ABOUT ME

And more of Jen, apart from the minis.

I was born in 1975 on Carswell Air Force Base in Forth Worth. My parents were part of an early genetic engineering project to produce the superhuman. Clearly the project only succeeded in part, because I'm not running the world from a secret lair right now.

I was reading by age three, and I still don't leave the house without a good book. Just in case, you know. I loved art, and the things I could do with clay and paint and fabric; I loved science, and the things I could do with fossils and rocks and bits of dead animals. Fortunately my parents put up with all the mess and encouraged my interests. When I told my mom I was dropping out of the anthropology doctoral program at the University of Chicago, and I'd be painting miniatures all the time now, she only sighed and said, 'Well, I always knew you'd end up doing something creative. As long as you're happy.'

I was a preteen in Texas, an undergraduate in Kansas, a young adult in Chicago. For now I'm back in Texas, though I'd rather be in Chicago forty years from now: a proper Hyde Park little old lady, sitting at a coffee shop, long white hair in a ponytail under my sun hat, reading the latest study of ritual cannibalism, a half-finished piece of Renaissance blackwork embroidery in my museum-donor totebag.

In grad school my depression was diagnosed. While it was hard at first to accept a 'dependence' on medications, and it took years to find the right combination of drug types, it changed my life in immensely positive ways. What a shock and a delight it was to find a Jen capable of 'happy,' a Jen with a little energy and interest in life, beneath the despair and apathy and physical pain. I still have bad days, but they're far more endurable because I know that it will end at some point. I still wake up most mornings with my hands and arms hurting, but antidepressants and pain meds keep it tolerable.

I married my college gamer boyfriend and had a long, stable, companionable relationship. It wasn't right for me, though, nor was I what a wife should be, and I ended up asking for a divorce in 2008--no fault of his, I must say. No children, nor do I plan to have any; I'd never ask a child to cope with a mother who can't even leave the house or make a phone call some days. And thanks for asking, but the role of Man in My Life has been filled. (If you're sufficiently brilliant and wealthy, though, with a dark, dry sense of humor, I might put you on the waiting list.)

I like cats, and rats, and bats, and will be thrilled when I have money and leisure again to maintain a small coral reef aquarium. I drink latte at conventions, and strong, fresh-brewed Indian chai at home. I wear the same paint-spotted old lounge clothes for days on end, and don't buy anything but black-gray-brown (you need some color in your wardrobe! interjects my mom), but put hundreds of hours into costuming and dressmaking for special events.

I like my quiet workroom and wish I could do all my errands at three a.m., when nobody's around. I like large cities, where I can be anonymous in the thick of a crowd, and the middle of nowhere, where I can just be anonymous. I've never made friends easily, and am immensely grateful for the people I've met via the miniature world who endured me long enough to become important parts of my life.