My professional career dates to one of those tired old impulses to finally get that technical paper written. A friend had decided that the way out of her family's financial woes was for her to write a Harlequin Romance. So she got together a women's writing group as a support system. I thought it would help me to get started on aforementioned paper, but instead, I hammered out a draft of the story I'd been telling myself as I fell asleep. 200 pages, utterly unpublishable, but I ended up sending it to a published writer, who wrote a very kind critique... and the next thing I knew, I had one short accepted in a fanzine and another in the first SWORD & SORCERESS.

Never did write the technical paper. Way too boring.