For instance, I pretended to be afraid of the dark until I was 12, just so I could squeeze books down between my bed and the wall to read by my Snoopy nightlight long after bedtime.  And when our local librarian limited me to "as many books as you can carry," I learned to balance a giant stack of books between my chin and my fingertips. (And I read them all!)  In sixth grade, I wrote my first stage play to perform with my classmates on Parent Night (a terrible Carol Burnett wanna-be sketch!). 

From then on, I was hooked. I wrote dozens of stories in high school (like “Prom Night Cemetery”) for our high school’s monthly magazine - Reflections and I served as the magazine's Fine Arts editor, composing monthly spreads and features (using old-school cut & paste that required Exacto knives and glue!) 

I still hadn't figured out that my path was meant to be a literary one yet,  and so I earned my BFA from Wisconsin Lutheran College, double majoring in Psychology and Interpersonal Communications. However,  I still fed my artistic soul by taking every art class I could (I even attended college on a fine arts scholarship),  singing in choir and the christian contemporary a Capella group, Revelation,  performing in musical theatre productions,  and founding the college's literary society.

After college, while working dead end jobs at several movie rental and sales companies, I rediscovered my passion for storytelling and enrolled in screenwriting classes at Scottsdale Community College. 

My very first screenplay (the romantic comedy "Wanna Bet?") became a Top Fifty finalist in Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's inaugural screenwriting competition, Project Greenlight. My second screenplay (the dark comedy "Why, MN") became a semi-finalist in both Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope and the Austin Film Festival's screenwriting competitions. I went on to write dozens of scripts on spec and wrote the screenplay for the indie film, "Hello, My Name is Frank," which won Best Dramatic Feature at the 2015 Manhattan Film Festival.