I was born in a college town in Kansas. Kansas is rural and conservative, but my town was a liberal bubble, and both my parents were professors at the university, very much inside that bubble. I grew up doing a lot of academic stuff that seemed normal to me as a kid but made me not fit in with the other kids in the area. I liked physics, music, writing, and literature. I did some programming, off and on, and hated it. My mom also comes from a really old-fashioned family in Massachusetts (they loved old furniture, had an old house, and would eat dinner by candlelight). I went there as a six-year-old and sat at the table while the adults discussed politics and literature, with no idea what was going on. I just wanted to watch TV, but they were strict, so I sat there and tried to fit in.

I applied to a bunch of hard-to-get-into colleges, didn't get in anywhere except the local one, and got a physics degree because I wanted to be a scientist. For a while I was really motivated, doing everything I could, and went to grad school. Then I realized I didn't want to be a scientist; I was so bored and disillusioned that I dropped out.

I floated around for a year trying to figure out what to do. I worked as a freelance math tutor, which kind of felt like helping college students cheat on their homework. I got scammed into a flaky day-trading scheme. I tried grad school again, this time in South Korea, because a professor said he had a connection there. I was very isolated in a foreign country, struggled to learn the language, and got sucked into a party scene that was exciting but made it hard to study— way too much drinking. I dropped out again. I did meet my girlfriend, who became my wife, there. I also heard about Bitcoin, tried to mine it, and gave up because it seemed worthless at the time (rip).

I moved back to the US and I was looking at places to go. Portland seemed cool. It was a cliche— a lot of young people were moving to Portland at the time— so I lived there alone for a year in a cheap group house, spent a lot of time reading at Powell's and wandering around the city. Eventually my fiancée joined me and told me I needed to get a job. I buckled down, took CS classes, and got a job as a programmer at an old-school company doing media data stuff. Really boring, but kind of relaxing. I worked there for eight years.

Then they got acquired by a shady company that went bankrupt, and a bunch of us lost our jobs— during COVID. It was also during this time that I broke up with my wife. During the pandemic, I lived on my own for a few years and kind of went insane with no human contact. Eventually I realized I could make money day trading stock options, which sounds completely insane but worked.

I started exploring blogging and fiction writing, and since it was cheaper to live overseas than in America, I spent the last three years mostly abroad. On a whim, I applied for Inkhaven and ended up here.

The best advice I've ever gotten is kind of cheesy: we try things, sometimes they work, sometimes plans fail— you just keep trying things until something works. It's a numbers game.