All About Lindsey

The most important thing to know about me is this:

I’m a storyteller.

From my earliest days, I liked to tell stories, and my first stories were attempts to “improve” (change, embellish, completely distort) reality in order to make it more interesting. Why admit I misplaced my lunch when I could say that armed brigands set upon me and demanded my peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Why not pick up that rhinestone someone lost in the field behind our house and decide that the international jewel thief (inexplicably operating in Ft. Worth, TX) must have dropped it from his swag while escaping from Interpol?*

* And what was Interpol doing in our neighborhood? Never mind.

For some reason, neither my parents nor the nuns at school approved of my budding novelist skills, so I spent a lot of time contemplating the venial sin of lying. To avoid going to confession every single day, I quickly learned to channel my penchant for imaginary friends and events into more socially acceptable communication — stories that everyone knew were stories.

By fourth grade, I was writing stories about my favorite TV shows and entertaining my classmates at recess. I even illustrated these stories with the Betsy McCall Fashion Designer Kit, which came with a lightbox that you could use to trace clothes for paper dolls (some of these great kits are still extant on Ebay). In sixth grade, I discovered Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, and other romantic suspense/Gothic authors, and angsty heroes (who might or might not be cold-blooded murderers) replaced my TV friends. In eighth grade, I wrote my first five novels**, full of shameless references to Gone with the Wind and replete with kidnappings, tragic ladies in peril, heroines who took no prisoners, and the original Richard Ashmore. My prized possession was my own typewriter***.

** These will never see the light of day. They are locked away in a trunk for all eternity.

*** For the Millennials, typewriters were things we used to type on before computers. They had clackety keys and required extremely messy ribbons that tended to wear out when you were pulling an all-nighter to write that paper due for your 8 a.m. class (that you put off writing until the last minute, of course). The debut of the IBM Selectric III, which used easy-to-change ribbon cartridges, seemed like the Second Coming. Really. The Selectrics were extremely expensive at the time, costing nearly a thousand dollars, and only businesses could afford them. I picked one up a few years ago at a church bazaar for $12 — true story!

Ode to the Selectric finished. Now back to our regularly scheduled story…

As for UST****, oh, yes. At my tender age as a sixth-grader, I had no idea what that meant. I did have a sneaking suspicion that the chaste kisses at the end of the Emilie Loring romances were not really the end of the story (which may be why the nun took my copy of Rainbow at Dusk away from me in seventh grade, saying that I was reading “racy literature”).

**** OK, per my brother (who thought I misspelled LUST), I should define UST. For the uninitiated, UST = Unresolved Sexual Tension.

After college, I sadly realized that I needed real money to pay the rent and buy food, so I went to work as a lead writer/editor for an international information company. I now spend my days writing about the scintillating world of income tax, saving my energy at night for a world where everyone has more important things to think about.

When I’m not daydreaming at work about my next chapter (I mean, taking a brief break between projects), I am reading on my Kindle, needlepointing my way through a never-ending stash of canvases, and plotting my escape from the coming zombie apocalypse. I also spend a great deal of time catering to my cat Max (namesake of Laura’s cat), who rules the household.

Fun facts that I know you are dying to find out:

  • I collect everything: Converse fashion sneakers, Vera Bradley handbags, gemstones, David Winter cottages, 21″ Madame Alexander Portrait dolls, carnival glass, rosaries blessed by the popes, interesting autographs (including Eva Peron, Pope Pius XI, and all of the major characters in the Twilight movies).
  • I have more unworked needlepoint canvases than I care to count. Motto: She who dies with the most unstitched canvases wins!
  • I am fascinated with astronomy, and the only thing that kept me from being the female Carl Sagan was my utter loathing of all things mathematical. I am eagerly following the New Horizons mission, can’t wait to see the first photos of Pluto (you’ll always be a planet to me, little one!), and have never thought that we are alone in the universe.
  • I am also fascinated with geology, and ditto on the math thing. In my spare time, I actually read about subduction zones. Weird, I know. In the course of my research for Ashmore’s Folly, I learned about the largely forgotten Chesapeake Bay bolide that struck 35 million years ago and that continues to plague the groundwater of the Tidewater region to this day.
  • I am a Twihard. I admit it. Team Edward.
  • I bid ferociously on Ebay, and I snipe without mercy. Don’t get in my way.
  • My favorite movie line of all time is from The Lion in Winter. “He married out of love a woman out of legend…”
  • I believe in the importance of jury duty. Like most of us, I did my best to skate out of it until the week when I got picked for a child molestation case. One of my proudest moments came when, as presiding juror, I signed the verdict forms, securing justice for a young victim and sending a predator to prison for the maximum sentence.
  • With one exception, I have walked every step that my characters walk in Ashmore’s Folly, including numerous visits to Monticello.
  • I’ve studied a lot of Myers-Briggs psychology and tested out as an INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Probing). That means that I don’t like meetings, I can’t remember where I parked at the store, I cry at the end of Titanic, and I have a hard time ever letting go of anything. A lot of writers are INFP or INFJ.

Future plans:

  • Going to Antarctica is high on my bucket list. Yes, doubly weird.
  • I have a five-year plan for becoming a full-time novelist.
  • After the publication of All That Burns the Dark, which will complete the Ashmore’s Folly trilogy, I will turn my sights to an epic tale of art theft and generational angst set in the Pacific Northwest. As with Ashmore’s Folly, I plan hands-on research for the location, and that I might need to pass through Forks on the Olympic Peninsula is nothing more than the merest coincidence.