To say I have always loved storytelling would be an understatement, but to say I have always wanted to be a writer would be untrue. I didn’t consider writing professionally until I had almost completed college. My earliest memory is not of writing but of counting blocks and pondering the number three. It is not an exaggeration to say that for as long as I can remember, I had been the “Math Girl” and proud to be so. I had a plan. I got a perfect score in AP Calculus sophomore year of high school, and was the golden girl of the Theoretical Math department in college. Which was lucky, because without the good will of my advisors, I might have failed my senior thesis on the Evolutionary Game Theory of Altruism due to spending too much time on a newfound love of screenwriting.
   In college, while I did take a number of courses in theater and creative writing, including a semester abroad studying London theater, I saw writing as a pastime, not a career. Math, I thought, was my career. Then, while working on my thesis, I took what was supposed to be an easy-A course on Writing for Television, and my life changed. Though I had written plays before, including one that was produced both in high school and again in college, it was that screenwriting class that opened my eyes. For the first time, I knew what it felt like to truly love what I was doing; to know that this was what I was meant to do. This was also the first time anyone had told me to write what I love, rather than the old adage to write what I know. This freed me. I began writing the science fiction and fantasy stories that had been chasing each other around my head, stories I had previously kept hidden, fearing them unsophisticated.
   Of course, I couldn’t throw away a promising career in math and science to write professionally without first developing a much deeper well of writing experience and practiced skill. So in the years since college, I have been using my math skills as a computational biologist by day, and have lost track of the number of pilots, features, and short scripts I have written by night. I have taken additional classes on screenwriting, including courses from Portland State University and UCLA and graduated with honors from Vancouver Film School's Writing for Film Television and Games program. With rare exception, I write every day. 
    Though I have found some recognition with shorts and have experimented with features, I am primarily interested in television. I have branched out from the science fiction and fantasy that fueled most of my earlier work, also developing family dramas, slice-of-life, and, most recently, historical work. But I keep coming home to fantastical worlds, because my favorite concepts so often revolve around the storytelling possibilities in using heightened almost-science or supernatural beings. 
    Most of my scripts focus on one or more queer characters, often bisexuals because expanding queer representation in television and undoing the erasure of the bisexual identity matters to me. In that vein, many of my plots explicitly revolve around questioning the nature of reality. I explore the different ways a person reacts when their own experiences clash with the perception of reality apparent in the world around them -- an exaggerated version of the experience of a bisexual person who is exposed only to stories in which bisexuality does not exist. 
    Though my primary aim is to entertain and engage, I do have a deeper goal: to find truth through fiction by encouraging a second look at assumptions we might hold, and by showing examples of heroes we seldom see. Once, I was asked to sum up my writing motto in less than fifty words. I like what I came up with, so I will end with it here: Come for the magic. Stay for the mystery. Learn from the metaphor. Because now that you don’t have to write something real, you can write something true.