Long before writing became my career, it was my passion. So I was delighted when I discovered Helium, with its diverse international community of writers who share that passion.

In grade school, I wanted to be either a nurse or a cartoonist, but all the while I was churning out poems and stories. In high school, history and Latin were my favorite subjects, but the articles I wrote for the local daily and the school newspaper kept me anchored in the here-and-now. In college, I sampled classics, music, and chemistry before settling on a B.A. in history and, eventually, a Ph.D. in English.

I've worked as a typesetter, layout artist, reporter, legal secretary, research assistant, English instructor, copy editor, grant writer, and academic adviser. But no matter what my job title, I always seem to find a way to make words a big part of what I do.

After a series of travels and (mis)adventures across North America and Europe, I returned in the summer of 2007 to my home state of Michigan and have been working as a full-time freelance editor and writer ever since.

Helium gives me an opportunity to hone my online writing skills while learning from other writers who tackle topics from aardvarks to zymurgy and somehow manage to make them fresh. Thank you!

My passion is ...

learning something new every day.

I know too much about ...

the consequences of procrastination.

My parents always told me ...

to finish what I start.

My first job ...

writing high school news stories for the local daily newspaper.

Arts & Humanities > Writing Tips Breathing life into your fictional characters

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Whether you write about spies or space aliens, hobbits or horse traders, one requirement remains the same: Your characters must be realistic, believable - in a word, alive. And while you could spend years researching the details of your characters' backgrounds and painstakingly describing every corpuscle of their physical appearance, in the end only one thing really matters. To be real and enduring, the life you breathe into your characters must come from the core of your own humanity, your understanding of what it means to be human.

Rediscovering your own deeply buried emotions and memo...

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