Katzen Hill

I grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania, even did a tour in California, but I've lived most of my life in North Western Indiana. As a kid, I spent a lot of time by myself with only my imaginary friends and those odd things that go bump in the night as my companions. I lived close enough to the Amish to know what real food tastes like and I've lived close enough to the big bad city to know how to dodge bullets. It was an odd kind of childhood, but one that furnished my mind with all sorts of insane ideas and lots of bad guys for my novels. I really should see a therapist about that.

When I finally escaped the confines of my middle class high school, I found myself in the land of corn. Purdue was a major disappointment since they shut down the paleontology program the first year I was there, so I did what any lost disgruntled eighteen year old would do and dropped out. What I didn't realize at the time was I had dropped out of Purdue only to be enrolled in the Lafayette Branch of Hogwarts specifically Defense Against the Dark Arts. Lafayette in the early nineties was a hot spot for pagan groups and wannabe satanic cults. I knew how to dodge real bullets, now I was learning to
dodge magical ones.

I know what you are thinking. You played too much D&D as a child, right? Well, I didn't start playing D&D or White Wolf games until my senior year in high school. That's also the same time my aunt gave me my first book on Wicca. Coincidence?

After years of supernatural hunting on and off the table top, my version of reality started to get fuzzier than I'd have liked. A radical change was in order, so when my first college roommate called me up and suggested we take a vacation and check out California like we had always dreamed about, I decided we should just up and move there. San Francisco or Bust was painted on my butt as I trekked out West with a suitcase, two cats, and a dream. Yeah, that went according to plan. I went from Hogwarts to the School of Hard Knocks in one plane ride. I learned a lot and met a plethora of colorful people with even less grip on reality. Between couch surfing and living out my fantasy life in at least six different LARPs at the same time, I thank the Powers that Be that I didn't get lynched by an angry mob or worse, expelled.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I made it back to Indiana, sanity not included. I gave up the nomadic gypsy life for something a bit more grounded. I worked my butt off, fixed my credit and went back to Purdue (gods help me) to get a degree in Anthropology with major minors in Psychology/Creative Writing/Botany/Forensics...yes, I have academic ADD. I tried all the spiritual -isms I could stomach and even attempted to run my own business. Turns out I'm not cut throat enough to peddle my own wares. So now I'm working in a library staring at all the badly written novels you could shake a stick at. Hell, if they could get published why not me right?