Hi there, I’m a fiction writer and web developer. I’m currently revising my first novel while working at the University of Vermont doing web, video and more.
Back in the 90′s I moved from NYC to Vermont, which seemed pretty drastic. But I have to say I’ve grown to love the Green Mountain State and Lake Champlain and even the mud season because I have a great fondness for pigs and their oh-so-soft piggy ears. But I also love bacon, which describes my diametrical nature and the fact that I can exist as easily in a city like New York as a state like Vermont.
In NYC, I worked as a translator, a lit-crit citation writer for the Modern Language Association, and taught at New York University as a grad student. And if you ever shopped at the Strand, you might have seen me hustling books downstairs.
Since escaping (happily) from lit-crit and (somewhat ambivalently) from the city, I have completed (most of) a degree in computer science. I also taught human-computer interaction for a few years because the topics of cognitive science and people+tech fascinate me. Like the character Antigone in my first novel, I have an interest in robotics and find myself overly excited by all things movable and usable. (Well, maybe not all things…)
The question I get most from people is, What’s with the name? Is it Japanese? Nope. I’m a first-generation Turk on my father’s side. In old Turkish (as opposed to the modern Turkish spoken today), my first name means “daughter.” My sisters’ first names, on the other hand, are somewhat more poetic: Sevil (“loved one”) and Kismet (“fate”). Yet I’ve always liked my name and never wished for another, even if it is often mispronounced as the happy green Muppet. Ah well, as Kermit says, “Time’s fun when you’re having flies.”
