About Mindy
I grew up in what was originally a small town full of cows, grape vines, and the occasional Indian arrowhead found on the banks of our local muddle-puddle lake. The nearest grocery store was a 30 minute drive, and the nearest library was a 50 minute drive in the opposite direction. Suddenly, people who worked for Microsoft became rich, and the small town became a city.
My mother was an avid reader who insisted on reading the newspaper from front to back each day. In the second grade, her reading level was so advanced that her teacher gave her books by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to read. Soon after, her family moved from Kansas to Renton, Washington. Despite having moved to Washington while she was still an impressionable child, my mother never completely lost her cornfield accent. We didn't live in Washington state, we lived in Warshinton state. She warshed the dishes in a dishwarsher, and the clothes in a warshin' machine. A grocery bag was a grocery beg, and a rattle snake was a rattler. Although these few glaring words appeared now and then to betray her roots, her accent usually sounded like someone from the western US. Unless, of course, I did something particularly bad. In which case, she slipped into a full Kansas accent and would yell from the porch of our blue house, "Mindalee, ya git yer rear in har rioght now!" Generally, I was a well-behaved child.
When I was in the second grade, my reading level wasn't advanced like my mother's-- it was practically non-existent. My mother discovered that instead of actually reading words, I had memorized the shape of each word my kindergarten and first grade teachers had written on the chalkboard. Both she and my second grade teacher taught me how to sound out letters in two vastly different ways, and eventually, I figured it out. Although reading and I had a bitter beginning, my favorite memories are when my mother took me to the library 50 minutes away where we would both check out books to read to each other.
By the sixth grade, I was reading 700 page books for fun and 200 page books for class. My sixth grade teacher had written an unpublished book similar to S.E. Hinton's popular novels, and made us write a lot of short stories and poems for class. He was my first influence regarding writing, and my first favorite teacher. At about this time, I began shutting myself in my bedroom for hours at a time, writing and mapping out intricate plots to novels I never completed. I never completed those novels because I kept changing the way they began, and I felt that I had to start at the beginning before I could move forward.
I continued the static cycle of never moving beyond the beginning of a novel-sized story until high school, when I had a sudden epiphany on the purpose of revision. By then, I had three large notebooks full of different beginnings to different stories that branched from one or two core ideas. Unfortunately, I lost those notebooks when I moved to college and my father threw out everything I had left behind.
During my first year of college, I had somehow decided that art history was going to be my major and that I would be happier taking art history courses than English courses. But I didn't learn that I loathed the art history department at the University of Washington until after I had taken three English courses for fun. After a rough first two years full of tortuous art history and science courses, I finally declared English as my major and had a much more positive experience for the duration of college. In fact, the feeling of enjoying my major was so liberating that I even added a second major- cinema studies.
After over four years of college, I graduated in March of 2005 with a double major in English (double focus in creative writing and literature) and cinema studies. I am currently unemployed and spend most of my days looking for work in an editing/publishing related area of the Seattle job market. With all of my excessive free time, I write, garden, play with my dog, and entertain myself with various crafty projects.