Bio

Kristi Jenkins is a mostly native Tucsonan who has always had a love of words and language. She graduated from Luther College with a BA in English ("would you like fries with that?"), a focus in creative writing, and a powerful need to pay the bills. To that end, she spent the early part of her professional life in the Historic Preservation field, and enjoyed many years with the City of Tucson's Historic Preservation Office. There she worked with National Register of Historic Places nominations, did occasional grant writing, and dabbled with web site design and maintenance.

She discovered National Novel Writing Month in late October, 2002, and never looked back. Since then, she has written eight novels, a smattering of essays, and a handful of short stories. She also served as Tucson's Municipal Liaison to NaNoWriMo from 2003-2008, arranging write-ins, social events, and providing encouragement to the Tucson NaNoWriMo community. In that time, participation grew from a couple dozen people to close to 600. Herding cats while writing a novel in a month proved to be quite the experience. She is a passionate advocate for NaNoWriMo and was fortunate to attend the 2009 Night of Writing Dangerously, an annual mass write-in for NaNoWriMo (the holy grail of NaNo participation).

When it comes to pleasure reading, she gravitates to science fiction, urban fantasy, and all manner of pop culture, but will devour any written materials that cross her path. Favorite authors include William Gibson, Jane Lindskold, John Scalzi, Haruki Murakami, and Kim Harrison. She prefers her fiction escapist and fantastic, but with enough substance to make it worthwhile. Between books, she tries her hand at photography, runs, plays bass guitar, and watches Phoenix Coyotes hockey games.

Through a fortuitous quirk of fate, she found herself at The Editorial Department in early 2009. Since then, she has worn many hats--blogger, social networker, resident science fiction expert--but found her calling as the company's webmaster. She is a regular contributor to Ellipsis, the TED blog, and wrote several articles now in the Between the Lines archives. She also maintains TED's Facebook and Twitter presences and keeps them populated with internet finds of interest to authors.

Articles

"Just Keep Typing" section of Ellipsis, the TED blog.

A NaNoWriMo Survival Guide

Know Your (Copy)Rights: A Guide to Copyright for Authors

Many roads to Him: A Guide to Subgenres in Christian Fiction

The Delicate Art of Self Promotion

Speculative Fiction: Then and Now

First 50s - A critical analysis of the first 50 pages of fiction works:

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

The End is Now, by Rob Stennett

Ratha's Creature, by Clare Bell