I’m Crystal, and I write things.
Sometimes, I write fiction: most often epic-ish fantasy shaped by real-world history and culture, with a diverse ensemble cast of oddballs, inspired by my own oddball nature and mixed heritage, and informed by my academic focus in anthropology.
I write poetry in spurts, often freeform, but just as often using Japanese forms like haiku, senryu, or tanka.
My nonfiction work at the moment tends to be about writing (a predictable sort of meta, I know), language, and wellness. In writing nonfiction, I try to mix meaning, fact, and an awareness of the ridiculous, because that’s how I feel life is best enjoyed. A friend on Twitter once said, “I find you a perfect mix of thoughtful and deep and silly.”
You can read some of my nonfiction on Medium, or find the list of all my Medium articles here.
I’ve also worked professionally as a magazine editor and a copy editor, spent a handful of years formally freelancing and content writing, and have been intermittently but determinedly writing and editing on a semipro basis for a squidge over twenty years.
Gratuitous bonus material!
I love cute reptiles, brilliant antagonists with a killer sense of style, magnificent bastards, dragons, quantum physics, lychees, and gratuitously pretty fight scenes acted out by great fighters. My life is peppered with fits of baking, yarn spinning, coffee roasting, tea hoarding, cat wrangling, and very occasional choreography of my own fight scenes. Once upon a time, on an Internet far, far away, I was named a patron saint. I love overly detailed costumes, and sometimes I wear Lolita. I should really practice the electric guitar and the flute more often.
I accept female pronouns as a reasonably accurate reflection of my biological existence and because I have several schools’ worth of other fish to fry. (Also, fried things are delicious.)
This is a pen name, for almost entirely positive reasons. There’s a blog post in that, someday.