“be the trouble you want to see in the world”

Badass creativity is a way of life: exploring who you are + what you can do + how to manifest that in the world with purpose and impact.

It embraces art, soul, vision, meaning, traffic, cash.

This blog provides you with information and inspiration to feed your inner badass.

To develop a dazzling voice, be brilliantly productive, and compel your right audience.

Visionaries, misfits, rebels, scandalous women + passionate men are the people who transform themselves, others + sometimes the world.

But you don’t have to go it alone.

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I’ve been an obsessive reader since kindergarten, and wrote my first ‘novel’ in fourth grade. I wrote more long fiction through my teens.

(I also got my black belt in tae kwon do and hung a Bruce Lee poster on my wall that puzzled and bemused my girlfriends.)

I was born in Peterborough, a small town in Ontario, Canada. When I was 17, I got on a plane for the first time to spend a year in Australia in a town called Wagga Wagga, where kangaroos raced across golden hillsides. My creative writing helped win me a four-year partial scholarship to university. After graduation I lived and worked in Japan for a year, and then entered a relationship with this brilliant guy I’d met in college.  I took myself (and my writing) to Silicon Valley, where he was founding companies. 

We married. It seemed an excellent thing at the time.

We had babies, one of whom died at ten weeks (I love you, Nevada Alexander).  

I published two dark-fantasy novels with an imprint at Penguin (BLOODANGEL and LORD OF BONES) and a YA supernatural thriller with an imprint at Simon & Schuster (UNINVITED).

I also started a Livejournal. I continued to blog through the death of my marriage and difficult aftermath — because I learned that if you don’t tell your story, someone else tells it for you (especially if you’re a woman). An editor at Marie Claire found me and commissioned a 3200-word piece for the magazine, which ran in the October 2010 issue.

I’m currently working on an edgy psychological novel called THE DECADENTS.

Meanwhile, my friend Jason Calacanis had introduced me to Twitter well before Oprah took it to the masses, and I became obsessed with social media. The rise of a company called Causecast (founded by my friend Ryan Scott), a relationship with the environmentalist Matt Petersen, and my introduction to the writer-activist Eve Ensler and her organization V-Day showed me ways in which creativity, art, compassion and technology can save a world that’s both broken and beautiful.

In the winter of 2011, Matt and I followed Eve to the Congo, where I witnessed the opening ceremonies of the City Of Joy, a community for female survivors of sexual violence*. Women who saw their children murdered, who endured things that go beyond nightmares, sang and danced.  I saw, there, what strength is.  The truest thing you have is your voice — and the power to use it.

Ask me anything at soulful@me.com.

* Next fall V-day and I are auctioning off my Tesla Roadster. Proceeds will go toward ending worldwide violence against women and girls.