I suppose I should explain that part.
Many moons ago, when I had my first proper email address, I decided I didn’t want every mailing list I subscribed to having access to my full real name. So I changed the settings so email received from that address would be from “Sheila the Wonderbink.” (It’s still set to that, in fact, at least for that address. I’ve accumulated quite a few email addresses since then, under various names and personas.) The word came to me from whatever odd part of my brain is in charge of such things and it struck me as grandly silly–it starts out sounding like a superhero and ends with a weird noise. So I kept it.
I decided to use it as the domain for this blog for, well, roughly the same reason, really. Because it’s grandly silly and a way to keep me from taking any of this entirely too seriously.
So, who am I, exactly? My name is Sheila O’Shea, pleasure to meet you. I’m a woman of a certain age who never did very well with what I was supposed to be doing with my life according to the standard script. I grew up in a nice neighborhood and got a degree at a prominent university, but instead of studying anything useful I decided I wanted to do what mattered to me the most and thus wound up with a Creative Writing degree. I jounced around the wilds of bohemia, doing time as a poet and performance artist, but kept one foot in stability working as a picture framer, technical writer and paralegal. I spend a lot of time feeling a bit ‘neither fish nor flesh’–a little too normal for the weirdos and a little too weird for the normals. (And not just an “I listen to punk rock in my car on the way to work” kind of weird but more of a “that thing you call ‘reality’ is actually a series of agreements we all made with each other and those can be changed, ya know” kind of weird.)
I make art out of raw draft poetry rendered in eyestrain-o-vision to make shapes and patterns on paper. I also write novels and tinker in virtual mediums, but I have other blogs for those. Thanks for checking out this one.