Cecily Gerund was born, eldest of a set of twins, into a family where obsessive behavior and hypochondria are the usual gifts from the fairies who attend the christenings. (Still, it could have been worse; she could have been engaged to a prince she'd never met.) She's slowly learning to overcome her nature and relax, due in part to yoga, the love of a good man, an honest disdain for her job, and the advent of cable television into her large and mis-managed apartment. Being afflicted with a life-long interest in death, ghosts, and the supernatural, she has for seven years been perfecting a fictional universe inhabited by at least one race of people equally interested in death, ghosts, and the supernatural, which she then tries to connect into the frame of any novel, play, or story that's twitching around in her head, invariably to no avail; the only works she has ever completed (as a junior in high school, a screenplay called "False Boxes" about high school, the delirium of daytime television, and people with supernatural powers, and as a twenty-three year old laboratory technician, a screenplay called "Johnny Traitor" about high school, binge drinking, misogyny, and the dark and mysterious things that can happen on Halloween) have no direct relation to the rest of her personal menagerie, despite the themes of death, ghosts, and the supernatural. "Maybe," she thinks,"that is the only way to get things done, to free them from the bog of the Cecilian Mythology, where they get caught up in the weight of fairly unimportant technical details." Then again, where's the fun in that?

Cecily likes:

chocolate cake, reptiles and monsters (but especially reptilian monsters), dreaming, day-dreaming, the having of nightmares, and fantasy books where the plucky heroine finds true love at the end with her mentor, who is invariably ten years her senior.

Cecily dislikes:

drivers who refuse to yield to pedestrians, pedestrians who don't use crosswalks, her job (about half the time), and people who talk loudly on the bus when she's trying to write.