About

me with Amani, one of this guy's
pack from "Wolves at Our Door"
with whom I interned in 2004

Hi! My name's Rebecca, and I'm a wildlife biologist and wannabe author. I also draw things occasionally. (If you happen to know that I once went by the screen name Banzai, and was at one time semi-well-known on a certain art website, well, good for you, and please don't tell anyone.)

Anyway, perhaps you got here from Twitter or Facebook or my field stories blog, wildlifefieldstories.blogspot.com, or because, as you read this, I'm currently a super-successful author with the #1 New York Times Bestseller and your good buddy told you Rebecca had a writing blog and you were desperate to check it out. (Hey, I can dream.) That, or you're an agent I've queried and you want to know if I can write worth a damn.

To answer that question: I sure hope so.

When I was ten years old, I wrote a novel about two talking wolves in India who found a magical golden collar. It did all kinds of cool things, like...uh, tighten uncomfortably when danger approached. And be made of gold - that's always cool. I gave it the profound, pithy title of The Golden Collar and I thought it was fantastic. You wouldn't believe the mess those wolves got into when an evil villain wolf (who received the oh-so-creative name of Lucifer, and had a back-stabbing lackey named - wait for it - Brutus) stole it and hid it on the top of Mount Everest.

That was pretty much the only reason I set the story in India - so I could hide something on top of Mount Everest and make my characters hike all the way up there to get it back. How cruel I was.

And yes, there are wolves in India. I was only ten but I did my research. In an encyclopedia.

I illustrated it, too. I still have those pencil drawings in a memory book in a box gathering dust somewhere. But the best part is, at ten years old, I printed that sucker on our dot matrix printer (complete with the tear-off side ribbons that were really fun to play with afterward) and snail-mailed it, along with the illustrations, to a publisher in New York City. I bet they thought that was cute, right before they sent it right back to me in my SASE along with a very kind letter that I had to have an agent.

I didn't let that get me down. I wrote upwards of 50 little stories until I hit high school. If they weren't stories about wolves or Simba, they were about leopards, cougars, foxes, and cheetahs. I could type faster than anyone else my age, even though, since I taught myself, I did it incorrectly; to this day I hit CAPSLOCK twice to capitalize a letter, because I didn't know what the Shift key did (and CAPSLOCK is fairly self-explanatory).

Unfortunately, once I hit high school, more serious Lifey things took precedence. My love for animals went from writing about them to studying them. I stopped writing. I nursed another, better story about talking wolves in my head for years, and I still hope to write it someday. But Life became more and more complicated; I became a nomad, moving from job to job, trying hard to figure out my place in the world and being thwarted at every turn for seven years after graduating from college. These thwarts included a stint in the Peace Corps, 7 weeks in a remote Honduran cloud forest base camp, and miles and miles of hiking in the mountains for barely more than minimum wage (which, really, wasn't so bad).

And little did I know that every second of it would be fodder for my dormant imagination.

Anyway, I finally have a permanent job. And time. But something weird happened.

I now write stories about (mostly) humans.