Some might consider author and wordsmith Monica Cable to be psychic, knowing almost at birth that she was destined to be a writer. And a writer she was, beginning her career putting pencil to paper when she was in kindergarten. That's right, KINDERGARTEN. And ever since that first day in 1981, when her first mentor Mrs. Taylor introduced her to the written word, she has practiced her craft. Not a day has gone by when this dedicated artist hasn't worked with words, whether writing, speaking or thinking. She spent elementary school as well as middle and high school taking her love and passion for words and turning them into beautiful and comprehensive complex sentences and even paragraphs.

At this point in her life, Cable felt unstoppable. She'd spent 13 of her 18 years submerged in words, considering herself an expert in all 26 letters of the English alphabet. She had even become so confident in her abilities that in the sixth grade she added French words to her vast collection of terms and expressions. She had spent these years in concentrated study, devoting countless hours to her craft, where she learned about topic sentences and five paragraph themes as well as the more artful form of building phrases and producing thoughts known to most as poetry. She began studying Shakespeare in grade eight, the same year she tackled, with help from her best friend, the feat of rewriting the Mark Twain classic "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", a masterpiece her English teacher couldn't help but urge them to "consider writing more" of.

At this point in her young life, Monica was already well on her way to mastering so many of the different forms and methods of the very essence of language itself. She'd written short stories, novellas, and novels as well as penned both incredibly poignant and fantastically terrible poetry, knowing that her education wasn't complete without this integral part of human expression. And if that wasn't enough, she made sure to become more than familiar with all types of literary equipment, including pens, pencils, paper, quill and ink, typewriter, word processor and even technological marvel, the computer.

It was during this portion of her education that Monica's viewpoint on things like society, politics and human behavior first started to solidify themselves. She became fascinated with the idea that the small suburb of Cleveland, Ohio that she called home was somehow 4.5 miles of land (and 2.5 miles of fresh Lake Erie water) that found space for not one or two but six -- that's right, SIX -- different churches. She was struck by the fact that there could possibly be both a rich and poor side of such a solidly upper-middle class town. And she couldn't quite let go of the fact that, despite what so many of her favorite TV shows showed her, most people in her world looked, sounded and worshiped just like her. And she discovered that this fact was incredibly isolating and boring.

During her senior year of high school, Cable discovered the work of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. While most of us read Slaughterhouse Five during the course of our schooling, it was Cat's Cradle that made its way into her brain, latching on and taking hold. She was fascinated by the fictional story of the creator of the atomic bomb and layers upon layers that Vonnegut wove into his work. She couldn't help but be moved by Vonnegut's use of his ability to speak so poignantly and bluntly about topics that he felt needed to be talked about.

It was now that Monica felt she had earned her advancement in the study of written expression, which made her next step quite clear. She would spend the next four years, buckling down and throwing herself (heart, mind and soul) into achieving what would make her officially unbeatable: her very own license to word. She chose the University of Dayton as the place that would help build upon her already strong foundation in the English language, studying various types of poetry and literature and continuing to learn the best and most effective devices for communicating thought and belief to vast quantities of people. During her years at UD, she would pilgrimage once a year with the English Department to The Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario which helped to cement her love and devotion to the English language and the art form that is literature.

Monica spent her years at UD soaking up as much knowledge on the things that interested her as she could. She thrived in all of her English classes, falling even more in love with The Bard than she already was and found that two years were all that were necessary to heal the wounds that Bleak House had created in high school by the soothing caress of A Tale of Two Cities her sophomore year. It was during this stretch of her study that Monica began to explore her confidence as a writer. With the guidance of some of the finest professors and scholars, Cable discovered her voice...a voice drowning in vocabulary and condescension but with such a masterful touch of artful discourse and needle-like wit that not only does one hardly notice when one is being made fun of but one hardly cares.

In addition to her favorite English classes, Monica found her fascination with The Holocaust and World War II continued to grow, never fully being able to comprehend the horror found there. She soaked up the discussions about The Hutu and The Tutsi in her sociology classes and began to really learn about so many places and people that weren't taught to her in high school. And through this, she began to realize that anomalies such as The Holocaust weren't necessarily anomalies at all and that writers all over the world were using their skills and talents to help speak out about pain and suffering. Eli Wiesel's Night, The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places all resonated so deep within her that she felt she carried these stories with her wherever she went and she began to begin to understand some of what she might want to do with her ability.

Towards the end of and immediately after her collegiate education, Monica had two very significant life events that she credits with influencing her art to this day. The first was the opportunity to hear Kurt Vonnegut speak at a nearby university. Sitting in the same room as one of her heroes was both heady and enlightening but happening upon him afterwards, sitting on a bench with few people around, was life-changing. She, along with a handful of other students, listened as Vonnegut told tales of his life and art in the uncompromisingly blunt and tender way he had about him.

The second life-altering moment was actually a good deal less flashy and quite a bit more personal. It was by no means the first time Monica realized she was a rebel, having struggled against the tyranny of the government ever since she sat in a darkened theatre at age five and watched as both ET and Elliot were violated at their core for something as simple as friendship. Perhaps, even igniting this very book in her subconscious at that young an age. But as much as Monica held a rebel heart inside of her body, even throughout the course of college she never rallied against the establishment the way her soul always urged her to. But on a graduation trip with her mother and her aunt, Monica found her rebel voice for the first time. The trip would take them from London to Paris, and then the whole of France, a country Monica came to love intrinsically after much study of their language and an influential high school trip which allowed her to live in Grenoble for a summer. It was early in the trip, still in London, while Cable was soaking up the literary history as well as the burgeoning art that always clings to the city's atmosphere when she was faced with her moral dilemma. Standing in her Mecca, her Lourdes, her Mount Olympus even, she trembled in awe of the brilliance and history around her. She was at Shakespeare's birthplace. Her trip to Anne Hathaway's cottage was lovely but this bordered on miraculous and as the very nice and always helpful tour guide pointed out different nooks and crannies, Monica couldn't help but be moved. The guide pointed out the things in the room that were obvious additions, meant to be the most accurate of replicas, there to help paint a picture of what The Bard himself must've been witness to. And then she began to tell a tale, clearly a work of fiction, imagining Shakespeare toiling about, considering word choice and character development. He paced back and forth, concentrating on the task at hand, stopping for a moment to better think and leaning on the fireplace mantle as he did. The guide assured that it was the very same fireplace mantel the crowd was looking at -- an unequivocal piece of literary history! And then, she asked that no hand touch the fireplace, a reasonable request that all museums ask of us and that we, as patrons, are both contractually obligated to follow and bound to by all societal norms and decorums. Cable nodded, agreeing at once, so very insistent in her mind that this literary Arc of the Covenant stay intact. She acted as guard, waiting until most others had passed through the room and moved on to other things more appropriate to them, like the gift shop or public restroom. And then she grabbed hold. She reached out with both her hands and like a child grappling onto the nearest piece of furniture it could find, hoping to lift itself up for the first time on its very own, she latched onto the mantelpiece and tried with all of her might to fuse her flesh into the old, splintered wood. And as she looked around to make sure no one had seen, she held her head high and proud, feeling the rebel's blood coursing though her veins and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was where her true heart stood, on the front lines of a fight against the rules and the ruling class, hoping to make us all equal once again.

After receiving her bachelor's degree, Monica decided it was time to get some real world experience. She spent the next five years honing her craft at an Internet publishing firm back home in Cleveland, spending 40 hours a week submerged in fascinating articles from various industry and professional periodicals as well as scholarly journals. She learned about crazy interesting industries like risk management and financial planning and devoted much of her time to learning the ins and outs of the captivating field of human resources, all the while improving upon her already masterful writing abilities. She proofread and edited her colleagues work and was put in charge of the most important journals, writing abstracts for online search engines that paraphrased without plagiarizing the works from popular, contemporary publications.

In addition to her very first salaried position, Monica continued her writing at home, as well. She was at work on two novels on the fateful day when she happened upon the treasure trove that was the Internet's vast fiction-writing training ground: fanfiction. Seeing the sea of stories online, written by regular people that were shared globally was eye-opening. Yes, she saw a chance to enjoy her favorite characters doing things and acting out story lines that she was denied onscreen but more so than that, she saw thousands of opportunities to workshop her techniques as well as her ideas. And that's exactly what she did.

It didn't take long for Cable's writing to gain a following. She snagged new readers daily and word of her tales began circulating from one site to the next, more than once being recognized when randomly posting comments on sites she tended not to frequent. And when the site she called home started a Writer of the Month award, she was the first chosen.

It was during this time in her life, when Monica began wondering if Cleveland was the best place for her as a writer. She had begun collaborating with a fellow writer online, their particular fanfiction series becoming a hit immediately and they knew they had lightening in a bottle. The original characters in their series were vastly more popular than the few already establish ones they were employing and they were both losing interest in devoting any time or page space to people or places they had not created themselves. And with that knowledge they decided to pack up their shit show and move to Los Angeles, with one fanfiction project begging for an overhaul and one Project Greenlight script reject tucked under their elbows.

Monica continued to work on her writing when she reached Los Angeles, proofreading and quality testing for a major market researcher in the television and film industry. And at the same time, she and her writing partner continued to work on their project, overhauling it completely to remove the offending unoriginal characters and relocating the rest of their fictional crew. She also tried her hand at another screenplay, this one on her own, and between the two projects began to sharpen her writer's voice, becoming more and more adept at weaving her cunning and sly sense of humor into her flowing prose.

In some respects, even more important than all of that, Los Angeles brought her perspective on issues that she would've never seen at home. The booming metropolis allowed her to meet people she would've never met, see things she would've never seen and experience a level of poverty she would've never been able to experience back in Cleveland. Her ten years in Los Angeles finally gave Monica the opportunity that she was always looking for as a girl, to be amongst people and in situations where she could really learn and expand herself. And like most creative and funny people, instead of letting the challenges she experienced beat her down, she took her abilities and perspective and simmered them together until they reduced down and became a delicious and concentrated sauce that she poured over everything in her life.

And now that Cable has moved again -- this time with her husband -- to the independent thinkers capital of the US, Portland, OR, she's only at the beginning of her grand pursuit to take over the world and cover it in her very own special sauce and it's a meal we can all look forward to.

Bon Appétit and don't forget to tip your server!