The title of this weblog comes from the fifth novel in the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is titled The Other Wind. In the novel, dragons live across the world, where they fly on the other wind. In an earlier short story by Le Guin, called Dragonfly, the "other breath" enters Azver, a wizard, and fills him with a message for his fellow wizards. I think good writing (of fiction and poetry) happens most often when a writer surrenders to the characters' voices, surrenders to another breath. Of course, I haven't learned how to surrender very well yet.

I also like the phrase "other wind" because it sounds fresh and whispery.

My husband David handles the web design for Other Wind. His blog, daserbeam, which I link to in the previous sentence, is currently on the bench. It was good while it lasted, so I hope he gets back to it one day. He also has a baseball blog called RBI, but he hasn't started covering the 2005 season yet.

I started writing this weblog a few years ago in hopes that it would inspire me to be more creative and to write more. (I also thougt it would be fun, for me at least, if not for others.) I wrote in it quite a bit a first, but lately it has been suffering from neglect much of the time. (Although, I have been writing more fiction outside of the blog, which makes me happy.)

For now, comments on the blog are closed. Too much comment spam was coming in for David and me to reasonably handle.

My name is Wendy and I live in Knoxville, Tennessee with my husband David and our cats Jabba and Sabé. (Both cat names are from Star Wars, so now you know we're geeks.) I am not a native to East Tennessee, but I've been here for over 14 years and it feels like home to me.

I work at the East Tennessee History Center, which is part of the public library system, as an assistant in the Knox County Archives. My job involves helping the Archivist preserve, organize, database, and retrieve the county government's records (court records, marriages, wills, deeds, etc.) and helping patrons (library talk for customers) of the Archives with legal, historical, and genealogical research requests. I also develop exhibits and outreach material for the Archives. Some projects I've been working on recently include processing Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions cases from the 1820s and Probate Settlements from the 1930s-1960s, designing and writing an annual bulletin about the Archives, and developing an index for Revolutionary War veterans' pension declarations from the 1820s.

I received my B.A. from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1998. I double majored in Literature and History, minored in Environmental Sociology, and studied abroad at The University of Wales at Swansea in the Fall of 1996.

I'd like for fiction-writing to be my sole occupation one day, but for now writing competes with my day job and with my impressive capacity for laziness.

If you want, you can read 100 Things About Me. I'm not claiming they'll be 100 very interesting things.