I left Colorado in 1996 and headed even more West until I couldn't get any West-er. Landing in San Francisco to pursue a career in digital character animation, I spent over a decade telling stories visually in video games, film and television. The birth of my children prompted me to want to make the world a better place, so in 2015 I founded the Renegade Girls Tinkering Club with my friend Vicky, an after school and summer enrichment camp. Together we set out to make the world of STEM more welcoming to girls. A few years later, I blended my background telling stories, my experience writing curricula for kids, and my passion for encouraging girls to pursue their love of all things STEM by writing the Renegade Girls Tinkering Club novels. I wanted to bring the projects I created for camp to a wider audience and help older girls with some of the unique challenges they face as they make the decisions to pursue technology, science, and engineering during a fragile time in everyone's life: middle school.