The person behind the robots

About Angie

Author. Tool-builder. Powered by spite and caffeine.

Hi. I'm Angie. I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I ended up writing about them instead, which is close enough if you don't think about it too hard.

I've been in the publishing business for fifteen years, which is long enough to learn exactly which parts of it I love and which parts make me want to fake my own death and move to a cabin. The writing? Love it. The fiddly, repetitive, do-it-again-by-Tuesday tasks that pile up around the writing? That's where things get personal.

Here's the thing about me: I am genuinely terrible at mundane tasks. I get bored, I lose the thread, and I would rather build a robot to do something than do it twice. So that's what I started doing. My day job is as a financial investigator, which gets more chaotic by the week, and somewhere in the middle of all that I decided that if I ever wanted to actually publish the books rattling around in my head, I'd have to automate the parts that were eating my time. Spite is a renewable resource. So is caffeine. I run on both.

The tools you'll find around here — Seedsmith, The Backroom, the Publishing Command Center, the Writing Room — all came out of that same impulse. Sometimes I got tired of doing a thing. Sometimes I genuinely could not remember what I was doing from one day to the next. And sometimes, if I'm being honest, I tried to make my life better by spending two weeks building something I may never actually use. Some of them are polished. Some are still wearing their seams on the outside. I'm sharing the whole messy, caffeinated process, not just the highlight reel.

I'd rather build a robot to do it than do it twice.

Full disclosure: I identify as a Slytherin, so there's usually a long game running in the background. And any typos, stray commas, or punctuation that's wandered off to do its own thing? Not me. That's the Typo Fairy. We have an arrangement. It is not going well.

If you came here and thought either “huh, I could probably do that too” or “wait, when did this woman last sleep?” — honestly, both are correct, and you're exactly the kind of person I built this for.