I’m writing a utopian novel via Substack

And a nonfiction book imagining a more beautiful future.

Becoming a journalist

In 2014, I launched Over The Moon Magazine on the side of my content marketing job.

I started the magazine because I was a marketing writer and I wanted to be a magazine writer and editor, and bridging that gap felt impossible. At the time, I was living in San Francisco, it was in the middle of the great recession, and there were no writing and editing jobs available — even if there were, I didn’t have the experience to compete for them.

Originally, I thought I might need to go to journalism school but then, to check myself, I went through the Sunday edition of The New York Times and Googled every single writer with a byline in it — less than half of them had a journalism degree. I didn’t need a degree, I realized, I just needed an opportunity. An in.

Around that time, I read an article in which the actress Nia Vardalos described the years she spent trying to get an acting part unsuccessfully. Unable to land a role, she decided to create one herself. She wrote and starred in a one-woman play based loosely on her Greek Orthodox family and she marketed it to Greek Orthodox churches in LA.