Su has collected a lifetime’s worth of words.
All kinds of words.
Su runs her life on high-octane enthusiasm — and coffee.
One of her earliest memories was of her mother telling her she talked too much, so she created a tiny library of tiny hand-bound books for her dolls, then read the imaginary stories in them to her unjudging audience.
She sold her first article in her late teens, and the realization that she could make money using her words set her on the long and winding road as a writer.
Poetry and music
When she was 13, Su got her first guitar. It didn’t take her long to discover that when she set bad poetry to music, she could call it lyrics, and it sounded much better.
Early influences included Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and The Beatles, and slightly later, Frank Zappa, Jefferson Airplane, and The Doors. It was through the influence of Jefferson Airplane that Su learned to play the nose.
As a songwriter and comedy performer, she wrote and performed Rapping Mother — in what might have been the first rap parody ever. Dr. Demento played the song every Mother’s Day for years.
She also sold The Trash Song to Disney for an album of scary children’s songs. Sadly, the album was so scary it was never released.
As a poet and poetry organizer, Su hosted a venue for several years called The Live Poetry Show. It showcased some of the top performance poets in Los Angeles. At one showcase, students from the workshop that inspired the Mechanics of Poetry book were featured performers to a standing-room-only crowd. And it wasn’t just parents!
She co-produced the LA Spoken, which was the largest poetry event ever in the Greater LA area. With over 100 poets performing from 10 am to 10 pm across 4 stages, the event closed with the legendary Watts Prophets.
Her own poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, and one of her sonnets, Ode to a Kiss, took first place in the Write Like Shakespeare competition.
Fiction
Su has written dozens of short stories, mostly science fiction. One, a romance, was published in Woman’s World. It paid better than all the others combined.
She also wrote a novel on an IBM Selectric typewriter. In dire need of rewrites, it’s still sitting patiently in a file cabinet, waiting for an OCR scan. Someday…
Su also started a new genre of fiction, called the micro-short, when her story Reincarnation and the Sacred Cow appeared in Galaxy E-zine along with a couple of her longer stories.
Screen and stage
Su has written several screenplays over the years, a couple of which were sold or optioned. She also wrote an animated short, material for a stand-up comic, and sketch comedy for a video comedy group.
Then there was that half-act play for one actor, two characters, called Chosen for What, that she wrote, directed, and produced.
She studied comedy writing for film and television with Dee Caruso, and studied improv with both the Groundlings and Tamara Wilcox Smith — the First Lady of Improv. Su still isn’t as funny as she thinks she is.
Su co-chaired the Hollywood Writers Society, where she produced dozens of workshops, seminars, and live productions, including both the Live Poetry Show and the LA Spoken.
Technical and non-fiction
Su officially started her career as a technical writer when a friend asked whether she had interest in a work opportunity that combined both her writing skills and business acumen. Prior to that, she’d worked in retail management off and on for everything from a clothing boutique to a vitamin store chain, where she frequently wrote and compiled employee handbooks.
In 1987, she started her own tech-writing business, Precision Wordage. Since then, she has trained scores of people as technical writers and editors. This is also where she made a good deal more money than she ever did from poetry, a sad commentary on our current culture — or on her poetry.
Su herself has worked as a tech writer and editor across a dozen or more different industries, and has personally written everything from illustrated quick-start guides to poundage in the form of long, detailed, reference manuals.
She has written and ghost-written scores of magazine articles, and ad copy, brochures, catalog blurbs, card game instructions, web content, tutorials, online courses, and at least seventeen other kinds of things she’s totally forgotten about. She even wrote infomercial scripts for awhile.
She published an online magazine, The Dirt on Organic Gardening, with over 50 published issues, and you can still find her book, How I Survived My First Year with Chickens, on Amazon.
Her latest book is Mechanics of Poetry. This is actually a revisitation of a book she wrote 30 years earlier to teach teens how to write poetry. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that her approach a) worked, and b) worked on more than just teens.
Game designer
Su’s life is a never-ending reinvention of herself, as each path she takes branches into new and unexpected directions.
In a world where you have to scheme and plot just to stay alive, your survival can turn on a single card. A. Single. Card.
Game design is a good example of this.
After several years of working with a major online game development company, Su got an idea for a game. It came after she wrote an article about the elements every good game should have. That article came after a deep dive into how games work.
But it wasn’t a video game she came up with; it was a card game.
Described by one test player as “Exploding Kittens for intelligent people,” Disasters Happen! has been in development since early spring of 2023, and is almost ready to find it’s publisher forever home.
Random facts
When she was young and adventurous, Su hitchhiked to Jamaica, where she lived on a boat in Montego Bay for a month, hung out with the locals, and ate curried goat. Another time, she spent a summer in Myrtle Beach, where she worked construction building an airplane hangar on a private airstrip, and got a lesson on how to fly a Piper Cub.
When Su’s boys were little, they were cast in a short film, The Kite, produced and directed by award-winning editor Jay Miracle. They were shooting without a permit and Su sweetly chased off the beach cop who came to investigate. (Jay described this as her “this is not the production you are looking for” moment.) Su was the only one who could keep the kite in the air and this got her name in the credits as Kite Wrangler. (This credit no longer shows up on IMDB.)
She started her first organic food garden in 2010. That was the summer she ate a lot of Swiss chard. A lot. It wasn’t until a couple of years later she learned that it was important to make friends with the neighbors so you have someone to give all that extra chard to.
Gardening led to starting an online magazine called The Dirt on Organic Gardening that ran for five years and over 50 issues. The Dirt eventually led to her first flock of backyard chickens in 2016, which led to her long-selling book How I Survived My First Year with Chickens. (A sequel is currently in development. This means that Su is thinking about the next book. She’s been thinking about it since her second year with chickens.)
Today, she still grows organic food and keeps chickens. It’s a good excuse to get away from the computer.