(Hey! This is my longwinded personal bio. You might just want to read my professional bio, instead.)

I am Ariel Meadow Stallings, and yes, that is my real name. If you're looking for labels, cross child-of-hippies (explains the name) with mostly-retired-raver, then put her in a pair of smarty-pants, take away all those hyphens, and you get a hint.

Here's the backstory: I was born on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. I grew up in a log cabin my parents built in the forest of Bainbridge Island. My mother was a midwife, then worked at the Seattle Midwifery School. Now she runs a little eco-retreat center. My father used to be a college professor, but left the ivory tower to work for the Seattle Metro and read books out loud to his "little grr." He's also a poet.

I was a content and relatively well-adjusted child, although a bit of a prude, constantly chiding my parents for swearing. In high school I acted in lots of regional theater and was a really good kid. My teenage years are testament to the power of the swinging pendulum theory of parenting. Nothing like liberal parents to keep a teenager from smoking, drinking, or being a fun-loving slut. No: I waited until college to do all those things.

After one semester as a musical theater major at Emerson College in Boston, I ended up at the University of Washington in Seattle, studying Sociology and Communications. In 1996, I started going to raves, and decided to take a year off between my junior and senior years to move to San Francisco and commune with my destiny as a serious scenester. I worked at a law firm during the day and enjoyed ridiculous — although I still believe very important — hedonism and bad fashion most nights. My writing career began in the haze of my most serious raver days, first with funny articles for a San Francisco feminists' zine, then as a features writer for Lotus Magazine, a Los Angeles-based music magazine.

I moved back up to Seattle in 1997 to finish my final year of college and met the love of my life on a dance floor in a dirty warehouse. After getting my BA in 1998, I was promoted to Editor in Chief of Lotus. I obsessively documented and served the West Coast's unique intentional rave community for about four years. (This, by the way, is right about when I started blogging, so everything from here on down you can read blow-by-blow in the archives.)

After my resignation from Lotus, I spent the summer of 2001 in New York City attending the Columbia Publishing Course. Then I bounced around a bit, back to Seattle for a year of copywriting for The Seattle Times and cranking out articles for The Seattle Weekly, then a year in Venice Beach writing for a dotcom and running a hula hooping website. We returned to Seattle in fall of 2003, and since then lots of grown-uppy stuff has happened like getting married, buying a house, publishing my first book and trying to navigate the transition from young, naive weirdo to older, wiser weirdo. These days, I spend three days a week as a social media-focused Marketing Manager at Microsoft. (Yes, really: Microsoft.) The other four days a week I work on my projects like Offbeat Bride and the Salon of Shame.

When I'm not writing or sleeping, I'm usually talking, dancing, stretching, walking my dog, attending the very occasional hippy-raver-freakfest, or staring at the wall quietly trying to get my shit together.

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