About

Lori Alden Holuta is an author, editor, book reviewer, foodie, forager, gardener, and avant-garde crocheter who can’t imagine life without the internet, even though she was born… er, well, a few years before it was invented, more or less.

She’s been an enthusiastic participant in the digital world since 1986, starting with local bulletin boards, before succumbing to the glitzy allure of Prodigy, where she met friends who are still a part of her life today, including that one guy she married. After Prodigy came CompuServe, where she earned her Free Flag as a moderator in the Science Fiction Television forums (or ‘fora’ as she prefers, but has been told it’s pretentious, even though it IS the plural of ‘forum’. Sigh.) She also enjoyed Usenet, especially the rec.arts boards for MST3K and Babylon 5. Many friendships formed in Usenet as still treasured and enjoyed today.

She made the jump to learning HTML and hand-coding web pages (in Notepad!) as one of the first Channel Guides at BellaOnline.com in the days when the dot com bubble was getting bigger and bigger. Yes, she got her unfair share of swag, advance screener movie and TV videos, bonuses, and an all expense paid junket to Hollywood (She’s not kidding). Then came WebSeed.com, and if you remember that venture, she’s impressed. Her final gig as a content provider was as About.com’s Guide to Lansing (Her motto: Living in Lansing So You Don’t Have To.)

Then the dot com bubble burst, and working for other people’s websites became unviable and to be honest, rather mean and cut-throat. Undaunted, she gathered up the pile of content she’d created for About.com and left to build her own websites: MidMichigander.com, a portal site for the Greater Lansing area, and CocoaJava.com, a popular portal for coffee and chocolate resources, with dozens of categories and hundreds of links, in the days before we just Googled everything. She ran CocoaJava for well over a decade, until the aforementioned Google gave us all better ways to search.

Nowadays, she’s happy right here at A License to Quill. She can also be found over at The Brassbright Chronicle, the home of her books and authorly pursuits, and comical romping around the Victorian era.

Lori has also been a digital resident of Second Life since early 2007, where she barista-d at her coffee houses, organized writer’s groups, acted as deputy editor for two in-world magazines, and worked on fundraisers for Relay for Life. Her avatar’s name is Ceejay Writer. That should tell you a lot about this website’s URL, eh?