... and in my pronunciation, that rhymes. Shay has nothing to do with the Irish first name, but is actually a short form of one of my characters' name: T'Shay-itzu... and I've just gotten used to using it as a nickname.

Well...

I'm from Germany, from the Stuttgart area to be precise. During highschool, I spent a year in the US, so my English should be ok. At least it was good enough to write my thesis in My virtual home is www.weltenbastler.net (German community for worldbuilding, if you speak German, check it out) and someone there posted a link to here. So here I am.

My basic interests are worldbuilding and making up stories which play in my world. Cartography is a bit of a love and hate relationship. I need maps - and accurate maps - to sort my thoughts, but drawing them to my satisfaction just takes up so much time. And just when I'm done, I realize there's some sort of error in my global climate or something and I have to redo it. Oh well, such is life.

All my maps are done in Corel Draw, which doesn't seem to be used much around here. I never really tried anything else, as I've used Corel Draw for years now (I think I got started on version 3, now I'm on X5). And I like to have scalable maps and moveable objects.

In real life, I'm a wife, a mother and a R&D engineer in automotive electronics. I'll leave the order of importance to you So my biggest issue is my time budget. I just have so many more ideas than time to do them. But I just couldn't pass up this forum.