Where to start? Where to start?Imagine a book editor tired of editing text books . . . remedial, freshman college textbooks. That would be me, trying to start up again after having two children and taking five years off.

Hello . . . helloooo? I'm back. Anyone there? Anyone who knows me, that is?

Hm, people move fast in publishing, switching from company to company. I should know; I had done some of that moving myself. I started at Time-Life Books, fresh out of college, in 1988.( Good times, my friends. Good times.) And then I went back to school to get my master's degree. (English Lit with a concentration in 19th-century Romanticism—is that a career breaker, or what?) Next I found myself as editor of Weiser Books, and then I got married. Well, some stuff must have happened in between. But I knew I was ready to go freelance, to jump off into the great unknown of no steady paycheck, no health insurance, no paid vacations . . . ah, the promised land.

That's how I ended up doing textbooks on just about every subject —English, psychology, teacher training, computer, medical (hope those doctors didn't believe every word I edited), and playwriting. There were smatterings of fiction (very few and far between).

Then I had children and took a "break". When I started editing again, most of my old contacts were gone and I found I couldn't stand textbooks. Which was good because the freelance pay rate had gone down while the schedules seemed even shorter.

Soon I discovered web design and cool things like html, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash. And not so cool things like php, databases, e-commerce software, and . . . computer viruses. (Honestly, what is with those people? If only they'd use their smarts for niceness instead of evil!)

So, you're pretty much caught up with how Cat Whisker Studio came into being. Web design is fun, interesting, frustrating, challenging, and rewarding. And I get to meet various and sundry people who are doing all sorts of remarkable things and who need a place of their own on the web. That's where I come in.

—Sydney Baily-Gould