About
Paulette Jaxton was born in Washington, DC on September 7th. She moved to Annapolis, Maryland when she was four and still lives there today. Paulette is an only child.
She began writing prose and poetry in high school, but was encouraged to focus on math and science by well meaning teachers. One of the things she wrote was a short little poem about butterflies. One day her English teacher told the class a famous poet was going to visit the school and critique their poems. They were each to choose one poem and write it out on a piece of transparent plastic so that it could be shown on an overhead projector.
The day came for the poet to visit and all of the English classes assembled in the auditorium. Up on the stage were a large screen and the overhead projector. One of the teachers introduced this woman who was a famous poet and she proceeded to put poems up on the projector and talk about them.
To Paulette’s surprise and delight, her butterfly poem was one of the first to go up. The famous poet told everyone she really liked this poem. She thought the structure was excellent and the word choices exceptional. She said that what truly set this poem apart was the choice of the word ‘caves’ in the last sentence. She said with a little work to set up that image earlier in the poem, it would be something to be proud of and could possibly win an award.
Then a girl who didn’t like Paulette very much raised her hand. “I think that’s an ‘r’ and not a ‘v’, so it actually says ‘cares’” The famous poet stared up at the screen for a long time pondering this, “Well that changes everything,” she said, snatching the transparency off the projector. “In that case it’s just crap.”
And thus ended Paulette Jaxton’s promising career as a poet and the beginning of her lifelong love of prose.
Paulette attended the University of Maryland at College Park for two years, but left to pursue a career in computer programming at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Later she went on to work for Digital Equipment Corporation developing telecommunications software and advanced user interfaces.
She kept her writings to herself until 2008 when she produced Form Letter Rejection Theatre, a podcast anthology of her short speculative fiction stories. Her first novel, The Empress Sword, was released as a podcast in 2010 and has just been published in print and ebook by Dragon Moon Press.
Paulette has become an accomplished podcast author and producer with her own anthology series Form Letter Rejection Theatre as well as being an associate producer on the Metamor City Podcast and Murder at Avedon Hill.
For an update on Paulette’s current projects, click on the link below.
Projects.
