A Skein of Words

Projects in Progress. Novels, short fiction, world creation — whatever is firing my spirit.

I am a druid, linguist, and author. In fiction and nonfiction, I write about meditation, relationship with Spirit, soulful fulfillment in scholarship and art, reconnecting the ancient with the modern, creating beauty, and healing the world.

Professionally, I am a computational linguist, with a focus on speech science, lexicography, lexical semantics, syntax, comparative linguistics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. (My LinkedIn profile is here.) I have a keen interest in the minutiae of the working of the human mind and the centrality of its manipulation of symbols, as well as the broader patterns of social change and development. I have published papers on conversational implicature, dialect analysis, lexical semantics, and syntactic universals.

Spiritually, I was raised Zen Buddhist in the culturally conservative South, and am now a revivalist druid. I have worked in the fields of internet search, speech processing, and the defense industry, and am the father of four children. I live in Pittsburgh, PA with my wife Ali and our black cat, Cu Gwyn.

I’ve been writing stories since I can remember — mostly science fiction until I discovered Tolkien when I was 9 and set about working up my own fantasy worlds and languages. I finished my first novel in college (fantasy) and my second (science fiction) in 2005, when I was living in Buffalo. My third, Mere America (alternate history), is in progress, but you can find the first part here. I’ve also published a collection of short stories, Wild Enough and Free.

The thing is, I always have about a dozen half-formed projects on the backburner. They’re not unfinished for lack of inspiration — I almost never suffer from writer’s block. But working full-time makes it hard to put concentrated effort into anything; and the zephyrous muses tend to blow me from project to project without much warning. And the projects tend to weave themselves together into larger wholes…

So this blog is my loom, where I come after work to sit and weave. When I finish something, I’ll carefully snip it out, package it up nice and make it available for sale. In the meantime it’ll be here, slowly entwining, braiding, looping, growing.

Essential information:

• Name: Jeff Lilly
• Date of Birth: May 26, 1973, approx. 11:30 pm.
• Place of Birth: Henderson, North Carolina
• Moved to Stoneville, North Carolina, in 1975.
• Moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1980.
• Moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1991.
• Undergraduate Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1991 to 1995.
• Graduate Work in Linguistics: Chapel Hill, 1995 to 1996.
• Moved to College Park, Maryland, in 1996.
• Graduate Degree: Master of Arts in Linguistics, College Park, Maryland, 1996 to 2000.
• Married in 1998.
• Four children born between 1998 and 2004.
• Linguist and lexicographer at Answerlogic Inc., 2000 to 2001.
• Moved to Buffalo, New York, in 2002.
• Software engineer in the defense industry, 2002 to 2005.
• Moved to western Massachusetts in 2005.
• Computational Linguist for Nuance, Inc., 2005 to 2009.
• Divorced in 2009.
• Moved to Pittsburgh, PA, in 2009.
• Research Linguist for Yap, Inc., from 2009 – present.
• Married Alison Leigh Lilly on Sept 16, 2011.

Astrological Data:

Sun: Gemini; Moon: Pisces; Mercury: Gemini; Venus: Gemini; Mars: Pisces; Jupiter: Aquarius; Saturn: Gemini; Uranus: Libra; Neptune: Sagittarius; Pluto: Libra.

Ascendant: Capricorn. Midheaven: Scorpio.

Major Aspects: Sun opposite Neptune; Sun trine Pluto; Mercury square Mars; Mercury conjunct Venus; Mercury and Venus trine Jupiter; Saturn conjunct Venus.