To begin with, it occurs to me that a contact email address would be a good thing, so hit it, at mslindaholmes (at) gmail dot com. Although, obviously…you know. Type it out like an email address.

Anyway! Here is an explanation of where things stand, which I wrote in the third person, because…it was that kind of day.

Linda Holmes grew up wanting to be a writer, but quit at eighteen because she was too chicken to approach professors to get into college-level writing classes. TRUE STORY! She also discovered that her instinctive enjoyment of picking apart logical problems and human behavior was a good match for the study of law, so she went off to law school. While in law school, she started writing movie reviews on the internet, which nobody cared about except her family and friends and a couple of random fans whose names are lost to history.

She successfully passed the bar exam and became an attorney. She worked for the Minnesota legislature for six years, doing legal analysis and drafting legislation (ask her about the temporary abolition of the Board Of Boxing and why you can’t sell cars in Minnesota on Sundays!). It was during this time that she became a fan of, and then started freelancing for, Television Without Pity, where she had the remarkable good fortune to be assigned The Amazing Race as her very first show.

She also started freelancing for MSNBC.com, which she did for years, and for TV Guide, which she did just long enough to interview Donald Trump. As she got busier and busier with freelancing, she found one of the world’s precious and few part-time legal jobs, which allowed substantially more time to recap Survivor and Little House On The Prairie and make witty writer friends.

In 2006, she brushed up against the dating industry for about five minutes when she collaborated on the book Why You’re Still Single. She and the dating industry were a match made in Chernobyl, as it turned out, but she is proud of, and stands by, every word she wrote. Her editor was the knees of the bees.

In April 2007, she bailed on the legal profession and the great state of Minnesota and became a full-time editor at Television Without Pity, a job that allowed her to pursue her years-old dream of moving to New York. She left TWoP in March 2008 and is now available for all your freelancing needs. At the moment, she is writing for MSNBC.com, TheAttorneyStore.com, Vulture (New York magazine’s culture blog), and NPR.org. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, where she enjoys her apartment, Zipcar, and having air conditioning.

Note: That picture was taken by the kind people at the Sears Portrait Studio, at the request of Linda’s mom, who didn’t have a decent picture of her for the mantel. The same people were kind enough to take this one, which Linda gave her mother first, just to make sure Mom was paying attention.