Remember the magazine Tiger Beat? I challenged myself to create a pattern in Illustrator that would be every bit as cotton-candy-soda-pop-junk-food-delicious as the heartthrob rag was to me when I was a wee teenage lady. 

There’s no “California casual” at a Viennese ball.  

This is what happens when you give me a Wacom tablet, a Lynda.com subscription, and take me to see St. Vincent perform live in Frankfurt. 

If you're on the lookout for vampires and all things creepy-beautiful, Prague is without fail your dream destination. In its pristine wintertime glory, the city lights up like a dark jewel revealing just enough of itself to keep you dreaming about it for months—or years—after you've returned to the safety of your home.

Everybody has their own reason to visit Berlin. Mine was to dance with ghosts, drink amongst angels, and take a deep dive into everything eerie and ancient the metropolis has to offer. 

Fans of the Grimm Brothers know fairy tales are far more sinister than the movies make them out to be. Case in point: Hameln — the Pied Piper’s town — a creepy-cool medieval village where rat-themed kitsch meets German history.

What does writing your first novel do? It breaks you up into little pieces and puts you back together again, better than you were before. Here’s what I learned from spending quality time with my imagination and getting intimate with my keyboard.

A telling snapshot of my late-November, gray-sky Germany days. 

Auf Wiedersehen might be as American as Oktoberfest and Wienerschnitzel, but it is not the way to say goodbye in Germany. This is the story behind auf Wiedersehen’s younger, hipper cousin, tschüss.

There’s only one city in Germany whose unofficial mascot is a wine-loving dwarf legendary for drinking eight gallons a day. If that’s not enough to get you to Heidelberg, I don’t know what is.

Some things in life are so scary, you need to be a little crazy to actually do them. Taking ballet class in a rural German suburb is one of these things.