The first thing you should know about me is that I have a British accent. This will help you establish a voice in your head when you're reading, which is important, don't you think?

My name is Holly Burns. I'm 29 and I live in San Francisco, California, with my brand new husband Sean, and two enormous cats. I work in the travel industry as a writer and editor, and sometimes I also do a little freelance work on the side to keep me in wine, cheese, and the flattering kind of jeans, which are important (and also expensive, if you're doing them right.)

I was born in England to English parents, but I grew up all over the place: Paris, the Netherlands, Britain, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Hong Kong---at seven years, it's the longest I've ever lived anywhere---and the slightly less glamorous Connecticut. When I was eleven, I left my family in Hong Kong to attend an all-girls boarding school in a leafy English village, where I stayed until I was eighteen. I learned things like Latin, lacrosse, french-braiding, independence, and how to deal with crippling homesickness. The jury is still out on which of those things has since helped me most in life.

Sean and I got married on September 5, 2009, after being together approximately seven hundred million years. In fact, I've known him since I was sixteen, which means he has seen me through some very ill-advised hairstyles and wardrobe choices, and has still stuck around. We've been in San Francisco since January 2006 and before that we spent three years in Charleston, South Carolina, which was very pretty and the lemonade was good, and I loved how everyone was named after streets and always had a set of monogrammed notecards on their desk, but I seem to have this disorder where I can't stay in one place for very long---commitment issues? the travel bug? who knows?---and after a while, the time had come to leave. 

And so we left. We quit our jobs, packed our lives away, and went traveling in Asia for six months, traipsing through Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma. When we'd had enough, we moved to San Francisco--jobless, homeless, and friendless---and figured things would work themselves out. Luckily for us, they have.Our apartment was even featured on Apartment Therapy once, which still remains one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me. Well, that and the time I grabbed Gavin Rossdale's bottom.

My parents recently moved to San Diego after eight years in Singapore and the rest of my family lives in England. My friends are split between Charleston, London, and San Francisco. We all have very good long-distance calling plans.

My favorite piece of punctuation is the parentheses, with the semi-colon taking a close second. Things I like include: oatmeal, going to the library, gold shoes, the word "brouhaha," Trader Joe's, beauty products with clever names, reliving scenes from My So Called Life in my head, black licorice, the page in Us Weekly where they say "Stars: They're Just Like Us" and then show them looking zitty and doing laundry, San Pellegrino, Target, Mark Ruffalo, when people say things like "um, clean up in aisle three from all the names you just dropped," German accents, free samples, people who can drive stick, hydrangeas, when the phone rings in the middle of the night and it's just a wrong number and NOT someone on the other side of the world dying, men in pink shirts, and Nigella Lawson.

Things I don't like include: people who use their cell phones at the gym, most seafood, bad grammar, beets, the word "ointment," people who won't admit that they shop in TJ Maxx EVEN WHEN YOU'VE SEEN THEM THERE, incorrect pronunciation of the word "croissant," hearing other people pee, elaborate facial hair, thinking you've got one square of your Caramello left when really you've already eaten the whole thing, Heidi Montag, soup, driving, and people who claim to "heart" things, especially when they write about it in Comic Sans font.