Winnie Jean Howard (a.k.a Mean Winnie Jean) writes dark humor for all ages. Her main focus is creating action-packed stories for young people more into gaming. She also loves writing flash fiction and has completed over a hundred short stories she periodically shares on this site.
Winnie was born in the south suburb of Chicago and grew up in an average American middle-class home with her parents and two younger sisters. She has watched countless horror movies since the age of six, and has become a bit addicted to any form of media that aims to scare. Today she lives near Denver, Colorado with her ever growing family. She hikes daily with her husband and beagles, drinks way too much wine, and watches way too many zombie movies.
At the age of twenty-two, Winnie joined the U.S. Air Force. During eight years of military service, she worked in communications and spent a few years in Germany. Later she was stationed at Cheyenne Mountain Air Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which means she worked for 5 years in a damp dark cave. She settled in Colorado after leaving the service and doesn’t plan to live anywhere else until the wind carries her ashes from Longs Peak to an exterior state.
Her dream of becoming a full-time fiction writer came true in 2008. The following year she wrote the first version of Call for Obstruction on Twitter, and in 2009 it won the Textnovel Writing Contest.
Winnie has been an IT geek and professional writer for over thirty years. She has been involved in the development of anything from simple websites to network monitoring to space defense systems. Recently, she returned to school to add graphic designer to list of careers. Besides fiction, she writes technical specifications, instructional manual, marketing articles, organizational newsletters, and much more. She’s also the founder, Chief Editor and Creative Director over at ArmLin House Productions.