My name is Rebecka Ratcliffe.  I spent 13 years in the world of corporate finance, doing exciting things like reorganizing spreadsheets and having meetings with various people to review the reorganized spreadsheets.  Despite getting to a point in my career where the spreadsheets were very exciting indeed, I left finance in 2008 so that I could raise my two newly formed subsidiaries. 

After a few years, I realized I didn’t have a burning desire to use my accounting degree again (CPA, inactive), and turned to my English minor, hoping to eke out whatever monetary value that might have.  So far, it has gone about as one might expect.   

This blog came out of the need for somewhere to put the stuff I was writing.  At the time (2013), I was writing the occasional humor piece and no longer had an e-mail distribution of coworkers to read it.  My current coworkers were illiterate and, let’s face it, not attuned to humor that didn’t involve a silly face or peeking/booing. 

In 2016, I’ll be sending my first complete manuscript to publishers, a fantasy novel for young people called The Tiny Giant.  I don’t know what will happen, or where it goes, but I’ve worked on it for over two years and it’s getting close to the best I can do.  I’m also working on a collection of stories for adults that tends more towards the thriller/horror end of the spectrum.  I’m looking forward to getting The Tiny Giant out the door so that I can focus on those.  Should I be so lucky as to hit the right place, person, and time with the novel, I have at least two more Tiny Giants books in me.  So many words. 

As I am focusing all of my energy on making The Tiny Giant the best manuscript EVER, for right now, the blog gets attention when I want something.  Like…when I want to post some silly poem I wrote, and I have nowhere else to do it.  That’s pretty lame, but that’s what I can spare. 

Why is it called You Should Be Happy?  That’s a long story that could probably be a lot shorter.  I’m a lot Irish, you see, and one Irish coping mechanism is telling other people they should be happy, it could be a lot worse.  Follow that up with all the ways it could be worse, and you might be one of my great-aunts.  We expect things to be bad, we’re pleasantly surprised when they are not, and you should be happy.  You could have lost the other leg as well!