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piercings and her sleeves rolled up to display some impressive tattoos, she easily blends into the crowd at the Vancouver Folk Festival or a retreat on Hornby Island. In jeans and a T-shirt, she's equally at home in the gym, in a funky Main Street coffeehouse, at a meeting of fellow day-care moms or around a gaming table with a bunch of the guys from the Trumpeter Tabletop Games Society.
Smedman will also be in her element at Vancouver's annual science fiction convention next month because, with 10 novels published since 1997 and two more on the way, she's rapidly becoming one of the most prolific science fiction/fantasy authors in Canada.
Born and raised in North Vancouver, she earned a BA in anthropology from the University of B.C. but ended up working as a typesetter for a publisher. Deciding she'd rather not type someone else's writing, she went back to Langara College for a journalism diploma and has worked as a journalist ever since: at the Richmond Review, the Langley Times, Sounder magazine, and finally the Vancouver Courier, where she's now the editor of the East Side edition.
"Working as a journalist is a real boon to writing fiction," she says. "What other job allows you to sit down and talk, one on one, with as diverse a collection of people as bank robbers, professional magicians, astronomers and police inspectors?
"I've gone for rides on a blimp, hovercraft and helicopter, been inside a smoke-filled 'burning building' that firefighters train in and been in several scientists' labs -- all very cool experiences that most people never get to have."
Smedman's Ladner home is unremarkable from the outside, but inside it overflows with her diverse passions. There are cats, pug dogs, toys scattered by her two-year-old son and quilts made by her partner. (The two women married in July.)
The largest bedroom in the house is Smedman's office. Its bookshelves are jammed with paperback novels and reference books on science, archeology, Canadian history, the First World War, forensics, religion and mythology. There are paintings of dragons, a Star Trek poster in Greek, a large plaster gargoyle. Three dozen model airplanes hang on threads over Ground Zero, her computer workstation. A large worktable is covered in half-finished modelling projects, and in the closet, clothes have been shoved into a small corner to make room for floor-to-ceiling gaming boxes, neatly stacked.
Smedman has been writing since she printed and stapled together her own books in elementary school, and she's been playing games since she was "tall enough to reach the table." She started with board games. Then a neighbour introduced her to wargames with tabletop miniatures.
In 1981, she discovered Dungeons and Dragons, the hugely popular role-playing game that spawned an industry, and soon became a veteran "dungeon master." In the late 1980s she started writing articles for Dragon Magazine, and it was then that she got "the call."
"TSR [the creator of Dungeons and Dragons] called me up and asked if I'd like to try my hand at designing an adventure. Would I? Would a kid like to be paid to eat candy?"
Smedman is habitually serious, but when she grins, you can suddenly see that candy-eating kid. "The first adventure I worked on for TSR was Dragon's Crown which was [released] in 1993, and over the next three years, I designed 10 more adventures. Every morning when I woke up, I couldn't wait to get at the computer and start work.
"My editor's job at Sounder magazine had ended when that magazine was sold, so I was doing game design full time, and I loved it."
Like TV shows and movies, popular games have their own tie-in novels, written by authors who work in a "shared universe" with pre-established settings, characters and -- in the case of gaming -- complex rules. It was a natural progression for Smedman.
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