Hi, I’m Vicki.

Screenwriter, educator, story consultant, podcast host, late-diagnosed autistic person, and proud everything bagel — based on California’s Central Coast.

For thirty years I worked in story: director of development in independent film, co-founder of the story consultancy Catharsis, Programs Director at Act One’s Writing and Producing programs, screenwriting faculty at Columbia College Hollywood and the New Hampshire Institute of Art. I wrote award-winning screenplays, a produced play, and co-authored Notes to Screenwriters. I hold an MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen and dual teaching credentials in Theatre and English.

And for those same thirty years, I was getting another kind of note — not on my pages, on me. Too much. Too intense. Too many interests, too many feelings, too many selves. So I learned to take the hats off at the door and perform one simple, manageable person. The performance ran all day. The bill arrived later.

It came due the way it often does for women like me: late diagnosis (autism, ADHD), a chronically complex body (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, POTS, MCAS), and a long burnout that made the old way of working impossible. Not difficult — impossible.

Which turned out to be the beginning of everything.

Today I host The Neurocomplex Creative on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, write A Hat on a Hat on a Hat on Substack, and build tools for neurodivergent and highly creative people — all of it one living record of doing creative life differently. Imperfectly. Honestly. In public. I’m also a certified trauma recovery coach, and everything I make is shaped by that training and by lived experience.

The three hats are real, by the way. Lime green on hot pink on zebra-banded black, with feathers. A mask is what you wear so no one sees you. The hats are what you wear so that everyone does.