The author-bio on Party of One's back cover doesn’t tell you very much. How much do you want to know? You don't want to read about the day I think I heard a ghost playing the piano in San Diego's Old Town or the night I spent being seasick on an Italian ferryboat ... or do you?

My name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, like "AN-na-lee." It's a very popular name in Scandinavia. I'm not Scandinavian.

I grew up near the beach in Los Angeles, which by my definition is a definite lonerland. First of all, the city is huge — and by contrast it is small towns with their comparatively nosy/friendly/curious residents that can be loners' hells. And LA's car culture, despite the true horrors of smog, ensures that a large part of every day will be spent all alone in a hermit-cave on wheels. I grew up near the beach in San Pedro, home of Charles Bukowski, the Minutemen, and the Del Rubio triplets. San Pedro is part of Los Angeles, which by my definition is a definite lonerland.

An only child, I played alone a lot. Other kids came knocking, but I usually avoided them, preferring solitary pursuits: poring over Ripley's Believe It or Not!, gluing plastic eyes and pipecleaner arms and legs onto seashells, doing the voices of Barbie and Ken and Skipper.

After leaving home I went to college in Santa Barbara and then at UC Berkeley, a gigantic university where a loner could easily blend into the crowd but where people are very serious and expect you to have serious opinions on things. There is no beach there.

After earning an English degree, I became a journalist and began writing for a number of publications which has grown to include Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fate, ArtNews, Tropical Fish Hobbyist, and the Boston Globe. I am currently literary editor of the East Bay Express, where I mastermind which new books will be reviewed each month and which will simply slip into oblivion.

Also I'm the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and the coauthor of five. My travel books — which include California Babylon and Weird Europe — are guides to offbeat attractions and scandal sites: from Austria's Arnold Schwarzenegger museum to an X-rated sculpture in the Vatican and everything in between. In a way, these are "loner books" — urging travelers to make their own rules, bypassing the Eiffel Tower and Sea World to see, instead, something that every other traveler hasn't seen.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! is still in my bookcase, though Barbie, Skipper and Ken are lying facedown in the basement, at the bottom of a taped-shut box along with a Ouija Board and a Magic 8-ball. Essentially not that much has changed. Okay, I'm married — but he's a loner. It's not as if he goes to tailgate parties and puts six-packs on his head — not that those are bad things. Anyway I still don't want to go out and play. I go out, sure. But you know what I mean.