Jess Hartley is a gaming guru, talented author, and mother of three. She travels the country extensively as a guest speaker at various gaming conventions and in my mind is an exemplary example of someone dedicated to their craft and loving every minute of it.
Gaming is a big part of your life. When did that interest start and what's the appeal for you?
In terms of general gaming, I've always been a gamer. I can remember playing checkers and chess with my parents, playing Monopoly and Life with my sister and cousins when I was very young, and one of the first Christmas gifts I remember vividly was a handheld electronic game (back when they were a big deal) called Merlin. 
It was incredibly simple by today's standards, but it could play tic-tac-toe and several other games via a grid of blinking red lights. It sounds archaic now, but it was amazing back then.
I came into RPGs (role playing games) much later in life. I bought a copy of the D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) "Red Box" when I was in my early 20s and tried to teach myself and my friends how to play with varying degrees of success. But my "good ex" introduced me to what gaming was supposed to be like, and we had a group of friends who played while he was stationed at Fort Lewis (just outside of Tacoma, Washington) for several years. He and I were the only ones in the group who had a place off of the base, so they'd arrive en masse just after they were released on Friday afternoons and we'd play off and on until Sunday night when they had to head back to get ready for work on Monday morning. We did a lot of Advanced D&D (First and Second Edition) but also GURPs and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles and Marvel and Aftermath — pretty much everything we could get our hands on. It was a social thing back then, with a lot more emphasis on discovery and destruction than on in-depth roleplay for our group (although there were certainly some ongoing character stories that were very intense roleplay).
I discovered the World of Darkness even later than that, maybe 15 years ago, first online through MUDS and MUSHes and then through LARP (live action role play) and tabletop. The shift of focus from exploration/exploitation (i.e. killing things and taking their stuff) to interpersonal story and political machination was something I found very appealing, and that has taken up a large portion of my interest over the past decade or more.
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