We-in-the-news-biz routinely take on the task of summing up a victim after the fact, of teasing out the little details and recollections that help illuminate the life that was lost.

Sometimes we do it well; sometimes we fall back on bathos-laden clichés (a gang-banger who "was turning his life around"; the murdered child who loved Christmas and Barney cartoons). We write about them and then, of necessity, we move on.

Shelley Nance did the footwork for me. In the social routine of modern-day young people, she revealed herself through online journals, comments and drawings.

But among the many cruel and senseless murders in our city, hers is one from which I find it particularly difficult to move on.

I didn't know her. I had never heard of her before her death. But I feel an odd sense of having joined her community of mourners.

Samantha "Shelley" Nance, a 20-year-old art student, was stabbed to death in her Lake Highlands apartment in September. Last week, a man police say was her boyfriend's jealous roommate was arrested for her murder.

The sordid purported motive is certain to grab a lot of attention, but it's Shelley's life, not her death, that makes her memorable.

Maybe it's because hers is the quintessential small-town-girl-seeks- success-in-the-city story. She was thrilled but a little scared to leave Italy, Texas (pop. 2,000), after winning a scholarship to the Art Institute of Dallas.

Or maybe it's because Shelley reminds me so much of my baby sister, a North Carolina-based potter of certain renown. Becca recognized early that talent is only part of the equation for a professional artist, that it's a kind of strings-attached grant you have to match with donkey work and sacrifice.

But it's probably because, in the record Shelley Nance left, I see so many of us a generation ago, battling our anxieties, frightened of failure, but fiercely determined to create our own destinies.

I recognize a young woman emerging from the teenage torment of feeling outside the mainstream and developing the confident pleasure of recognizing her own – and other peoples' – individual gifts and value.

I have come a long way from the quiet girl who just wanted to be invisible in high school, she wrote in an online site for artists in August 2008, when she had been living in Dallas for a year.

It makes me nervous thinking of the future, and even wondering if I'm good enough to be in this industry, but time will tell. I just have to do my best until then.

The picture emerges of Shelley as a sweet girl from a loving family, a dreamy child who was happiest when she was drawing or painting or crafting little stories.

Her friendships were strong, but they were few; she was a self-described "weird kid," something of an oddity among the Italy High School graduating class of 2007.

"She loved animals, computers, and anything to do with art," reads a lovingly candid hometown obituary. "She might not have been the most popular student at Italy High, but she knew what she wanted to do with her life."

She was creative and sensitive, yet there wasn't much of the angry rebel about her. Shelley Nance clearly loved her family and wrote fondly about her frequent visits home.

But she was delighted to have found a larger world where she met others who shared her esoteric interests: online gaming, alternative music, Japanese manga art, computer graphics and animation.

As her first quarter in art school drew to a close two years ago, she showed a grown-up awareness that creativity is useless without discipline.

Artists are meant to be rebellious and do art as they please, which kinda defeats the purpose of going to an art school, where teachers rule over you, she wrote. I don't 'fight the system.' Which makes me think, what's wrong with me?

On the other side, maybe this shows that I have what it takes to survive this place – and art. I don't give in so easily. I think this change was what I needed, to get out of my hometown. I'm getting more ideas. I'm making more new friends.

Shelley didn't nurse trite, overblown fantasies about fame and glory. She focused with increasing clarity on realizing the difficult dream of earning a living by doing what she loved.

I wanna live on my own, in a small cozy apartment, with bookshelves galore, she wrote early this year. Have a little dog, and a cat too, raise 'em together, see how it goes. Work a job or two, just enough to get by. Take up freelance art jobs, while working on independent stuff.

Was that too much to ask? Not for Shelley Nance.

If only she'd had the time.