Bio-degradable

As a writer I am constantly bothered with the fact that I have to write a bio about myself for various public functions and events. You would think that a writer wouldn’t have a problem with writing anything, especially about himself. We writers are notoriously vain and spend most of our days incessantly blathering on about just how amazing we are to anybody or anything that may or may not have the capacity to hear. I once spent six hours talking to June Bug about what it took to write a 700 page novel based on creatures I have only seen in a zoo and about locations I have never been to.

But therein lays the problem. I’m pretty good at lying making crap things up. It was a skill I developed early in my life to avoid doing things like going to school around Christmas time so I could stay home while my parents were at work, unwrap the presents, play with the toys and carefully re-wrap them. But being good at playing make believe doesn’t translate well into telling the truth about oneself, or at least not at making it interesting anyway. 

So how do I solve this conundrum? (It seriously just took me five attempts to type out conundrum) I thought about lauding myself with words befitting an author of my caliber and who is held in such high esteem by his peers that at least three or four other authors purchased my first book RISE OF THE PENGUINS. But to me, singing my own praises in a public venue is akin to peeing in a Wal-mart parking lot. It’s all fine and great until somebody sees it and either points and laughs or calls the cops and a police K-9 that was rewarded with Snausages during training thinks it’s treat time. 

Since I don’t like to say I’m all great and stuff, my next option is to lie. I can say I have earned all sorts of literary awards that cannot be verified by any living person. e.g. The Charles Charlie Chuck Charleston III Award for the Most Superfluously Worded Fiction Novel Written by a Person Either Male or Female Who can Write Inessential Words With Either a Type-writer or Word Processor or Ink-Pen or Pencil or Crayon or Vine Charcoal or Finger-paint and Who Writes the Superfluous Words with such Dispensable Superfluity that Extra Words Become Extraneously Superfluous. But that won’t work either.

So in the end I’ll just have to be who I am. I’ll mix a bit of the truth, like how I wrote my first novel while on short breaks working long night shifts and how nearly dying from a heart attack at an early age motivated me to chase my dreams; and I’ll add some less than true stuff like how in high school I was voted least likely to mate with a member of his own species. Like my bio on Amazon says, “Life has taught him to never take himself too seriously because that just takes all of the fun out it.”