People always say they want to know cool facts about their favorite authors. I am frequently told that I need to be more mercenary, and assume that people want to hear about me and my books.
In the spirit of these two things, I am going to assume that I am someone’s favorite author and offer up three little-known and (hopefully) cool facts about me. Enjoy!
I used to have dreams about dying all the time
If you’ve ever wondered whether the theory that, “If you die in your dreams, you die in real life” is true, you can stop wondering. I’m living proof that it’s not.
(Also, how would we know?)
Yes, when I was younger I had dreams of dying in all kinds of strange ways.
- Destroyed by an alien death ray while saving planet earth with a number two pencil.
- Splatted on the ground while hang-gliding on Mars.
- Burned to a crisp for beating a dragon at chess (laughably unrealistic, considering how bad at chess I am).
- Hugged to death by an overly enthusiastic friend.
The list could go on for quite some time.
Why did I dream of dying so much? I have no idea whatsoever, but it never really bothered me much, except on occasion when the deaths were particularly scary. It was most often like watching myself die in a movie than actually experiencing it.
I once cut an idea from a book because I realized I wasn’t first
In hindsight, this feels like a bit of a silly reason to cut the idea altogether, but at the time it felt legitimate.
In my first novel (unpublished at the time of this writing) I included a character whose magic, among other things, gave him an extraordinarily lucky hand at games of chance. Making his way through the world, while very tough in other ways, was made somewhat easier by the fact that he could sit down to any game of dice and basically clean house with everyone.
Readers of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series will probably find the above description familiar. I am a fan of the books and, while I didn’t actually read the part where Matrim Cauthon discovers this miraculous trait about himself until after I had written it into my own character, I couldn’t shake the alarm bells in my head saying I was stealing the idea.
Could I have tweaked the trait to make it more unique to my character and less a dead ringer for Jordan’s idea? Probably, but fear prevented me from doing so.
Thus, out of the book and into the great scrap heap of discarded ideas it went.
I was briefly a LARPer in Amtgard
For those of you scratching your heads and wondering what in the world the above means, LARPing stands for Live Action Role-Playing. It’s like D&D, but you fight each other with foam swords.
Amtgard is an international organization of LARPers who have different chapters in towns around the world.
I was briefly a member of the Rock Springs chapter, known as the Shire of Truevale, many years ago. While I met several good friends who have stuck with me over the years, and had some good clean fun, I found that it wasn’t a good fit for me. I wanted more storytelling and less tracking how many times I’d been hit in what body part, a desire that would eventually push me toward GMing in tabletop RPG.
What do you think? Did any of these facts really surprise you?
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