About The Author

Jim had, quite literally, done nothing in his life other than finish his novel, a simple (if starkly boring) existence that led to this author bio on the inside of the back cover of the book that would go on to be a best seller:

 About the author: Jim wrote this novel.

Jim, seeing this in black and white for the first time when his advanced copies arrived, felt as though it was wrong and the wrongness leapt at him from the dustcover, stared at him in black and white, again, quite literally.

About the author: Jim wrote this novel.

The truth, it is said, hurts, but this (unlike other things in this story) is not literal. The truth does not stab or cut or slice or even punch you in the stomach like your older brother did using your own hand – why you hitting yourself?—although that is a fairly apt metaphor for what the truth could do if it was physical.  The truth, instead, taunts. Or maybe haunts.

 He began to read other author bios, to see what they were up to – walking slowly through bookstores and libraries, picking books out at random.  Romance novels, how-to guides, historical biographies of people he’d never heard of (and the irony of looking in a biography for a much shorter biography, if it was irony, nobody’s ever sure what irony is any more, which itself might be ironic, if you think about it, and if irony means what everybody thinks irony means,  was lost on him), and what he read amazed him:

 ...lives in Vermont…

 What the heck was a Vermont? A house? A place? He wondered.

 …has a husband…

 Jim wondered if he should get one of those and where he might. Online?

 …when not writing…

 HUH? Who ever heard of an author that stopped writing?

 …two dogs, four children, and a parrot that thinks it’s people…

 Which sent him to the encyclopedia to figure out what a parrot might be and whether that might be a way to kill two birds with one stone: get a ‘parrot that thinks it’s people’ and a husband all at once. 

 He was then embarrassed by his use of that old saying once he found out a parrot is a kind of bird.

 This grew discouraging.  All these things and people and places and he wasn’t even sure what was what!

 “You’ve never done anything?” his publisher asked him, when Jim phoned him to discuss this.  “I thought that author bio was some sort of literary thing, you know, e e cummings?”

 “Who?” Jim asked.

 Jim had by now finished his second novel, but refused to send it to his publisher until he figured this thing out.  He sat up late one night, typing bio after bio:

 Jim spends his time, when not writing,

 HUH? He still couldn't wrap his head around that one.

 Shark-hunting off the coast of

 He had to look up where you could shark-hunt off the coast of, and what sharks were, and what hunting was, using Google™ but found a place.

 Bora Bora

 He wrote that one, and, quite literally, 53 others, biographies that gave him a wife and a son and a turtle, not necessarily in that order, and sometimes their names were interchanged, so that the turtle was “Rita” in a few.  Biographies that had him living in California, and New York City, and Austin, Texas, and other places he picked out of a map that he’d hung to his wall, a map that said it was of the “United States Of America,” a country Jim sort of thought he lived in.  Biographies that gave him unusual hobbies: he was a numismatist, a philatelist,  he went herping, stargazing, he collected taws and Codd-neck bottles, he had once found an entire T-Rex tooth on a trip to South Dakota with his now-estranged brother, and as he wrote that one it didn’t bother him at all that neither the tooth, nor the T-Rex, nor South Dakota, nor his now-estranged brother were things that he wasn’t sure had ever existed.

 He grew increasingly despondent when he was not increasingly desperate.  He went to a fast-food restaurant for the first time. It was his first fast-food restaurant, his first restaurant. As he stood in line -- his first time standing in line! -- he thought maybe he could use this for a bio?

 The author enjoys a cheeseburger now and then but does not care for French fries. However, the restaurant he goes to most frequently out of habit does not serve onion rings, and for some reason the author never goes to the other restaurant, which is not so far away

Of course he had never had a cheeseburger before, now or then. He did not know if he cared for French Fries, having never had them. There was no restaurant he went to at all, let alone most frequently; at this point, that would be this one, his first. He wasn't sure how far away the other restaurant would be, or if there was another restaurant. He stared at the cashier at this restaurant, a girl or woman who appeared to be just about 18 years old.  He wondered if she would be his daughter – she was probably too young to be a girlfriend or wife – and wondered if she had a boyfriend that perhaps he could go into business with on the side?

The author makes log cabins with his son-in-law.

 But he couldn’t bring himself to ask her that (even though he was very very close to doing just that when she'd smiled and asked “Will there be anything else?” he’d almost said “Yeah, do you have a boyfriend who you are going to marry and does he build log cabins?” before he’d said “An apple pie, please.”) At least he got to try an apple pie for the first time. (He didn't care for it.)

 He asked his publisher what that man did on the weekends, what life he had, whether he had ever entered an equestrian competition and finished fourth but was pleased to have just competed?

 “I think you need to get out more,” the man had said, cryptically, on the other end of the phone from whatever place he lived in that Jim didn’t really believe could exist.

 The author once stayed outside for 17 consecutive days, eating pizza he had delivered from time-to-time and drinking rainwater.

He didn’t learn anything and didn’t really feel the experience was valuable.  

 Pumping gas one morning he saw a beautiful woman and darted over to her.

 “Marry me,” he said.

 “Excuse me?” she answered, backing away slightly.

 “Marry me,” Jim told her.  “Marry me and move with me to an abandoned ski chalet in Boulder, which we will remodel to serve as a home for our two children, a daughter named Marie because she was born in France where you studied life drawing, and a son named Brady because he was my favorite quarterback as a kid.  Marry me and honeymoon with me on the Amazon river in Brazil, where you will be bitten by a snake and have to be airlifted out but you will survive and will have joked on the helicopter that this will make for a great toast at our fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Marry me and insist that we rescue the pets nobody wants, an entire floor of our house devoted to iguanas and tarantulas and Madagascar hissing cockroaches.   We will together enjoy cooking meals for your extended family, or sometimes travel to our beach house in Malibu, or simply live on the farm where you grew up in Kansas.”

 “I think you need some help,” the woman said, not unkindly.

 The End.

 About the author: The author’s whereabouts are currently unknown.  He was last seen running into an airport, hand-in-hand with an exceedingly attractive woman who, it must be said, regarded him with an expression of equal parts disbelief and amusement. They were carrying several bags of marbles and clutching a brochure that said something about the South of France.  His next book may never come out.