Biography Anyway, I'm the author of the Matty Graves series of sea adventures. I was born at around 3 o'clock in the morning one bleak and bleary December 28 in Hollywood, California. The folks expected me a few weeks later than that, but Mom got food poisoning at Christmas dinner. It kind of tainted my view of the world. I ate some castor beans once. I also ate some airplane glue. One time I tried to go from Kauai to California without a boat. That was interesting. I stopped drinking after that. About 30 years after that, but still. My grandparents all moved to Los Angeles around 1920 or so. They're all dead now. I'm a third-generation Angeleno but I spent most of my adult life in and around San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Currently I live in Southern California. I hate Southern California. It’s a long story. Buy me a coffee and I'll tell you all about it. I was educated after a fashion at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Jose State, where I majored in creative arts—which on a scale of difficulty is a step up from basket weaving—and graduated in 1994 with a minor in creative writing. Once upon a time my articles and short stories appeared regularly in alternative newsweeklies and literary magazines. I liked a piece I wrote about killing rats. Once upon another time, I was a crewman in the Lady Washington brig of Grays Harbor, Washington. That was for a pretty short while, really, and all in all it's probably best if they don't remember me. So anyway, I've gotten two novels published and am polishing up the third. I still have to figure out how to write a novel each time I do it. My favorite rejection letter (so far) read, “No, I shouldn’t care to publish this. In fact, I can’t imagine who would.” I have no idea who wrote it or what the publication was, or even if it still exists. I like to think it doesn't. The best piece of advice I ever got was, "Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does." Seriously. |
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