Playing around with a new bio to spice up my various author pages. Below is the current draft.
Chuck
Litka, who signs his stories and paintings
C. Litka,
plies his art as an amateur, which is to say, for pleasure rather
than profit
so he
never has to wonder Will this
sell?
He has dreamed of writing science fiction since his distant youth,
but his intrinsic inability to spell English, together with a certain
lack of persistence doomed his early efforts to doorstops.
He
attended the University of Wisconsin earning a BA in International
Relations, and a BS in Agronomy. He worked for several government
agencies, stocked shelves in grocery stores, and spent 13 years in
pre-press as the printing
industry
moved from manual to digital, ending up as
a graphics tech for
a small
daily newspaper before giving it all up to paint.
He
lives with his wife in rural Wisconsin. Weather
permitting,
he rides his bike for
several
hours a day, occasionally tends a small garden and mows his lawn once
a week. Unless it doesn't need it.
Come
now, Chuck, we'll need a little more than that.
And no, I can't
just make stuff up. A
bio is not
a work of fiction.
He
bakes his own sour dough bread, and drinks four mugs of tea a day –
loose leaf, not tea bags.
Great,
that added 21 words and a great deal of excitement. Yes, I'm being
sarcastic. How about travel? Travel's
always material good for a bio.
Mr
Litka spent several months traveling from Wick to Penzance in the
early '70 on a British Rail pass.
Care
to add any more to that?
He
left his appendix in Canterbury.
Right.
And since then? You know, in the last 40 years?
He's
been to
Nester Falls, Steamboat Springs, Baileys Harbor and Two Rivers,
but these
days he hates to travel. He
wonders,
with
Google street view,
why
anyone goes
anywhere when they can see the
world
from their easy chair?
Okay.
Moving on. What else do you do for excitement? ...No,
I don't think
cleaning the leaves out of your
rain gutters warrant
inclusion.Yes,
I realize it involves an element of danger,
but still,
we'll give it a miss.
What else?
He
usually spends an hour or
two
in the morning, and another hour or two in the evening writing. Once
or twice a week he may paint a picture. He
daydreams a lot.
Heaven
help me. Please, I need something
interesting to
write about. No
go.
Years
ago he read a
book, The
Golden Age,
in which he
came across a story about an
absentminded old
man –
"...eccentric,
learned.. [who]
...was
alleged to have written a real book"
– living
an
uneventful life in a house filled with books.
This struck
him as the ideal life.
When he no
longer needed
to help rich men get richer,
he adopted it.
He's
currently
working
on a new story to see
him through the long winter ahead, if snow shoveling doesn't do him
in
first.
Well,
it certainly won't
be excitement that does him in.
Really, he's
every bit as exciting as a bare
white ceiling without a crack.
His idea life.
