New Bio

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.