The teacher told me to comb my hair...I was only five and was lucky I knew which end of a comb to use...my hair was always a static cling wreck no matter how nice my mom would fix it before I got on the bus...it still is a mess, only curlier than this baby fine blond fluff...
While I jump through the hoops of becoming a published author, I always come up against the brief biography bit that I should supply to potential agents and editors to entice them into representing me...I very often feel too humble about little ole me to toot my horn so when I do it, I cringe inside, I mean, really, it was drummed into my head not to be a show-off or to be too proud...wtf...good grief, I don't know, it's just tough trying to make my ordinary history sound interesting enough to be taken seriously by the gate keepers to the publishing powers that be...with every rejection letter, I feel like chucking the traditional route and self-publishing just to get it over with...especially now with the economic disaster that the Bush Administration has allowed to happen, well, now the publishers are tucking their tails and are definitely not willing to take a financial risk on someone like little ole me...a white girl from Upstate New York with no literary pedigree...
I must be crazy.
So for the hell of it, I wrote this down like the ones you see on the backs of books, referring to myself in the third person is so weird...it's way too long for the back of a book cover...but who says I'll put it on the back of a book cover? I'll put it here for now so if someone stumbles in, they'll have an idea of who I am...
Laura grew up in a small, old Erie Canal town in Upstate New York, and she loved getting that new box of 64 Crayola's at the beginning of the school year, beyond that point, she hated school and barely talked to anyone. Education always seemed to be modified for a certain type of student and Laura always tried to fit 'it' into her vision of how it should be. Academically she wasn’t a stellar student. Although she was considered bright, she had a tendency to not follow directions no matter the terms of the assignment, she was the quintessential square peg being shoved into the round hole of the public school system, she was mostly bored, and spent a great deal of her time inside her head making up stories. (On more than one occasion she was called a liar when she tried to share these stories.)
Laura attended art school, worked as a disc-jockey at a college radio station, she’s an accomplished horseman, and spent some time working on a horse farm shoveling shit in exchange for free riding lessons in Dressage. She has been a model, did time as a book slinger in a college bookstore textbook order department, was a clothing and shoe retail clerk, briefly did clerical work in a credit office, worked as a secretary, and is currently the Registrar at a university art collection. (She has noted that there are a lot of women named ‘Laura’ who are Registrars at art museums.)
Laura lives in an old farmhouse on a windswept hilltop in Upstate New York with her husband, their twenty-something son, five cats, and one dog named Max. On her own time outside of the day job, she is an artist and has sold several works of art to private collectors in the Syracuse region, and has been diligently writing books for the last ten years. When she isn’t writing or drawing, she loves gardening and photography; she also watches old movies, has an eclectic taste in music, reads several books at a time, is an avid supporter of PBS, she loves horses and adores wildlife. She is self-publishing her first book, Dusty Waters, a ghost story that was inspired by some of the lies that she told when she was a bored kid in a small, old Erie Canal town.
As you can see, I tried to cover all the bases and stuck with the basics of me...
But here's another one that I wrote some time ago...it goes well with this picture from my garden:
Do you think the weather in Upstate New York has anything to do with the making of exceptional writers? So many distinguished authors have passed underneath the prevalent gray sky—many have moved on, but I have stayed here, though I chose to relocate to the hill country south of Syracuse for a better view. There’s something unique about the profusion of overcast days that sparks inspiration, it is a bit moor-ish in a Bronte sense. Some times that suffusion of gray comes down as fog on my Upstate hill, and my world takes on an isolated quality; it is such a lush atmosphere that fosters creativity in cozy rooms by a wood stove fire. Sunny days are precious, and that’s when I turn my attention from the moody sky to the placid earth. I have worked out numerous plot knots with my hands immersed in the soil of my garden; my imagination tickled by the softness of a cat’s sweet tail as it brushes along my arm when it passes by me with affectionate curiosity. After hours of physical labor tending to flowers and vegetables, I return to my desk to write, contemplate—tinker and tweak; sometimes I forgo the desk to sun myself in my favorite chair on the front porch. While hummingbirds buzz at the sprays of bee balm, I rest my feet on a sun-warmed dog, and I read with a red pen poised, ready to stab at the manuscript lying in my lap. You see, I have a good life on my hill, it is so pastoral and peaceful—this is how I want you to envision me. It is important for you to incorporate this vision, because this is what I have worked towards for many years, without this quality of life and the extremes of weather, I wouldn’t be writing—I’d be stuck on survive otherwise.
Too flowery...
How the devil does one write this sort of thing without sounding like a narcissist? It's bizarre...
And so here I am, all "growed up", yup, that's me standing by the flower...she still doesn't use a comb in that fluff and has since given up trying to tame it...some things never change...I'm still trying to make up my own rules as I go along, I write books that are too 'prickly' to be considered 'mainstream'...which translates to not being a best seller blockbuster these days...but I'll be damned if I give up my vision of how things should be...
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