Help Me Flist!

[mmerriam]

Last night, while careswen and I were in the process of doing the final layout of Shimmers & Shadows, my lovely wife turned to me and said she thought it might be a good idea if I posted my "About the Author" bit and asked for feedback from my flist. Because she is wise (and because I hate talking about myself in the third-person), I agreed. So here it is, and I am requesting your input.


About the Author

Michael Merriam was born in Michigan, in 1965, but spent most of his life in Oklahoma and Texas, moving to Minnesota in 1999.

Like most writers, Michael has worked a variety of odd jobs over the years, including musician, short order cook, and freight logistics manager. In 2003, after being laid off and declared legally blind, Michael began writing again, rekindling a passion he had set aside nearly two decades earlier.

Michael has sold science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction to a variety of magazines, including Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Fictitious Force, From the Asylum, and The Harrow. He was nominated for the James B. Baker Award in 2007 and Preditors and Editors Reader's Choice Awards in 2006 and 2007, and he has been a semi-finalist twice in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest.

Michael is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the Twin Cities Speculative Fiction Writers Network. He lives in Hopkins, Minnesota, with his wife and an ordained cat.

Visit Michael's homepage at www.michaelmerriam.net.


How could this be improved? What could be taken out? What would you like added? Does anyone even read the "About the Author" page? All ideas and suggestions welcome!

Comments

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I also tend to read the author's bios in novels and anthologies, especially if I enjoyed the work (in which case, I read the bio with some envy).

There's something clunky to me in the opening sentence. Maybe it's the grammar (which seems technically correct to me) or maybe it just seems like too much information. The rest of the bio has a nice flow to it that doesn't quite work here. I'm thinking something along the lines of "Michael Merriam was born in Michigan in 1965, but found his way to Minnesota in 1999, by way of Oklahoma and Texas." Something with more character?

The best bios I've read have some personality to them, so it's not just a fact sheet on the author. If you can get more of the tone of "an ordained cat" into the rest of the bio, I think it would be even stronger than it is now.

I also suggest combining some of the paragraphs, such as your publication history with the writers group info. And keep in mind that "He lives in Hopkins, Minnesota" at the end is semi-redundant with the opening paragraph, so you may combine them, ie: "Michael Merriam was born in Michigan in 1965, but found his way to Hopkins, Minnesota in 1999, by way of Oklahoma and Texas." (if that's correct, since I don't know if you've been in Hopkins since '99.

Just my two cents!

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the excellent input! I was worried that people don't read the "About the Author" section. We ended up doing a pretty substantial restructure, while keeping the things we liked.