About the Author

I’m in a strange place right now. I have to write an About the Author section, but I have absolutely no idea how to go about it. I’m finding that I just don’t know how to write about myself. It’s weird, too, because I love talking about myself. You would think it would be a simple matter of writing all those wonderful words down. No polyhedral dice.

I could write about all sorts of other people: my daughter, Napoleon Bonafrog, that guy who works at the copy shop and doesn’t know how to use a computer and almost formatted my flashdrive instead of opening it. Heck, I could even write a really great biography of my wife. It would go something like this:

Jenny was born, blah blah blah, met Dallas Caldwell, blah blah blah, married Dallas Caldwell, probably died in a starfighter mishap in 2062 because her contacts dried out.

See? That was easy. So why is it so difficult to sum up my life in a paragraph in such a way that people don’t think I’m a smarmy d-bag… without lying to them? I’m tempted to bet on the idea that no one actually reads the About the Author page and just throw in a string of garbled words, but even that would take effort to craft it in such a way that it looked purposefully chaotic. I can’t talk about High School Dallas who was into sports and Star Wars and making fun of people to make himself feel better about his own shortcomings. I can’t talk about the Dallas that spends inordinate amounts of time thinking about the combative superiority hierarchy (CSH) of Captain America, Captain Planet, Captain Kangaroo, and Captain Caveman (the top’s not who you’d think). And I definitely can’t talk about the Dallas with a birthmark below his right nipple that has completely disappeared in a sea of manly curls. 

Which, if you take those things out of the equation, leaves me with very little interesting fluff. And without fluff, my core shouldn’t really be about me. But then again, neither should my writing. I will never be a visionary evangelist like C.S. Lewis, but I hope that, like him, I can hide a little bit of truth in stories about swords and magic and unusual creatures. Fantasy, to me, is about faith in something greater and acceptance that we, the protagonists, are not the end-all, be-all of the universe, but that we can find significance through the opportunity we have to be part of a much bigger story.