Bio exercise

Hi! What better way to inaugurate this blog and introduce myself than with a post about writing my bio?

To do this, I decided to spend some time looking at how authors whose works I have been trying to refer to in my queries – you know, that super convincing and not-at-all contrived part of your pitch where you're like, “my amazing novel, which will earn you quadrillions of dollars when published, might be found on a bookshelf next to the works of [amazing writer whose skill I can never hope to approach]” – wrote up their bios around the times that their respective fames took off. I did this by looking up the publication dates of each author’s debut novel (or the one for which they are best known, if not their first), then checking it against Google Trends to see when their trend line be’d going’ed up (i.e., did their first novel cause them to take off, or was it a second or third work, or after something unrelated). Then I put their website URL into the Wayback Machine and took a look at their website during the aforementioned times.

The next part of this exercise was to try to replicate how they’d written their bios, but with my own experience in mind. Sort of like how Hunter S. Thompson described having added to his writing skills by copying other writers works word-for-word to get into their heads. So yeah, this is admittedly gentle plagiarism, but I’m just trying to get in some practice, here, by cosplaying as authors I like.

My thought here is that as I try to market myself as an aspiring author, it wouldn’t make sense to copy the way that one of them has written their bio now that they’ve been famous and known for decades, with many more published works under their belt. It feels like that’d be arrogant and a little dangerous! It would be like a teenage sports athlete trying to pitch themselves as the next [scouring my memory for professional athlete names] Bo Jackson. Instead, you acknowledge where you are and look at what success looks like for the next phase from there, and plan your trajectory accordingly. You don’t aim so high that you’d end up landing back where you are; you aim for the next step on the staircase.

The authors I looked at were N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, L.L. McKinney, Lev Grossman, and Tracy Deonn. I looked at a couple of others, like Cadwell Turnbull and Ladarion Williams, but the former had already been very well established by the time his website went live, and the latter doesn’t seem to have a website outside of his linktree. I also would love to do this for Jim Butcher, but he’s been active for longer than all my data points would allow me to compare.

If you’re one of these authors and you’re reading this, please know that I love your works and I swear I’m not a creep! And so…

My experimental bio, in the style of pre-famous…

NK Jemisin

I’m a speculative fiction writer currently based in Minnesota (Duluth, to be specific). I spend most of my time being a working single dad, working out, baking, death metal, anime, gardening, martial arts, and libraries and bookstores. And writing!

Nnedi Okorafor

Achilles was born in Colorado to a mixed-race couple and grew up in Hastings, Minnesota. He earned his Master’s in Library Science from the University of Maryland in 2012 and currently resides in northern Minnesota.

A Midwesterner at heart, Achilles’ parents took him to museums, libraries, and local forests. He takes inspiration from these places, and as a result many of his stories integrate mythology, history, and wilderness.

And because he’s been a longtime fan of silly fighting anime like Dragon Ball Z, Kengan Ashura, Baki, his works tend to include characters overcoming adversity in over-the-top, theatrical ways.

L.L. McKinney

Achilles Sangster is a dad, a writer, and a digital librarian.

Achilles lives in northern Minnesota within walking distance of Lake Superior and more forests and parks than he could ever hope to mark off his bucket list. Aside from doing all the Single Dad Stuff, he spends his weekends baking, playing video games (Mario Kart and Minecraft with his kids, Hades and Tears of the Kingdom solo), and enjoying little home improvement projects. He also trains in judo and jujutsu, lifts heavy things, practices the violin (badly) and learns Japanese (also badly). He spends his writing time drafting new works, editing old ones, and clawing at his face in existential despair after querying agents and submitting to publications. He’s spent time as an associate editor for a campus newspaper and its literary journal, has published a couple of short stories, and has led panel discussions on nerd stuff.

Lev Grossman

I was born in 1982 and grew up in rural suburb outside of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, then went on to earn my Masters in Library Science from the University of Maryland in 2012. I spent the subsequent years starting a family and becoming a digital librarian. I wrote and submitted tons of short fiction pieces and queried a novella to several agencies before choosing to take a break to focus on my family, my health, and my job.

Tracy Deonn

Achilles Sangster is a writer and second generation dork. He grew up in southeastern Minnesota, where he spent much of his childhood watching anime, being a below-average student, and ignoring recreational reading before learning that books could be fun via The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which set him on his journey of voracious reading and writing.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota and his Master’s in Library Science from the University of Maryland, Achilles worked as a records manager and digital librarian, while continuing to sharpen the saw of his sci-fi and fantasy writing chops. When he’s not writing, Achilles continues to watch anime (Kengan Ashura, Kill La Kill, Frieren, and anything Studio Ghibli), power through his reading list (which never seems to shrink), dabbles in jujutsu and judo, and tries learning violin and Japanese with mixed results. But mostly he does the single dad thing with his two kids in northern Minnesota.

Achilles is an advocate for accessibility, information literacy, and long-term preservation.

I reviewed all these and got a general idea of what I should say, what I should omit, what's repeated, etc, and came up with the following that I decided to use on my website. It's more or less in my own voice, but follows the pattern for how my authorly predecessors represented their respective histories and experiences:

Achilles Sangster

Achilles Sangster is a speculative fiction writer, digital librarian, and single dad based in northern Minnesota. He was born in Colorado but grew up in southeastern Minnesota, where he regularly haunted local libraries, enjoyed visits to museums, let his mind wander during journeys through nearby wooded areas, and subsisted on a steady diet of anime.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Minnesota and his Master’s in Library Science from the University of Maryland, Achilles worked – and continues to work – as a records manager and digital librarian while writing (and submitting, and querying, and occasionally despairing over) countless fiction projects. His stories draw on mythology, history, and experiences with wilderness. They also tend to feature characters overcoming adversity in theatrical, over-the-top ways (likely the fault of too much Dragon Ball Z, Kengan Ashura, and similar silly cartoons).

His previous publishing credits include short fiction in the The Roaring Muse, as well as articles in Wake Magazine. He also served as executive editor for the literary journal, Liminal. He’s been known, on occasion, to do public speaking arrangements on nerd stuff, such as (surprise!) anime and comic books.

As an information professional, Achilles advocates for accessibility, information literacy, and long-term preservation. When he’s not writing, he’s single-dadding, experimenting with baked goods, lifting heavy things, training judo and jujutsu, watching anime, playing Mario Kart and Minecraft with his kids, practicing violin (badly, but he’s getting better!), and learning Japanese (also badly).

Writing is hard, and the marketing and branding side of it is even harder, but he keeps doing it anyway.