My Writer’s Mini Bio
Just Being Honest
I’m post-career.
Writing is the only thing I’m any good at and it’s basically how I made my living because producing video and CD-ROMS and building websites all involve writing and lots of it.
Fortunately I love the process of writing, or rather, my process of writing. It allows me to be off by myself accomplishing something — two circumstances I value.
Another good thing about writing for me is that it seems to flow easily and naturally out of the volumes of thoughts and memories in my mind and into a form that is readily sharable. The ease of production, sometimes, and the ease of distribution, sometimes, cannot be overstated as great reasons to write.
I have two writing heroes.
The first is James Joyce.
He is a hero to me because he paid attention to every letter of every syllable of every word in every sentence of a very very long book about what goes on inside people. Ulysses.
I like Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I don’t love Finnegan’s Wake, (but I do like Finian’s Rainbow). Joyce is a hero to me because of Bloom and his wife, characters he created.
My second writing hero is Montaigne, the first modern thinker and blogger. He got into stuff — being a Mayor, being in combat. He didn’t like it all that much and he could afford to drop out and keep his own company and write, which he did.
He wrote about everything. Obvious as it sounds, no one had really done that before. They wrote about God and important stuff but rarely about what was happening in regular old life. Montaigne did.
It would be very difficult for me not to keep writing.
Thank you for reading it.
Now here is my byline, finally.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
