Author Biography and Bibliography Gary W. Shockley grew up in the farm country of Northeastern Indiana. By age five he had made up his mind to become a professional football player. Despite failing to make the squad in high school (being of small stature and without athletic talent), he remained undeterred. The autumn following his graduation found him swaggering onto the IU-Purdue Fort Wayne Campus determined to fulfill his ambition—only to discover that the college had no football team. Whereupon his flexible nature saved him. He switched gears to pursue a degree in electrical engineering, secretly hoping to become an astronaut and someday play for the Martian Jalapeños in a future Interplanetary Football League. But again fate struck like a snake that's been tied in a knot and dunked in kerosene and set on fire; his grades began to spurt like blood from an arterial wound until he had no choice but to drop out of college. He flirted with a succession of employment opportunities, first in a small print shop operating a seriously demented linotype machine, then in a fiberglass factory dumping bags of asbestos into mixers. At last, with an intuitive stroke of genius, he scrawled "computer programmer" across the top of his resume, saving himself from further glissades into menial labor; and he soon found himself working for such illustrious companies as Burroughs, Control Data, and Data General, each of which—in the wake of his departure—succumbed to bankruptcy or buyout. Along the way he took hiatuses to attend Clarion, to live for a spell in Eugene, Oregon (where he met his future wife), and to win a Writers of the Future Gold Award. In truth, he has spent much of his adult life on hiatus, enjoying the fruits of the garden out back, undaunted by the fact that there is no garden, no out back, and no fruits whatsoever save those that grow in the mind. He has suffered many setbacks in his careerless careen. In 1990 he entered a psychiatric facility to be treated for a nitrogen fixation. In 1994, again on hiatus (this time living among the redwoods of Mendocino County), he experienced a remarkable succession of epiphanies, forty-seven in number, all in the space of a month, none of which amounted to anything but which, by their magic number, convinced him to return to civilization. He currently lives in Daly City (just below San Francisco) with his wife, Lori Ann White, herself an award-winning writer of similar background and equally scarred by Clarion and Writers of the Future. Together they cater to the whims of three cats. Having at last given up on a football career, Mr. Shockley now aspires to become a full-fledged eccentric, though he continues to fall far short. And while he might believe himself clever, he has yet to solve a Rubik's Cube, beat a computer chess program, or trample even a passable crop circle. In addition to writing, Mr. Shockley is wont to paint—mostly in oils. Some of his work can be seen on his website. Photograph by Gary W. Shockley.