Christopher Moore (placeholder)

I was born in Toledo, Ohio. My father was a highway patrolman and my mother worked in a department store. I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, and had a basic suburban childhood that comprised a lot more anxiety than actual hardship. I played football, basketball, and ran track up through ninth grade, when my father announced that if I wanted to drive when I was sixteen I had better get a job. So I got a job. A bunch of jobs.
I worked as a roofer, a night clerk in a grocery store, a factory worker making ceramic Nativity scenes (and I am still remembered for making a mean baby Jesus), an insurance man, photographer, disk jockey, journalist, motel clerk, and a waiter. All of a sudden I was thirty. I had a car, but I was thirty.

Somewhere between those jobs I went to Ohio State for a while, studying anthropology, I moved to California and studied photography at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, and I took a bunch of extension courses in writing. I also lived with a bunch of women who eventually thought it would be a better idea if I lived by myself, and I developed a pretty good drinking problem.

Then all of a sudden, I was thirty (did I already say that?). I was supposed to be famous by the time I was thirty, right? Well, I wasn’t. I was a waiter at the Harmony Pasta Factory (Harmony,. CA has a population of 18, unless you count the entire metropolitan Harmony area, then it has a population of 18 and 4 cows). So I thought I better write a book. I quit drinking and started writing. A year later I finished Practical Demonkeeping, and a year after that Disney bought the film rights for the book for (as they say) a major six figure advance. Soon the book was bought by publishers in seven countries and people were asking me when the next one was due. I figured it took me 32 years to do the first one, I should have the second one done sometime around the year 2023. But all of a sudden I had readers, and my readers didn’t want to wait.

(the above is kindly stolen from chrismoore.com)