My early weakness for raillery

Often there comes a certain giddiness when one has finished a book and learned that it is to be published. This is especially pronounced among young writers. Some time later, the publisher requests an author bio, acknowledgments, dedications, and other ancillary material. In my early books, I tended to use these as an opportunity to goof around and blow off steam. This was particularly true in author bios, which for some reason I find very difficult to take seriously. For example, at one point in my career I had seen a spate of author biographies that I found especially pompous, and so wrote a mock-pompous one pronouncing me a "perfect husband and father" or some such nonsense.

Unfortunately some people took it at face value.

Since then I have tried to buckle down and get serious, with mixed success.

A few years ago I ran into a spate of questions from journalists about what kinds of music I listened to when I was writing. I then got in the habit of embedding song titles in the text of my books, with particular weakness for Suzanne Vega and Soundgarden song titles. This is meant strictly as homage to those artists, whose music I like very much.