brother, can you paradigm? The author bio challenge

So I’m more than a little punch drunk, as the following will attest. It’s a draft of the author bio I have to get to my editor. Dopey puns kept occuring to me (thus the paradigm) and then I got overly chatty.

How do you feel about author bios? Should they be dry and short, or entertaining? Do you read author bios at all? Do tell.

Cheap Books in 1883

Also, it is true that I spend a lot of time looking at old newspaper and magazine advertisements. Many mysteries are solved in those ads. For example, where did students buy their books? This ad is from the Columbia University student newspaper provides some insight. At this same time there was a Brentano’s Books on Union Square, but I imagine that they didn’t cater to the needs or the budgets of lowly undergraduates.

ROUGH ROUGH DRAFT:

Sara Donati is a former academic and researcher who spends a lot of time haunting the intersection where history and storytelling meet. She does this by wallowing in 19th century newspapers, magazines and  and street maps along with a lot of historical research, and never gets bored with any of it. She is the author of the Wilderness series, six historical novels that follow the fortunes of a group of families living in the vast forests in upstate New York in the late 1700 and early 1800s. The Gilded Hour jumps ahead two generations to follow Nathaniel Bonner’s grand- and great granddaughters into the twentieth century.

Sara Donati is the penname of Rosina Lippi, who writes  contemporary novels and academic work under own name. Rosina lives on Puget Sound with her husband, daughter, two elderly dogs and a rambunctious cat. Sara lives with Rosina and her family, but refuses to answer the phone, do windows or make herself useful in any way at all.

Tags: pennamesblurbs