I was born in a small town in Wyoming and lived in that state most of my life, although I worked in Alaska for fifteen years. I passed through part of California once and lived in both Denver and Atlanta (several years in each place) but I’m basically from the Rocky Mountains or the far north. When I go east of the Mississippi I feel like I’m in a foreign country, although I can definitely enjoy a few weeks in Manhattan once a year.
My parents were both Texans who moved to Wyoming shortly before I was born, during the worst blizzard in a hundred years, so I was mainly raised in the north, but in the summer mama would take us kids to Texas to visit kinfolk in Dallas, Kilgore, Midland and a bunch of other places, so I grew up bilingual. To this day I can speak Texan or Yankee.
I was a promising student in high school and everyone, including me, expected that I would get a college degree, but I ran off the rails and dropped out of a good college in my freshman year. I learned land surveying on the job and stuck with it because it’s outdoor work, it’s quiet and you don’t have to deal with people much. I worked in some of the most beautiful, unspoiled territory in the lower 48 and also Alaska. Being able to speak Texan came in very handy because that’s the common language in construction and the oil patch.
But I had become a bookworm in third grade and sometimes I think that when I should have been living my life I was reading instead, and I always had a dream of being some kind of writer. I started a number of plays and novels over the years but abandoned them, which made me hate myself.
I became productive by accident eleven years ago because I decided to spend the winter in Argentina. In January I started writing a novel and I kept at it. Finally. To date I’ve published three novels and a book of short stories and there’s a fourth novel in the works. I still spend the winters in Argentina, which is actually summer there, because the seasons are reversed. What it amounts to is that I’ve eliminated winter from my life.
I don’t like talking about myself, so I’ll skip further autobiography. Psychologists have told me that I have an INTP personality, which is found in only one of every two hundred people. This doesn’t mean that it’s better or worse, just uncommon. People like me are highly rational and extremely introverted and usually end up computer geeks or architects. I have always been socially isolated by choice, although I did play guitar and bass in various local bands and did solo singer/guitarist gigs for awhile. Nowadays I don’t play much and mainly listen to classical and jazz.
If you are still curious about me, I’d say that you should read my book of short stories, “Close Calls & Weirdos.” They’re mostly autobiographical sketches really, describing stupid stunts I’ve pulled that almost got me killed, strange members of my family and a lot of even weirder people I’ve run into here and there. A friend once suggested to me that I’m a weirdo magnet and maybe he’s right. Odd characters do seem compelled to talk to me, maybe because I don’t say much. Those people don’t want conversation anyway; they just want an audience. I write it all down later.
Edmund Pickett