The owner/operator of furballfactory.com wants me to write a bio.

(What to write? What to write? What to write?)

It started pretty simple, in Fairfax County's Robinson high school, class of 1988. In my sophomore year, I hung out with five guys that were all very funny. One was smart and one was clever and one was a jokester and one was just plain insane. The fifth one was fat. The thing that bothered me was that I wasn't anything special. You put the six of us together and I stood out screaming in my mundane normalcy.

So I decided to do something about that. I decided to prove my worth within the group entertainment dynamic. I knew super-heroes, and I knew my friends. So I thought I would cast my friends as super-heroes and write them all up into one fantastic adventure. 'Write what you know' a slew of college professors would later tell me. I wrote what I knew. Twenty pages later, I turned in high super-hero adventure in a slapstick manner. I managed to capture the speech patterns and characteristics of my friends. And it pleased many. Twenty pages turned into two hundred pages. My readership grew with my page count. The next year I signed up for creative writing and started another long-term story, three hundred pages. I was definitely getting the practice my creative writing teacher wanted me to get.

She was hot. I would've done anything she asked of me.

I went to live with my grandparents in West Chester, Pennsylvania after graduating. I studied English Literature at West Chester Universty. Two years later, a girlfriend that I shouldn't have been with lured me back to Fairfax. I trasferred to George Mason University and graduated in fall of 1992. I wrote and wrote and collected comics. I learned how to be snooty and arrogant from more than one English professor, and I applied it well.

In early 1994, I got my first writing job. A popular comic book artist who got caught up in sudden celebrity hired me on to help write his comic book. Promises were made. We were young. He fired me less than three months later.

Three months after that, the girlfriend whom I probably shouldn't have been with decided I was a loser and she wasn't going to waste any more time with me. She took up with my best friend.

Because of being fired from a job writing comics, I stopped writing altogether. I didn't want to, I just lost every last shred of confidence. I sat for hours with nothing to write down. Every paragraph I tried got erased. Every word I wrote was in anger. I put down my pen and went out into the real world. Remember all those lessons in arrogance I got from my English professors? I lost those pretty quick.

Because of being deemed worthless by a woman I had loved for seven years, I developed an extremely poor attitude about women in general. Because my best friend was now her paramour, I decided not to trust anyone.

For a couple of years I laid in a life that wasn't mine and swam in an existence that didn't exist. I was store manager for a video rental place and I walked through that job. Letting it suck my time and drain my life. I was good at it, parts of it I enjoyed, but it seems so far away from me now. But then.... well, it was my life. Wasn't it?

In February of 1996 I met a woman who changed all that. Meeting my wife Lorie was the single greatest thing God has ever gifted me with. The very idea that a woman like Lorie could exist on the planet Earth turned my entire life upside down like a dollar box of used flea market action figures. She is beautiful, independent, funny, silly, unapologetic, and she's got a cute little butt. And she's so much more. After meeting her, I knew I had to be her friend. After being her friend, my heart fought my mind on the matter of being in love. After falling in love, I fretted on how I could get closer.

I'm not that handsome. I'm certainly not elegant and I've never made a lot of money. I may be charming, but not romantically. There was no way I was going to get a woman like Lorie to take any kind of interest in someone like me.

Well, maybe there was one way.

August of 1996 I took pen to paper and wrote one Hell of a love letter. Then another, and another, Lorie soaked them all in and ran to the mailbox for more. I let her know who I was inside. I let her see herself through my eyes. I taught her that I was worth spending time with. She learned to love.

In October of 1997, I married Lorie. Oh yeah, and I moved into her West Virginia home. In February of 1998, I left my dead-end job as a video store manager. In October of 1998, we bought a computer, the first I had ever owned. In October of 1999, I got a job as a computer programmer trained in Oracle pl/sql. One day later Ashton Carter Dill was born. And in May of 2001, Katie Lynn Dill made the scene. Pretty good for a guy deemed as worthless.

My love for Lorie got me away from my dead end job. It got me into computer programming and writing steadily again. For all intents and purposes, my love for Lorie saved my life.

So here I sit before you. Lending my thoughts to your ears and hoping to do what I started out to do in my sophomore year of high school. Entertain.

Maybe someday soon I'll learn to be an arrogant English professor again.

DCD

Copyright 2002 David Charles Dill Jr.