Nebula Award winning author, editor of the Infinite Matrix, and all around brilliant person Eileen Gunn is currently writing the introduction to LWA. She emailed me last night to ask for a bit of biographical information, and I sent her the following:

Can you send me a bio, just for reference? Also, what is your wife's name? (i.e., are any of the wives in the stories your actual wife? Not that I would use this info, just curious. Also, don't want to seem to be idiot if it's not true in fact. Can't always protect against this, however.)


Let me tell you a bit about myself:

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1970, to Mary J. Lain and Charles Douglas Lain MD. Mary Johnson was the third and final child of a librarian and a lawyer. Charles Douglas Lain was the second of the two boys born to a journalism professor and his scholarly wife.

I am an only child.

Okay I'll just skip my childhood, too much material there, except I'll point out that I grew up in Colorado Springs, next to NORAD.

I married my highschool sweetheart, Miriam Heather Markum, in 1994. I'd say that perhaps all of the wives in these stories are, in one way or another, based on her. On the other hand, these wives are also probably projections and phantoms.

These wives have been a point of mild contention between us, although I think that the wives in these stories are sympathetic characters.

Miriam and I have four kids. Their names are Benjamin Noam (age 8), Emma Rose (age 7), Simon Philip (age 2 3/4), and Noah Markum (age 9 months). Benjamin's middle name is Noam for Chomsky, Emma is named after Emma Goldman (although it turns out that the name Emma is the new Jennifer), and Simon is named after the electronic game Simon and after Philip K. Dick. Noah is, strangely enough, named after the stand in character for Ben in the story "Subliminal Son", but that wasn't intentional.

Is any of that helpful?