My Latest Author Bio

Here's an author bio I wrote for an upcoming humor book I'm involved in:

Born and raised in an ancient Nephite sorcerer's underground lair in an undisclosed location in the Great Salt Lake Desert, Christopher Kimball Bigelow considers himself a modern-day Gadianton robber of the written word. After working for seven years at the Ensign magazine, he began to fear he would be translated, so he quit and helped start a secret combination called The Sugar Beet. His publishing projects have also included cofounding Irreantum, a Mormon literary magazine whose name no one ever mispronounces; coauthoring Mormonism For Dummies, which the LDS Church has selected as the priesthood and Relief Society curriculum manual for 2014; a novel titled Kindred Spirits that recently hit triple digits in sales; and four or five boring nonfiction LDS reference books that funded several fun vacations. Forthcoming works include an exhibitionistic memoir titled Mormon Punk: From LSD to LDS and a post-apocalyptic, likely prophetic Mormon horror novel titled Master Mahan Avenged, which includes the gays taking over the LDS Church's City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City. Bigelow has a wife, five kids, a dog, and a cat who all want nothing more in life than to support his writing by providing him with unlimited, uninterrupted quiet time at his laptop. 

Upon Hearing of an Old Roommate's Gay Marriage

Yesterday, a long-ago roommate's name popped up as a recommended connection on a social network, and I invited him to connect. He accepted but wrote back to warn me that he's now gay-married and that maybe I will want to delete him for political/personal reasons. So here's how I explained my stance:

One Decade, One House

Occasionally I like to indulge myself in longish personal journal entries, like this one.

In June, we hit the 10-year mark in our current home in Provo, Utah. This is the longest, by far, that I have ever lived in one house continuously. My parents have lived in their current Bountiful house for 33 years now, but I lived there for only six years continuously with them, although if you count my pre-mission (1986), post-mission (1988), post-Boston (1992), and post-divorce (1997-98) times with them, the total is closer to eight years.

Giving Up Soda

So, I've now been off soda for about a month.

I'm not sure when I developed a daily Coke habit, but by the time I was working at the Ensign magazine in the mid-to-late 1990s, I was getting a 32-ounce Coke every morning and then another one at lunch on some days, plus a refill of that one. By the time I was working at Unicity in the early 2000s, I was drinking as many as 100 ounces of Coke a day. Well, subtract for the space taken up by the ice, which I usually filled to the halfway mark of the cup, partly because I love extremely cold drinks and I love chewing ice, and partly because I told myself that putting more ice in was healthier because it meant I was drinking less soda, which I suppose is true. (I can also drink Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and at one point Dr. Pepper, but Coke was my main drink.)

Updating My Reading Shelf

For several months (or years?), my shelf in our bedroom where I keep the books I want to read next has been mostly full of LDS last-days stuff, which I intended to read as research for a novel project. Tonight, I decided to put all those books down in my basement and bring up a fresh crop of books, which I'd like to think I could read my way through within the next year.

Status Report on Zarahemla Books

Someone asked me for some thoughts on Zarahemla Books and Mormon publishing, and I ended up typing more details and personal thoughts than he probably needed, so I'm posting it here as a personal blog/journal entry.

My little Mormon-themed publishing company Zarahemla Books published three titles in 2010. Angela Hallstrom's story anthology Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction has sold nearly 300 copies, Stephen Carter's personal-essay collection What of the Night about 50, and Darin Cozzens's story collection Light of the New Day about 60 copies. I knew none of these titles were particularly commercial, especially the latter two, and they have performed exactly how I expected.

15 Songs on Shuffle

A little sampling of 15 songs my iTunes just randomly played from my 8,000-song library, with some commentary:

"The Bike Song (feat. Kyle Falconer with Spankrock)," Mark Ronson & The Business: I have no idea what this song is and don't even remember listening to it.

"The Trooper," Iron Maiden: I have deleted most Iron Maiden from my iTunes because the singer is often quite bad and out of tune.