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Quick info: Fantasy authorCopyeditor Irish musician Contact: Favorite movies: Rebecca (1940) The Seven Samurai (1954) The Haunting (1963) The Lion in Winter (1968) Breakout (1975) Some TV shows I've liked: Classic Trek Blake's 7 Lancer Firefly The West Wing EastEnders Some favored composers: Cliff Eberhardt Patty Larkin Massenet Mozart Sondheim Seamus Egan Favorite authors: An impossible question (there are too many). Ursula K. Le Guin and Lord Dunsany are the most personally inspiring, but only by a hair over a bunch of others. If I could be John Crowley or Gene Wolfe when I grow up, I'd be very happy (but I'd look a lot different). |
I knew a
girl who was named Tara because her mother watched Gone with the Wind
when she was pregnant, and a friend of mine is named Lucy because her
mother loved I Love Lucy. I was named after a comic-strip
character. My great-grandfather was a mad scientist, my grandfather was a carnival barker, and my father was an actor; the crazy side of the family worked mostly in insurance. I was born in New York City, where I have lived and worked pretty much ever since. I went to grammar school in Greenwich Village in the sixties. I graduated from high school on Friday the 13th. I graduated from college in Orwellian 1984. I've been a bartender on Wall Street, a street trader in Ireland, a receptionist on Long Island; I've waitressed, delivered papers, mucked out stables, worked at a musicians' booking agency; I've served on an Anglican vestry. I worked at The New Yorker for fifteen years, the last seven or so as a Page O.K.'er, but escaped Condé Borg in the spring of 2000. (Resistance is not futile!) I'm now a full-time writer and freelance copyeditor; at various times, I do work for Tor, Del Rey, Pocket, and Bantam, specializing in speculative fiction. I'm a member of HWA, the EFA, WOWW (the Waverly Omnivorous Writers' Workshop), the Authors Guild, and SFWA®, of which I was once vice-president for my sins; I spent a term on the board of editorial directors of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. My novels Illumination, The Binder's Road, and Triad are available from Tor Books. In my off hours, I do some gardening and biking, volunteer at a local shelter, study Japanese with the aim of watching Kurosawa films without subtitles, play a little Broadway piano and folk guitar and a lot of Irish music (mostly pennywhistle and Irish bouzouki, also some banjo and flute), hang out online (there's also a Livejournal now), and sometimes go camping or bowling, shoot a few rounds of pool, or pretend to play tennis. Through ARMA, I've done some basic longsword study (Workshop 1.0 certificate); I hold an orange belt in Krav Maga and eat low-carb, although there's still nothing like a box of Entenmann's, a can of Chef Boy-ar-Dee cheese ravioli, or a frosty Dr Pepper to aid in the writing of Very Large Novels. (A genetic aberration, I can't stand corned beef and cabbage.) I've grown the world's gnarliest jade plant and done my best to kill my front lawn. (I failed. I give up. I water it now. Except when there's a drought emergency.) I like to take adventure vacations--the kind where you sign a form promising not to blame the outfitter if you get killed--and I would like to see the aurora borealis before I die. This desire predates my reading Philip Pullman, I swear. I'm partial to non sequiturs. NOTE: New website as of late 2012! The Nine Winds, at terrymcgarry.com, has updated b(ibl)iographical info, exclusive fiction, and all kinds of new content. 
Photo by Tom Powers. |