Fun Facts post # Giveaway.

My scheduled guest author's book publication has been postponed. So I am going to idle this post away with fun facts. Including a few about me.And I'm giving away  5.00  Amazon Gift card.
Not-so-fun fact. I think I've given up on NaNoWriMo for this year. I wanted to do two short stories. I have never written one. I got mired down in both of them and I have given myself permission to bow out this year. I still have two NaNo novels to revise. On the plus side, I went looking for short stories and found several including two by Jen Crusie. She's always a great learning experience. Then I happened upon The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes which I Thought was going to be three short stories by Jen, Anne Stuart, and Eileen Dreyer. It's actually one novel written by the three of them and I am loving every moment of it.

 This man and I would not get along.
Fun Fact: I am a two-fingered typist. I flunked typing twice. I still manage to write six adult novels (two published, one going out to agents, one being revised right now. And two still in first draft.) And when I type, I always have to go back and spell check.

Author fun facts.

Alexandre Dumas (Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers) fought his first duel at age 23. During the course of the duel, his trousers fell down.

Before settling on the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens signed his writings with the pseudonym ‘Josh'.

Jean-Dominique Bauby ‘dictated' his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about his life following a stroke, by blinking his left eyelid.

Detective fiction author Dashiell Hammett started out as a private detective; his first case was to track down a stolen Ferris wheel.

When he worked for Faber, T. S. Eliot liked to seat visiting authors in chairs with whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars.

A young Samuel Johnson was turned down for a teaching job because it was feared his ‘way of distorting his face' would scare the pupils.

On his marriage document in 1582, William Shakespeare's name was spelled ‘William Shagspeare'

C. S. Lewis coined the word ‘verbicide' to denote the killing of a word or the distortion of its original meaning.

Writer of westerns, Louis L'Amour, received 200 rejections before he was published. His novels have now sold 320 million copies worldwide. (I read everything he wrote. The Sacketts were my favorites.)

Fun Facts about me.

I went to twenty-two schools, none of which gave me a class in American History. I fell in love with American History when I saw the musical, 1776.

I was in the last un-miked musical on Broadway. The Robber Bridegroom. 

We all had to have very loud singing voices.

I can cross one eye. (Useful only if you are male and playing the lead in a Kabuki drama. It's an essential part of the mie.)

I've done more acting work in my seventies than I did in my first forty years in the business. This year I've appeared on Casual, Life in Pieces, One Mississippi, Grey's Anatomy, Baskets, Future Man and This Is Us. 

My Great American Novel is sixty-five words long. 

I signed a contract for it in 2011 with Beach Lane Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. 

Now you leave me a fun fact in the comments. Best fun fact gets the gift card.

Happy reading.

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