Bio

Who is Benjamin Clayborne?

No idea. If you figure it out, drop me a line.

In the simplest sense, I'm a guy who wants to write. I love writing. I want to create. There is no joy exactly like the purest form of creation: getting lost in the details of building a story, inventing something from what seems to be nothing.

It's not nothing, of course; we all draw upon our knowledge and experiences when we create. Nonetheless, in the moment, it feels like magic being pulled from a void.

I'm thirty-four years old. I've been writing for a long time, but there was never any sense that I was truly committed. In July of 2011, I came across one of those pithy self-actualization statements: Something like, “When you're old, on your deathbed, do you really want to look back on your life and say, ‘I wish I'd done something else?’”

I was no stranger to such sentiments. It's not always as easy as suddenly shifting your life to do the thing you love. Priorities have to be rearranged; favored hobbies and pastimes have to be abandoned, because there's only so much time in the day. It can seem insurmountable.

But that summer day, something changed. It was like a switch had been flipped, and I suddenly was committed. “I will do this thing,” I said to myself on that day, and every day since. And I started writing.

And I haven't stopped.

It's tough being a new author: Getting anyone to even spend five minutes reading a thousand-word short story can be nightmarishly difficult. But you persist, and keep at it, and inch by inch you claw your way toward success.

I'll get there. And I'll keep going. And hopefully, along the way, someone will read what I wrote and say, “Hey... that was pretty good.”

Traditional Bio
Oh, you want the standard jacket-copy style of bio? Happy to oblige:

Benjamin Clayborne is a new author who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children. He enjoys kayaking, antiquing, astrophysics, and lying about the things he enjoys. He writes fantasy fiction and thinks that if you read some of it, you'll find it enjoyable and want to read more. He can be found on his blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and hip-deep in artificial worlds of his own creation. He would love to hear from you, and is happy to discuss just about anything except professional sports—excluding sumo, which he (no fooling) does love.