Mark Coram
All About Mark Thomas Coram
I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee at 3:19 pm on November 24, 1957. I was born with a full head of hair that has stuck with me through thick and thin, so far.
My first-grade teacher, Miss Goufon, told the class that I would grow up to be a famous writer, but the Beatles had just happened in America, so my thoughts and dreams were elsewhere.
I wanted to be Ringo Starr, but that dream was quickly thwarted by my brother (see video evidence below).
In 1964, I shot my brother during a civil war reenactment.
I served my country in my backyard, and captured many enemies from both sides, including my brother, who was a Nazi at the time.
After graduating high school in 1975, I took the next year off to recuperate. From 1977 to 1980, I studied commercial art at a small art school in Franklin, Tennessee. I learned all about paste-up, overlays, how to safely wield an X-Acto knife, and other skills that were rendered obsolete by technology a year or two later.
After art school, I started my newspaper advertising career, along with a short-lived stint as a freelance cartoonist. I poured all my creative juices into songwriting and recording said songs with my first band, The Rattlehounds, and later with some excellent “rawk folk” from Knoxville.
In 2017, after being forced to jump from the sinking ship of the printed newspaper industry, I finally had time to fully concentrate on some of my creative pursuits, one of them being an epic humorous fantasy novel. Armed with a legal pad full of ideas and a firm belief that “there’s no way on earth I can do this,” I procured copies of Scrivener and ProWritingAid and started typing. It took a while, since I looked up every third word on thesaurus.com, but imagine my surprise when I completed the first draft. Maybe Miss Goufon was right after all.