About Me

You scared me

Charlie Clayton is a lead software engineer at a large regional bank, a writer, a blogger, a Liverpool football (soccer) enthusiast, husband, father and prospective author.

What does all that really mean?

Mostly, he's just tired all the time and figures he will die young. Very young.

But until then, he has decided to do his best to write stories for people to read, try to find an agent willing to talk to him, and hopefully, someday, see his works in bookstores. (Or whatever passes for bookstores in a handful of years when there are no more bookstores).

As a child, he liked to read whenever possible, but never the sorts of books his teachers asked him to read, which contributed in part to his less than stellar grades. It should be noted that other traits factored into his poor grades as well, such as a penchant for arguing, over reliance on sarcasm, and a churlish, stubborn nature regarding homework. Eventually, books became a passion for him, especially Science Fiction and Fantasy, and he loved being transported to worlds created by such writers as Robert Jordan, Melanie Rawn, David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, and David Farland. He hopes someday to see his own works on bookshelves next to those names. Well actually just next to Sanderson's name, because it wouldn't really make sense for his books to be next to Eddings's unless the shelves were stocked by someone without an intimate knowledge of the alphabet of course.

www.naturalbornliar.com was created by Charlie as a way to share his work, build an audience and hopefully do a little shameless self-promotion.

As of this writing, Charlie has worked on several projects of literature, including one finished novel, Basilisk, that is currently in the submissions process to several agents. He has completed a handful of short stories, a few novellas and is currently writing the second novel in the Basilisk series.

Because he was poor and bad at money, he did not go to college, and instead took the old fashioned route of checking books out of the library and reading them to learn how to fix computers, write software in various programming languages, and manage people and projects. He does not take credit for this, rather he credits his mother for instilling (beating) into him the life lessons of diligence, hard work, and self-reliance. He stays motivated to work out of a healthy fear of seeing his wife and three daughters begging food in the streets. It's usually enough to make him get out of bed. Usually.

To pay the bills he works as a senior java applications developer in the banking industry, manages teams of developers on projects and helps to keep various software products up and running so people can get to their money while sitting in their pajamas at home.

It's a tough life, but someone's gotta do it.