Marian Allen was found under a cabbage leaf by poor but honest parents. Being honest, they stayed poor.
The youngster, an only child, was devastated when her parents informed her they couldn’t afford to buy her an imaginary friend, so she made her own out of scraps. A year later, it ran off to join the circus.
Alone again, Allen took refuge in inventing stories. She called them “stories” because she got punished for telling “lies,” but telling “stories” was considered amusing. She told a lot of “stories.”
Allen clearly remembers her first ambition: to be a beachcomber. This was an odd ambition for someone who lived inland and had never been to a beach, unless one counts the banks of the Ohio River, which one wouldn’t once one had smelled them.
When she learned that people were still making up and publishing stories—and getting paid for it—she changed her target occupation and never looked back. No, I tell a lie. When she visited Tybee Island, Georgia on a writing retreat, being a beachcomber beckoned once more. But other than that, writing is her life. “Everything is about writing” is one of her mottoes. The other one, she stole from Don Marquis’s Mehitabel the Cat: “To hell with anything unrefined.”
Her published books include the Sage Fantasy Trilogy and its companion book of short stories, Shifty; A Dead Guy at the Summerhouse, a paranormal suspense set in 1968; Sideshow in the Center Ring, a science fiction comedy of bad manners; and Lonnie, Me, and . . . ., a set of goofy stories about a plus-size man known as Tiny and his friend, Lonnie, who is the world’s biggest fool. She’s working on a series of comic mysteries set in a neighborhood of Storybook Style houses, which will be known as The Spadena Street Mysteries.
She lives in the woods with two cats, a husband, and a unicorn named Fred. Fred was exiled from his herd because he only poops the primary colors, not the full rainbow. He likes to be called Superman, but he isn’t fooling anybody.
Allen’s favorite times of the year are autumn, because of the colors and because she can look forward to the ticks freezing their butts off, and about two weeks in the spring, when she gathers, cooks, and gorges on morel mushrooms.
She blogs daily at Marian Allen, Author Lady, where she, perhaps unwisely, shares samples of her work. She also shares reviews, recommendations, photographs of doors, and recipes. Her cats take turns blogging for her on Caturday–er, Saturday. In May, she writes a story a day and posts them on her blog.
Her imaginary friend (the one who joined the circus) was injured in falling off a high trapeze and took to drink. It was last seen singing “Melancholy Baby” off-key for the Boilermakers in a low joint in Peru, Indiana. Allen offered to take it back, but it refuses to give up show business.
