DALE W. GLASER is a lifelong collector and re-teller—and occasional inventor—of fantasy tales.
He grew up right on the line between suburban cul-de-sacs and unspoiled wilderness, and has been known to get up to mischief in the woods late at night from time to time.
He once played Santa Claus in a third-grade play, but felt the narrative lacked a certain something in the way of external conflict with giant monsters. He was relegated to non-speaking background elf roles thereafter. Since then he has realized that if he wants a good earth-shattering epic told right, he’d best tell it himself.
He is a small town boy made good, the small town in question being one built entirely out of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs and populated by off-brand sword and sorcery action figures, alien finger puppets, and wind-up robots.
He read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the first time in fifth grade, and got good and spoiled by it. The sheer lack of nonsense in the required reading across the remainder of his education was disappointing by comparison. He makes up for it these days by penning his own weird trips to other worlds.
HE attended the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where he majored in English and worked on the campus humor and satire magazine, The Pillory. He completed a senior thesis on urban legends. He found out very late in the process that the thesis board had approved his project proposal under the mistaken impression that it was to be a traditional research paper on modern American folklore, rather than the epic narrative of interwoven recountings he had envisioned, but it was too late by then to do anything but thank the spirits of all literary tricksters for helping him pull a fast one. He showed up to his thesis defense in a collared shirt and jeans shorts with a patch declaring “MEAN PEOPLE SUCK” in hot pink block letters. Somehow, he was allowed to graduate regardless.
He needs air, food, water, and stories in order to survive, not necessarily in that order. His lifelong love of written words has manifested as a devotion to the English language almost exclusively, which is probably just as well because if he were to master any of the dead tongues that conceal ancient mysteries and invoke malevolent forces, we’d all be in trouble.
He currently lives in Virginia with his wife, their three children, and a rotating roster of pets. Six is a good estimate of how many animals cohabit with the family at any given time.
