Gregg Winkler
Biography
On a cold winter's morning in early February, Gregg Winkler was born toothless and penniless. After several years of hard work and enterprise, he has managed to grow a rather impressive mouthful of teeth.
His first experience with writing came at the tender age of 12 with his debut short story, "Mandrake." This story was about a small Oklahoman family and its dealing with a feral duck. The story was wildly popular amongst much of the seventh grade, but mostly ignored by literary critics.
Even at an early age, Gregg was studious in his writing practices. Whereas some accused the young writer of "not being able to get a date," Gregg swears it's not because he was socially awkward or "funny looking." He swears he only spent his Saturday nights writing stories instead of dating as to better learn the craft of writing. Yeah. That's it. That's the reason why.
At 14 years of age, Gregg wrote his first novel. It was 12 pages long and contained one sex scene. Due to the sex and the use of the word "hell," he was too afraid to show his manuscript to anyone and kept it hidden for many years. The manuscript was later discovered and disposed of as it was covered in Kool-aid stains and riddled with misspellings of the word, "penis."
Gregg's first real success came at a speech contest in which he won first place for a speech in which years of reading The Readers Digest played a major role. Thinking he had stumbled upon a recipe for success, he had his confidence shattered when his second original speech didn't fare as well, a speech taken almost exclusively from that week's TV Guide.
In December of 1996, Gregg met his future wife and asked her to go out on a date with him. The couple went out for dinner and bowling. After a quesadilla, a few stiff drinks, and a trip to a local hypnotist, the rest, as they say, is history.
In July of 1998, Gregg and his wife were married on the hottest day of the year in a church that didn't have air conditioning. With temperatures in the church over ninety degrees, it was decided that that would be the last time Gregg was allowed to make decisions regarding family matters.
In the spring of 2000, Gregg and his wife welcomed a new addition to the family. While cuddly and cute, the seven-pound ten-ounce baby boy had a habit of piddling on the carpet, and was thus repeatedly slapped on the nose until it learned to crawl and scratch at the door. Nowadays there are far fewer accidents, but a rolled up tube of newspaper still sits close at hand just in case.
After the birth of his son, Gregg decided to go to college. He majored in English, and after four years, still has no idea when to say "who" or "whom," and believes that Beowulf is a complete ripoff of Conan the Barbarian.
To help make ends meet, Gregg has spent several evenings a night for the last five years teaching for a couple local colleges and universities. Some would say that Mr. Winkler has a love for teaching. Those people would be wrong. He is suffering from an intense addiction to the white board marker fumes, and a need for saying pretentious words like "existential" and "deconstruct" in front of captive audiences.
Interesting tidbit: Gregg Winkler does not actually have nine fingers and ten toes. In actuality, he has seven fingers, two thumbs, and ten toes. Despite this, focus groups thought it a bit too wordy to serve as a good domain name for his website, and thus, ninefingerstentoes.com was born.
In 2060, at the age of eighty years old, Gregg Winkler will be named America's Sexiest Writer in the March issue of Time Magazine. Gregg will credit his amazing good looks to two things: a daily cranberry/banana/tangerine milkshake and frequent colon cleansings. Cranberry sales will rise dramatically, though there will be no discernable differences in the colon cleansing market.
more to come...
|