Owen Thomas

If writers are what they write, then Owen Thomas is a fiction. Not a fiction in the way that Ebenezer wonders whether the Ghost of Christmas Past is merely a gastric illusion brought on by an "undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, or a crumb of cheese." Nor in the way that Verbal Kent invented Keyser Söze from scraps of information on a police station bulletin board. Rather, Owen Thomas is a fiction born of creative suffocation, less a product of indigestion or criminal-minded design than a full-on psychotic snap. After nearly twenty-five years as an attorney practicing civil litigation, the emergence of an alter ego was probably inevitable.But if there is any truth in fiction (and there always is), then here is the truth. Owen Thomas is a life-long Alaskan with an abiding love of original fiction writing and storytelling whose ultimate purpose is always to reconnect the reader with humanity. Owen is a product of the Anchorage School District and a graduate of Duke University and Duke Law School. Over the years, while his responsible, wage-earning identity has been busy representing clients and writing legal briefs, Owen has written three novels: "Lying Under Comets: A Love Story of Passion, Murder, Snacks and Graffiti"; "The Lion Trees" (winner of 14 International Book Awards, including the Global eBook Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, a finalist for the Beverly Hills International Book Award, a Top Five Finalist for the Amazon Kindle Book Awards, and awarded Honorable Mentions at The London Book Festival, The Southern California Book Festival, the Great Midwest Book Festival, the Los Angeles Book Festival, the Great Southeast Book Festival, and the Pacific Rim Book Festival); and a novel of interconnected short fiction, including six novellas and four short stories, entitled "Signs of Passing", winner of the Pacific Book Awards for Short Fiction. Additional short fiction pieces are collected and reproduced in their entirety in a blog feature called "Tiny Points of Life" (http://www.owenthomasfiction.com/inde...). Owen's short story "Everything Stops" has been included in an anthology of short fiction published by Fiction Attic Press called Modern Shorts, available at Amazon. Owen's short stories "Nothing to Worry About" and "Island Santa" have recently been released for purchase on Blurb.com and Amazon, respectively. Links to all works can be found on the author's website.For the fifth consecutive year since he has been measuring his commercial success as an author, Owen has not won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Also, to great acclaim, he has not won the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, in April of 2015, Owen was not nominated for a Pulitzer.To make sure he stays at least somewhat grounded in reality, Owen keeps very busy avoiding his responsibilities. When he is not writing, Owen can be found recreating and taking photographs in the grandeur of his Alaskan backyard and in the middle of the dream that is Hawaii, some of which are now accumulating on Owen's nascent photo blog, 1000 Words per Frame.Owen fervently believes our problem is not that life is too short, but that it tends to be much too narrow. Also, whimsy in living is far too important to take seriously. But both of those propositions are the subject of on-going litigation. In the meantime, Owen is increasingly concerned that referring to oneself in the third-person is dangerously habit-forming.