Al Macy's story begins millions of years ago in a cave in Eastern Siberia. Wait. What? I don't have space for that much detail? Now you tell me! So much for the story about the saber-toothed tiger that was a little too friendly.

When Macy was a kid, he could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. OK, let me interrupt a second. I'll let you in on a secret about author biographies: Most of them are written by the authors themselves. They just use the third person to make it sound like they have some kind of highfalutin public relations team. Unless they are, like, Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway, in which case they actually do have a public relations team. That's especially true for Hemingway, since he's dead.

So, just to let you know, while reading this bio, that when it reads "Al Macy did this" and "Macy did that," [whispering...] it's really just me saying that I did this or that. OK?

Where was I? Oh, yeah, Al Macy (wink, wink) couldn't decide what to do with his life. He was pretty good at music, but he was better at science and math, so he started studying engineering at Cornell. But then he changed his mind, and finished his degree in physiological psychology. After a PhD in neuroscience at University of Michigan, and a post-doc at UC Berkeley, he changed his mind again, and started writing educational computer games for a living.

OK, this is getting boring for me now -- I mean for Al Macy now. I'll skip ahead, and tell you that Macy retired in his early fifties, and switched back to having music as his main hobby. He played jazz trombone and jazz piano in local venues, and, as he puts it, "Worked hard to get bettter before anyone noticed how bad I was."

Recently, he started writing books. His goal is to write many books in totally incompatible genres to insure there will never be any carryover success from one of his bestsellers to another. Thus, his first book helps people play the piano, the second book is a story about a bicycle trip, his third book will help people format books, and his fourth will be a science fiction thriller. Get the idea?

And that's all you need know all about Al Macy! Isn't he a great guy? Now, about that saber-toothed tiger...