Biography
BIO: Long Form
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez was born in New York, NY in 1969. After spending most of his childhood in the Claremont Park section of the Bronx, he moved around several times, including Manhattan, Westchester County, and Northern Jersey. He wrote his first story in the 5th grade, after nearly getting caught plagiarizing a story copied from a kid’s book of ghost stories he liked so much. Stashing the book in his closet, he sat down and wrote his own story for the first time.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember what it was about, which kind of makes this whole tangent irrelevant, albeit on brand…
Over the years, he’d write several more stories, most often influenced by his current taste in books—Ian Fleming, Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Sue Grafton, and Lawrence Block were all early inspirations—and girls. Most of those stories had to do with him getting the girl in question, usually at the expense of her ex-boyfriend cast as the bad guy. Most of them weren’t very good. He also dabbled in journalism and broadcasting, writing for his high school newspaper and writing/reporting/directing for its local public access show, but somehow only considered writing fiction a legitimate area of interest.
The FFL Gazette was a self-published newsletter for my high school fantasy football league in 1986.
Post-high school — after a year or two as a full-time Jehovah’s Witness where he began to develop his speaking and debating skills knocking on doors in Northern Westchester County — he had a crisis of faith, partly inspired by the movie It’s A Wonderful Life, which he saw for the first time at eighteen. A few months later, he moved back to the NYC area, staying with his estranged father in North Bergen, NJ. A year later, in 1990, he picked up and moved to Miami Beach, FL with a cousin and a friend — eventually living four blocks from a beach he somehow only went to four times! — and spent a semester and a half at Miami-Dade Community College before blowing his student loan money, hopping a Greyhound back north.
Having gotten rid of all his winter clothes the year before, he spent his first week back in NYC sick and ended up signing up for the US Army, leaving three weeks later for Ft. Dix, NJ and Basic Training/AIT where he trained for six months as the Army equivalent of a Jiffy Lube “mechanic,” followed by another three weeks in Ft Benning, GA for Airborne School. He then spent the next two years stationed at Ft. Campbell, KY with the 2/5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) as a Light Wheel Vehicle Mechanic, doing everything he could to avoid Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and getting dirty working on HMMWV’s (aka Hummers), while figuring out what his next move would be.
Many years, poems, stories — mostly true, as fiction simply couldn’t compete — and addresses later, Guy now lives in Essex County, NJ with his beautiful wife and their two grown-ass kids. Along the way, he won some poetry slams, founded a reading series, co-authored a book of poetry, carved out a weird career in publishing, and still writes when the mood hits him.
He prefers good whiskey, soccer, and comic books — and has pretty much let go of his plans for world domination, because… well, look around. Instead, he runs, plays games, and spends too much time on Twitter not enough time on his own writing.
