The creator of the World

Will Collier was born naked and screaming, in a hospital.

My grad school advisor dared me to start my Master's thesis biography page with that line. I chickened out then (Wally, I hope you're satisfied this time). I think I'll start again:

Will Collier was born in Enterprise, Alabama on October 18, 1968. He--ah, to hell with this third-person stuff. I grew up (or at least older) in Enterprise, finally escaping to Auburn University in 1987. In between cramming four years of college into five years, I spent one term at the University of London and another at Oxford (not the one in Mississippi). After graduating from Auburn in 1992, I went on to another one of America's great cities, Austin, to attend another one of America's great schools, the University of Texas. I finished up my Master's in 1993, and that was it for school as far as this kid is concerned.

Somewhere between leaving my home town and finishing my Master's, an odd thing happened (actually, a whole lot of odd things happened, but these are other stories for other times). Although my major and eventual degrees were in aerospace engineering, I found myself signing up for more and more English courses. Along the way, I was lucky enough to talk my way into the fiction writing course taught by Auburn's writer-in-residence, Dr. Elly Welt. Elly just happens to be one of the best writers in America, and maybe the best writing teacher anywhere. Pick up her masterful Berlin Wild, and keep an eye out for The Virgin Of The Snows, coming soon to a National Book Award banquet near you.

Elly's class, where students' work is dissected in public, is not a place for the faint-hearted. It is a great place to find out quickly whether you've got "it" or not, and a better place to learn how to use "it"--that indefinable thing sometimes called talent, or art, or the writer's gift.

I am painfully aware of how vain and pompous that last sentence sounds, but there does come a time where even the most humble (a category I rarely fall into) have to admit when they actually are good at something. A couple of years under Welt's lash--uh, I mean, tutelage, and I could put words together with some semblance of precision, and even occasional style.

I've got a slowly growing collection of short fiction, and the beginnings of a novel buried among the relics of that period. I always figured that I'd wind up writing fiction, if not for a living, then at least for a hobby. I might yet, but somewhere between there and here I heard another call. In late 1993, I started writing a nonfiction book with my best friend from home, Scott Brown. It would eventually be called The Uncivil War, and it's about our mutual obsession, the football rivalry between Auburn University and the University of Alabama, where Scott went to college. The book was published in 1995, and if you like, you can read part of it here.

Uncivil was published in August of 1995, and the first printing sold out by late October, much to the surprise of our publisher. While working on the book, I started to write occasional op-ed pieces on current issues, and published one in The Birmingham News as a featured editorial (see "Getting Our Money's Worth"). The exposure was nice, but nobody pays for unsolicited op-ed columns, and I hate working for nothing. Okay, I did do another column gratis for The Birmingham Post-Herald, but that was fun, so it doesn't exactly count (see "Bebes In Charge").

Not getting paid is bad enough, but I really draw the line at having somebody else rewrite my words--especially when they haven't bought them in the first place, which was the case for the op-ed essays. I watched as a 420-page manuscript that I'd spent years writing was hacked nearly unrecognizable in three weeks (at least I got a check). That was quite enough for Lynda's little boy; from here on out, I call the shots where my work is concerned. Hence, Will's World. If you read it here, I wrote it, period.

In case you're curious, no, I don't do this for a living (yet). I pay the bills as a full-time aerospace engineer. I work for the 83rd Fighter Weapons Squadron of the U.S. Air Force as a defense contractor (or a devious, thieving pawn of the military-industrial complex, if you're the kind of person who believes any word expelled from the mouth of Peter Jennings). I'm an AMRAAM flight test analyst, which means I'm involved with test firings of the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-To-Air Missile. When people ask me what I do, I get to boil all that gobbledygook down into one terribly satisfying answer: "I blow up stuff." I recently moved from Fort Walton Beach to Panama City, Florida, where I'm Veridian Engineering's Tyndall Air Force Base branch office manager (which sounds really impressive until you learn that I manage an office of one person--namely me).

I think that's enough about me. How have you been?

(Oh, just one more thing, because I know somebody is going to flip out over the title of this particular corner of the World. I am not comparing myself to the Almighty. While writing HTML is a pain, I am bright enough to realize it doesn't hold a candle to the creation of the universe. Calling this bio page "The creator of the World" is just a silly joke. Lighten up, will ya?)

(Second footnote: The opinions and ideas expressed on this site are entirely my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Veridian Engineering, the U.S. Air Force, the Republican Party, the State of Florida, or the Western Hemisphere. Yet.)