Biography
About Greg M. Hall
Greg M.Hall was born in Lincoln, Nebraska a couple of weeks before the first moon landing. He doesn't remember it. After both parents got their Masters degrees they relocated the family to Weeping Water, Nebraska. A mining and quarrying town, it was a place with lots of dynamite. Greg wrote his first stories there, and though his third-grade teacher might have only given them "S+", it was because she didn't get them.
The Halls later moved to a farm near Morse Bluff, Nebraska, which had been in the family since the days of the homestead act. There wasn't any dynamite there; Greg had to create his own homemade explosives. His writing at the time was either longhand or on an old Smith Corona typewriter. Since most of these stories would have earned him a trip to the psychotherapist, they were destroyed shortly after being written, often secreted into the family trash on runs to the incinerator.
At seventeen, Greg was faced with the choice of a life as a starving actor (with a state runner-up medal in Oral Interpretation of Drama, an Oscar was a question of when, not if) and writer, or a stable career. He chickened out, going to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Most of his writing from this period was unfocused and raw, but he found a niche in absurdist writing, which required neither focus nor polish. His first published story, The Six Most Disgusting Things on Earth, Part Six, appeared in the Rose Quarterly, the school's literary magazine.
While in school, he met Jana Emmert, who he married between his Junior and Senior years. Their first child came ten months later; five more were to come.
After school he was hired by one of the largest construction companies in North America. His first four years were mainly spent traveling to projects around the U.S. After that, he was transferred to Maui for two years, and Southern California for five. There were explosives on one Riverside County project. Tons of explosives. But once the mountain was blasted away they didn't order any more.
Greg now lives with his two kids (the other four went off to college) and wife in his sleepy small town.