There's this thing I do sometimes called a Totally Fabricated Bio.

It's where I write a short bio for a person that contains very little in the way of actual biographical information, but is fun and usually funny and often written in the style of the subject's favorite author.

I recently wrote a set of Totally Fabricated Bios for the management team at Red Pill Now, a tech solutions firm that is probably the coolest company ever because they are using my wacky bios on their website.

I thought I'd share the bios with my Steemit friends, too. This one is written in the style of Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish author best known for her Pippi Longstocking books. It's about Viktor Krantz, a Swedish-American guy who loves hunting, grilling, and small town life. Hope you enjoy!

On a lazy street in a small, quiet town in Missouri, on the back deck of a rather ordinary house, a rather extraordinary man was grilling sausages. The savory smell of the sausages wafted around the back yard of the house, down the street, around the corner, up onto the front porch of another house, and straight into the bulbous nose of one of the neighbors. This neighbor, a Mr. Smith, dropped the stack of mail he’d been thumbing through and said quite loudly to himself, “Krantz is home!” And then he ran out into the street in his bathrobe and slippers.

Mr. Smith hurried along the road until he came to the house where Viktor Krantz lived with his family. Even though all the neighbors knew him as Viktor Krantz, Viktor himself was always quick to point out that it was only a nickname. Sure enough, there on the mailbox the old letter stickers spelling out “VIKTOR KRANTZ” had been covered up by a colorful, hand-painted sign announcing the owner of the box as “Viktorissimo Bolivar Pineforest Grendelson Jim Salmoncake Krantz.” And below that, in larger lettering, it said: “Dimension Wanderer Extraordinaire.” It was true; Viktor Krantz was a dimension wanderer by trade. He’d been wandering dimensions since he could put one foot in front of the other, to hear him tell it, and as far as anyone knew, he was the only professional dimension wanderer on earth. There may have been other dimension wanderers on the earths in other dimensions, but on our version of earth, he was the only one.

Henrietta, the Krantz family’s guard-glyptodont, grazed peacefully on the front lawn. Mr. Smith paused to look up at the ancient beast for a moment, shielding his eyes from the sun in order to take in the animal’s full height as she scratched her head on a third story dormer window. Mr. Smith thought that Henrietta was surely the best and most awe-inspiring animal on the planet, and he was probably right. She was certainly the only prehistoric glyptodont in existence, in this dimension, anyway. Krantz had befriended her in the Bravenboar dimension, where prehistoric creatures still ruled the earth and humans had never evolved.

Mr. Smith reached into his bathrobe pocket and drew out a handful of potato chips. You had to offer Henrietta a treat when you came to visit Viktor Krantz, because otherwise she might think you were an intruder and pick you up by your shirt collar with her mouth and deposit you back on the other side of the fence. She wouldn’t eat you (she was an herbivore); but she would certainly ruin your shirt and wound your dignity. Henrietta lowered her massive armadillo head and snuffled the potato chips out of Mr. Smith’s open hand. Then she turned around, swinging her enormous, armor plated tail in a wide motion.

Mr. Smith shuffled onward until he rounded the corner behind the Krantz house and came up in view of the back deck. Viktor stood behind the grill, wearing a red checkered apron over his usual attire of a bright Hawaiian shirt and leather riding chaps. (The chaps were for when he got a sudden craving for some fried cheese curd or gooey butter cake. He would climb up Henrietta’s armored plates, hop into the huge saddle he’d made himself out of four cowhides stitched together, and head into town. The chaps kept his legs from chafing.) Mr. Smith had seen this outfit enough times that it no longer startled him, but he was not accustomed to the large black kettle that Krantz now wore perched atop his head like a hat, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it. As he stood there on the lawn, studying the new head adornment, Viktor saw him and waved a pair of grilled sausages in his direction. “Smith!” he said. “Come on up and have some sausages.”

Mr. Smith did. In between bites, he said, “I like your new hat.” (It wasn’t exactly true, but Mr. Smith wanted to know the story behind it, and it would be rather impolite to say “Well now, Krantz, that is one of the uglier hats I’ve seen in my long and varied exposure to ugly hats.”)

Viktor looked confused for a moment, then felt around atop his head with the spatula he was holding. The spatula scraped against the kettle and Viktor said, “Oh yes, I’d forgotten all about this. I got it in the Harrington Harrington dimension just last week.”

“Do many people wear kettles as hats there?” asked Mr. Smith.

“Of course not,” said Viktor. “That would be silly. No, in Harrington Harrington, people drink a lot of tea, and so they carry tea kettles on top of their heads to keep the tea warm inside.”

“How do their heads keep the tea warm?”

“Because they wear tea cozies as hats, of course. I was given one, but I lost it on the way back.” Viktor flipped a sausage off the grill with his spatula and caught it on a plate in midair. He wiped his hand on the front of his red checkered apron, and it was only then that Mr. Smith noticed that Viktor was missing a thumb.

“Why, Viktor!” he exclaimed. “What has happened to your thumb?”

Viktor looked down at his hand and said thoughtfully, “I suppose I’ve lost it forever.” Then he smiled a big smile. “But no matter. I’m sure that nice man in the Harrington Harrington dimension will make good use of it.”

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Mr. Smith.

“Well, in Harrington Harrington, all of the people are modular, sort of like IKEA kitchens. All of their parts are detachable and interchangeable. They can rearrange their freckles any time they like, and when they have an eye infection, they simply pluck out the eye and send it off to the doctor to be tended to. No one ever worries about breaking their arm, but when they say ‘I think I’ve lost my mind,’ it means something entirely different from what it means here.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What has that to do with your thumb?” Smith asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Viktor. “The people of Harrington Harrington are always taking off their thumbs and trading them for other people’s thumbs. They do it so often that no one even has to say, ‘excuse me sir, but would you like to trade thumbs with me?’ Instead, they just do it while shaking hands. Well, I shook hands with one of them, and he took my thumb right off. He was very sorry to find that I could not make use of his, since I’m not built to be modular. But I let him keep my thumb as a spare, and he gave me this nice tea kettle in return.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Smith. He finished up his last sausage and licked his fingers.

At that moment, Henrietta lumbered around back of the house and lowered her head to the level of the back deck. She snuffled her snout against Viktor’s shoulder, and Viktor said, “Oh yes! I almost forgot. I have an urgent appointment beginning shortly. Would you like a ride back to your house?”

Mr. Smith had never ridden on Henrietta’s back, but had always dreamed of doing so. He leaped up and said, “Sure! Why not?”

Viktor showed him where to place his feet and hands to climb up Henrietta’s plate armor, and in just a moment he was sitting high on top of the glyptodont, gripping her saddle horn with a nervous hand. Gazing about him, he could see the whole neighborhood, the forest, the lake, and miles off, the town. With Viktor sitting behind him, he swayed in the saddle as Henrietta lumbered out of the yard and down the street.

When they reached Mr. Smith’s house, he slid down Henrietta’s tail just as he’d seen Viktor Krantz do so many times before, and landed right on his front porch, where Mrs. Smith sat rocking in her rocking chair.

“Where is he going on his glyptodont, do you think?” she asked.

“You never can tell,” said Mr. Smith. “You just never can tell about anything when it comes to Viktor Krantz.”

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