About me
Hi, I’m John Shore. I'm an author and editor. I was born in Nashville, lived for decades in California, and now reside in the southern Appalachian city of Asheville, NC.
Among other books I've written an award-winning novel (Everywhere She’s Not, 2019), a (then) ground-breaking book refuting the notion that being gay is a sin (UNFAIR, 2013), and a book about punctuation (Comma Sense, 2007), which I co-wrote with renowned grammarian Richard Lederer.
Over the past twenty or so years, whenever I’ve needed to make a lot of money I’ve ghostwritten other people’s books. (This is not a satisfying way to make money, though.)
From 2007 until I shut it down in 2014 to write my novel, I wrote a personal blog that was simultaneously published on my website and on The Huffington Post. That blog received more than 400,000 unique views a month—which made me, for some five years running, one of the most-read writers in America. Which sounds like an insane thing to say, I know. But there it is.
From April 2016 until I concluded the story in November 2017, I wrote, for the Asheville Citizen Times (part of the USA Today network), Ashes to Asheville, the first real-time serial novel ever to be published on the website of a major daily newspaper. From Oct. 2016 through 2019 I also wrote for the Citizen Times a popular advice column, Ask John.
For years before any of that work I was a freelance magazine and newspaper writer and editor. I wrote and edited for the San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS San Diego, The Reader, and San Diego magazine, among others.
Communicating the truth, as best as I understand it, has always been the primary drive behind my writing.
In August of 1981 I married the love of my life, Catherine ("Cat"), a genius of a human being who has yet to awaken in the morning, look over at me, and say, "That's it. I'm out." I don't know why that hasn't happened yet. I don't ask. Cat is the Finance Director for a nonprofit that serves victims of domestic violence.
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