As far as I can tell, these are some of the facts. I was born in Chicago in 1967, and raised in Cleveland. I started working when I was 11, doing professional magic—birthday parties and bar-mitzvahs and the like. Around 17, there are a few dim memories of being a stock boy in a furniture shop and a clean up boy in a chemical compounding plant, but I’m no longer sure that was actually my life.

I do know that I entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1985, then dropped out in 1986. This was followed by a stint of wanderlust, a briefer stint in art school, and a noteworthy progression from the world’s worst waiter to a halfway decent bartender. I ended up back at the University of Wisconsin in 1987, graduated with degrees in English and Creative Writing in 1989.

I spent a season as a ski bum in Colorado, then three years in San Francisco. It was there, I think, when I really decided to become a professional writer. I started working on my first novel, The Angle Quickest For Flight, and lived in a room the size of a Volkswagen microbus. That room was attached to Anti-Matter, then one of the world’s largest performance art and video art galleries—a fact that may also explain some of the weird shit I saw go down in my kitchen during this period.

In 1992-1993, I got a masters degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, then spent another decade in San Francisco. I published my first article in Bikini (not, actually, a magazine about women’s swimwear, rather the, um, slightly more artful precursor to Loaded, Maxim and FHM) in 1994. Since then, my writing has appeared in over 70 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, Discover, Popular Science and Details. I also write “The Playing Field,” a blog about the science of sport and culture for PsychologyToday.com.

Meanwhile, The Angle Quickest for Flight ended up taking eleven years to write, but it was a pretty good ride. It was published by Four Walls, Eight Windows in 1999, was a San Francisco Chronicle-bestseller and won the 2000 William L. Crawford IAFA Fantasy Award.

Almost immediately afterward, I took a job as a Writer-at-Large for GQ, moved to Los Angeles and got serious about my surfing. My second book was the by-product of that surfing. This one went slightly quicker, probably because I switched to non-fiction. West of Jesus (Bloomsbury, 2006) took seven years, was a Pen West finalist, and an even better ride.

In 2007, I moved with my wife, the author Joy Nicholson, to a postage stamp of a farm in Chimayo, New Mexico to co-found Rancho de Chihuahua, a special-needs dog sanctuary. On average, we share our home with 25 dogs. So what is that like? Well, in September of 2010, my next non-fiction work, A Small, Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life will be published by Bloomsbury—which is my way of saying it’s really not easy to explain in less than 307 pages.

Currently, I’m about to start running around the country talking dogs. Please come say hey. I’m also starting my next book, which I’m co-writing with X PRIZE founder Peter Diamandis. It’s called Abundance and Free Press is the publisher and that’s about all I can say for now.

JOIN STEVEN in support of Small Furry Prayer. Click here for dates and locations of his 2010 Book Tour.