Writer Resume

Mark Hazard Osmun dropped out of college in 1971 and became instantly eligible for the draft
and Vietnam. His lottery number was low: 121. During that draft year, the selection process
stopped at number 120. Luck, rather than wisdom, made its first of many appearances in his life.

Taking job as a reporter, he wrote features for a weekly newspaper in Virginia, then covered
sports for a daily paper in Colorado. He returned to college in 1973 and studied creative writing
and English at George Mason University in Virginia, graduating with honors in 1975.

After college he returned to the idyllic place of his youth: Honolulu. There he lucked into a job
as a newspaper's "odd-sports" reporter, covering such things as surfing, rugby, volleyball and
long-distance running for The Honolulu Advertiser. In 1978, after covering the growing interest
in long-distance running, he left the paper to write a book on the subject. Harper & Row's
imprint J.B. Lippincott published his non-fiction, "new journalism” view of marathon running in
1979 (The Honolulu Marathon).

Thereafter he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and became a freelance writer, a foreign
correspondent and travel writer for The San Francisco Examiner, and a west coast
correspondent for USA Today. He wrote features for such publications as Rolling Stone,
Playboy, The Boston Globe, The Orange County Register, The Dallas Morning News, Sacramento
Magazine, Honolulu Magazine, The Yacht Magazine, and The Runner Magazine. His six-part
series for The San Francisco Examiner on South African apartheid became a finalist in the 1987
H.L. Mencken Awards of the Free Press Association. Writing assignments took him to Alaska,
Scotland, Grenada, Costa Rica, Hawaii, South Africa, and throughout the United States.

In 1997, he began work on Marley's Ghost, his first novel, a dark prequel to Dickens's A
Christmas Carol. The book came out nationally in September 2000. Featured by the Associated
Press in a major holiday story and receiving editorial reviewer praise, the novel climbed to
126th position on Amazon.com's sales list during the last week of December. (A word about
Amazon: Mark no longer permits his newer books to be offered there. Within a month of
publication, Amazon offers used copies of a writer's work—on the same page as the original—
for a fraction of their worth, effectively ending writers' revenues.)

When the attacks of 9/11 came, Mark worked as the public affairs director for the American Red
Cross in Sonoma County, California and served that organization for three years.

In 2006, Mark finished After the Bones, a novel of historical intrigue taking place in 1866
Honolulu. He also republished--via lulu.com--both The Honolulu Marathon and Marley's Ghost,
adding the text of Dickens's original A Christmas Carol at the end of Marley, thus providing the
prequel and the original together in one book. All his books are available exclusively at http:
//www.lulu.com/MarkOsmun.

Today Mark and his wife live in California where Mark writes and publishes private
biographies/memoires for individual clients. Anyone interested in producing his own biography
is encouraged to inquire at twelfthnightpress@yahoo.com.

Writer Resume