It's all about the books. Friends, family, school, "real jobs", they were just obstacles to be tackled so that I could return to my true love: books. All I have ever wanted in this world is to read and write books. My criteria for choosing a purse is that it must be able to fit a paperback book inside. I took books on my honeymoon, and bought more while we were there. I picked my major because it looked like I would get to read a lot of books, and also I thought it would provide me with interesting background information for my own books (which it did), so I now have a BA in Humanities -Comparative Literature with a minor in Scandinavian Studies. From the time I was twelve on up, I told people that I wanted to be a writer. When they said, "So, you'll teach and then maybe try to write a book?" I would just shake my head. No, I was a writer, and that was all I wanted to do. Over the years I have lived in Idaho, New Jersey, Delaware, and now Utah, because it doesn't matter. I can read and write anywhere. I've worked at a wedding invitation factory (Bet you didn't know they made them in big scary factories, did you?), at a video store (back at the birth of DVD), at libraries and bookstores, and even been an office lady at a school while I waited to get published. I knew that I would be published eventually, because . . . well, I just had to be.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have other interests. I took eight years of German, four of Norwegian, and even studied Old Norse so that I could read the great Viking sagas in the original language. I knit like a maniac: hats, scarves, sweaters, dog sweaters, socks, felted purses, you name it. I play the piano and viola, love to travel and to watch movies. I have a husband and three kids and a dog . . .

But mostly, it's about the books.

Visit Jessica at http://www.JessicaDayGeorge.com

Faith Hunter, urban fantasy writer, was born in Louisiana and raised all over the south. Hunter fell in love with reading in fifth grade, and best loved SciFi, fantasy, and gothic mystery. She decided to become a writer in high school, when a teacher told her she had talent. Now, she writes full-time, tries to keep house, and is a workaholic with a passion for RV travel, Japanese maples, orchids, white-water kayaking, and writing. She and her husband love to RV to whitewater rivers all over the Southeast.

The dark urban fantasy Skinwalker series, featuring Jane Yellowrock, is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling series with multiple books and compilations. Jane Yellowrock is a Cherokee skinwalker who tracks, hunts, and kills rogue-vampires for a living -- that is, until she takes a gig working for Leo Pellissier, the Master of the City of New Orleans. The series is set in an alternate reality, modern-day world, one inhabited by humans, vamps, and other things that go bump in the night.

Her Rogue Mage novels, a dark, urban fantasy series, feature Thorn St. Croix, a stone mage in a post-apocalyptic, alternate reality, urban fantasy world. These novels are the basis for the Rogue Mage World Book and Role Playing Game, which contains lots of fiction for the readers!

The Soulwood series features Nell Nicholson Ingram, and is a spinoff from the Skinwalker series. Nell is an escapee from a cult, a solitary woman with deadly magic of her own. In book one, Blood of The Earth, she is hired to help PsyLED (a division of Homeland Security) find a missing child.

Faith's Junkyard Cats series is a "near future" SciFi series of novellas first released as Audible Originals and later as ebooks, and possibly some day as a print onmibus.

Under her pen name Gwen Hunter, she writes action adventure, mysteries, and thrillers.

As Faith and Gwen, she has 40+ books in print in 30+ countries.

Join the fans at the official Faith Hunter Facebook fan page now located at

https://www.facebook.com/official.faith.hunter or follow her on Twitter @HunterFaith

For more, including a list of her books, freebies, & upcoming events see www.FaithHunter.net and www.GwenHunter.com.

Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five novels. He’s best known for his Monster Hunter International urban fantasy series, the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior epic fantasy series, the Grimnoir Chronicles alternate history trilogy, the Dead Six military thrillers, and the sci-fi Gun Runner. He’s also written over sixty pieces of shorter fiction, many of which are included in his Target Rich Environment collections, and he has edited three anthologies.. He lives in Yard Moose Mountain, Utah with his wife, children, and fearsome Krasnovian Waffle Hound.

You can follow him at monsterhunternation.com.

John C. Wright is a retired attorney, newspaperman and newspaper editor, who was only once on the lam and forced to hide from the police who did not admire his newspaper.

In 1984, Graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, home of the "Great Books" program. In 1987, he graduated from the College and William and Mary's Law School (going from the third oldest to the second oldest school in continuous use in the United States), and was admitted to the practice of law in three jurisdictions (New York, May 1989; Maryland December 1990; DC January 1994). His law practice was unsuccessful enough to drive him into bankruptcy soon thereafter. His stint as a newspaperman for the St. Mary's Today was more rewarding spiritually, but, alas, also a failure financially. He presently works (successfully) as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children: Pingping, Orville, Wilbur, and Just Wright.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is a national bestselling author and Hugo-nominated editor of adult and children's speculative fiction, including 10 novels and 20 anthologies. His debut novel, The Worker Prince received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club's Year's Best Science Fiction Releases. His short stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies and online and include canon entries in The X-Files, Predator, Joe Ledger, Monster Hunter International, Aliens Vs. Predator, and Decipher's WARS, amongst others. As book editor he was the first editor on Andy Weir's bestseller The Martian and has edited books by such luminaries as Alan Dean Foster, Tracy Hickman, Frank Herbert, Mike Resnick, Todd McCaffrey, Jean Rabe and more. His anthologies as editor include Predator: Eyes of The Demon, Aliens Vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey, Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers, Infinite Stars and Predator: If It Bleeds for Titan Books, Shattered Shields with co-editor Jennifer Brozek, Mission: Tomorrow, Galactic Games, Little Green Men--Attack! with Robin Wayne Bailey, and The Monster Hunter Tales with Larry Correia all for Baen, Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, Beyond The Sun and Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera For a New Age for various small presses and Joe Ledger: Unstoppable with Jonathan Maberry for St. Martin's Press. His forthcoming books include the Novel Shortcut (which is being developed for film), and the anthologies Joe Ledger: Unbreakable with Jonathan Maberry for Journalstone, The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie with Henry Herz and Robots Through The Ages with Robert Silverberg for Blackstone. Find him online at:

Website/Blog: www.bryanthomasschmidt.net

Twitter: @BryanThomasS

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bryanthomass?ref=hl

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3874125.Bryan_Thomas_Schmidt

Nationally Best Selling Author Quincy J. Allen, is a cross-genre author with numerous short story publications in multiple anthologies, collections, and magazines. His first short story collection "Out Through the Attic," came out in 2014 from 7DS Books. He made his first short story pro-sale in 2014 with “Jimmy Krinklepot and the White Rebels of Hayberry,” included in WordFire’s "A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories," and his most recent short story sale, “Sons of the Father,” appears in Larry Correia’s "Monster Hunter: Files" from Baen, published in October of 2017.

"Chemical Burn," his first novel and the first volume of the sci-fi detective noir series Endgame, was a finalist in RMFW’s Colorado Gold Contest in 2011. His latest installment of the Blood War Chronicles, "Blood Curse," is book 2 in an epic fantasy series starting in the Old West and featuring a clockwork gunslinger. His first media tie-in novel, "Shadow of Ruin," set in the Aradio brothers’ Colt the Outlander universe, is expected out in early February of 2018.

He is the publisher and editor of Penny Dread Tales, a short story collection in its fifth volume that has become a labor of love. He also runs RuneWright, LLC, a small marketing and book design business out of his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and hopes to one day be a full-time writer in Baen’s stable of fantastic authors.

Sarah A. Hoyt was born (and raised) in Portugal and now lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons, and a variable number of cats, depending on how many show up to beg on the door step.

In between lays the sort of resume that used to be de-rigueur for writers. She has never actually wrestled alligators, but she did at one point very briefly tie bows on bags of potpourri for a living. She has also washed dishes and ironed clothes for a living. Worst of all she was, for a long time, a multilingual scientific translator.

At some point, though, she got tired of making an honest living and started writing. She has over 32 -- the number keeps changing -- published novels, in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical mystery, historical fantasy and historical biography. Her short stories have been published in Analog, Asimov's, Amazing Stories (under a previous management), Weird tales, and a number of anthologies from DAW and Baen. Her space-opera novel Darkship Thieves was the 2011 Prometheus Award Winner, and at this moment the third novel in the series, A Few Good Men, is a finalist for the honor.

Sarah also won the Dragon Award for Uncharted (With Kevin J. Anderson.)

She also writes under the names Sarah D'Almeida and Elise Hyat.

To learn more about Sarah A. Hoyt and read samples of her work, visit http://sarahahoyt.com

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, editor, and translator from Brooklyn, NY. He's the author of The Middling Affliction (Caezik, 2022) and Eridani's Crown (UFO Publishing, 2019) fantasy novels.

Over 120 of his short stories appeared in various magazines and anthologies since 2010, including Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, etc. He's the winner of the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction.

He edits the Unidentified Funny Objects series of anthologies and Future Science Fiction Digest. His other projects as editor include The Cackle of Cthulhu (Baen Books), Humanity 2.0 (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick), Coffee: 14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic (UFO Publishing) and Dark Expanse: Surviving the Collapse (Deorc Enterprises).

You can visit his official home page and blog at alexshvartsman.com

The 2019 DragonCon Dragon Award winner for Best Science Fiction novel (title: A STAR-WHEELED SKY) Brad R. Torgersen's award-winning stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. A veteran and Chief Warrant Officer in the United States Army Reserve, Brad has also served in half a dozen different countries. Married for 25 years to his very first audio narrator, Brad lives with his family in the Intermountain West. He can be found most often at his Facebook page, and occasionally writes non-fiction for both his personal blog, and the Mad Genius Club group blog. A political Classical Liberal, Brad believes in having an open mind—so long as you don't let your brains fall out.

Julie Frost grew up an Army brat, traveling the globe. She thought she might settle down after she finished school, but then she married a pilot and moved six times in seven years. She's finally put down roots in Utah with her family--a herd of guinea pigs, two other humans, and a "kitten" who thinks she's a warrior princess--and a collection of anteaters and Oaxacan carvings, some of which intersect. She enjoys birding and nature photography, which also intersect. Utilizing her degree in biology, she writes werewolf fiction while completely ignoring the physics of a protagonist who triples in mass. She also writes other things, on occasion, as the fancy strikes her.

Her short fiction has appeared in Monster Hunter Files, Writers of the Future, The District of Wonders, StoryHack, Unlikely Story, Stupefying Stories, and too many anthologies to count. Her novels are published by WordFire Press and Ring of Fire Press. She whines about writing, a lot, at http://agilebrit.livejournal.com/

Kim May has been a dancer, competitive swimmer, actor, singer, model, bald spot duster, and slug licker. Sadly she wasn’t paid for any of it so she gave it all up in favor of spending her days working at one of the oldest independant bookstores in Oregon, and spending her nights writing. True to form, Kim writes a bit of everything: sic-fi, fantasy, steampunk, thrillers, historical, young adult, horror, and tie-in fiction. The one consistency is that she often draws inspiration from her Japanese heritage. In fact, in 2013 she won The Named Lands Poetry Contest with a haiku.

Kim lives in Oregon with her Vampire Care Bear.

Steven Diamond writes for Baen, WordFire Press, Gallant Knight Games, and numerous small publications. He is the author of RESIDUE, a YA supernatural thriller, and numerous short stories which can be found in his collection WHAT HELLHOUNDS DREAM AND OTHER STORIES.

Steve lives in Utah with his wife and two kids. His influences are Robert McCammon, Brian Lumley, and many others.

I started writing in high school. I didn't really get into it until college, when I began writing fiction online. I never seriously considered trying to be a novelist, though, not until 2006. That was the year I met Larry Correia. He liked a story I was writing online and asked if he could jump in on it. That story ultimately became DEAD SIX.

I lived in Doha, Qatar for a year, while working security at at US installation there. Qatar ultimately became the inspiration for the fictional country of Zubara.

Later in life, I served as an explosive ordnance disposal technician in the US Air Force. I deployed to Afghanistan, and applied that experience to my second book, SWORDS OF EXODUS.

My first solo novel, HER BROTHER'S KEEPER, wasn't exactly inspired by real life. I am sad to admit that I've never captained a privateer rocket ship. I do, however, have a lifelong love of science fiction and space opera, and am excited to be able to share my take on my favorite genre.

I also have a free short story on my publisher's web page. It's a prequel to HER BROTHER'S KEEPER.

http://www.baen.com/EmberPast.asp