Meet the Writers

Find out a little more about the people behind the words...

Legends of Skorn

Sue Bridgwater was born in Plymouth in 1948 and has now retired home to Devon.  She has generally earned her living as a librarian, and has been writing seriously since the early 1980s.
Sue read English at Bedford College, London, graduating in 1970.  Her M. Phil. in Children’s Fantasy Fiction was done externally during her children’s pre-school years, and was awarded in 1984.
She was a Tutor in Literature and Creative Writing from 1982-96 for the Workers’ Educational Association (London District) and the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies, University of London (now a part of Birkbeck College, University of London).
Sue’s main interest is in Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is currently working on novels in the Skorn sequence, co-written with Alistair McGechie, a Star Trek novel, and non-fiction in the field of Mythopoeic studies.  She also contributes editing and writing skills to Dreamworlds Publishing.

Alistair McGechie’s degree was in philosophy and he has always been interested in a philosophical approach to ideas. He continues to read and study this subject (which gives him a license to study anything). Sometimes, the philosophical questions are connected with fantasy writing in interesting ways. It is not clear exactly what the connection is: you would have to read the stories to get some idea. It may be that the work of Ursula Le Guin has had more influence.
He has always liked numbers and eventually ended up working in local government doing educational statistics. He is not actively involved in this area of work anymore, but retains an interest in educational matters. He now lives in Letchworth in Hertfordshire.

Redcap ~ Jack who had Two Faces

Daniel Brown hails from the north-east of England, which is probably why both Redcap and Jack Who Had Two Faces are so redolent of the ancient warrior past of a region that still evokes folklore and legends from long before a Roman soldier ever set foot on British soil.
Daniel’s literary passion is for horror fiction and was a little worried about the inherent ritualistic violence of Redcap, so asked us to vet the story to make sure it wasn’t too strong for younger forum members on DreamWorlds. We were hardly a few lines into our reading before we were completely enthralled by Daniel’s bold, stark prose, and immediately knew that we’d met yet another gifted teller of tales. 
Both stories featured in these pages are certainly suitable for most young adults,  without being too gratuitous, and we’re delighted to be able to bring them to a wider audience to savour the grittier, unvarnished legacy of prehistoric Europe that still haunts the darker places of human consciousness.

Chronodendron ~ Cona the Barbarian

Clare O’Beara is a tree surgeon and expert witness, and a former national standard showjumper.  She has qualified in ecology and includes environmental issues in some of her stories. Clare is an award-winning Dublin writer of fiction and non-fiction, whose journalism work has been published in more than thirty countries. Her credits include Mensa Magazine and Mensa International Journal. She contributed a story to an anthology in aid of Concern’s Haiti fund.
In 2013 she won First Place, Print Journalism in Ireland’s National Media Awards. 
In 2014 she won the Arkady Renko Short Story Contest, judged by Martin Cruz Smith.
Clare has independently published eleven books of crime, science fiction and romance. Her science fiction series currently comprises Dining Out Around The Solar System; Dining Out With The Ice Giants and Dining Out with the Gas Giants in progress.

Dreamless Roads ~ Onwards and Upwards ~ The Dead Path

Jan Hawke, lives in North Cornwall and has been writing for a long time, but finally began a series of short safari stories that eventually became her debut novel, Milele Safari, in 2005, when serious illness forced her into early retirement. Eight years later the book was self-published, at the same time that DreamWorlds Publishing was launched by Jan and a few other fantasy writer friends on the DreamWorlds forum. 
Milele Safari was not a fantasy, but it did have some folkloric elements and fables threaded through some very dark dream imagery. While Onwards and Upwards featured here was highly influenced by Kipling’s Just So Stories, Dreamless Roads is a memoir and testament to the friendship and inspiration that Jan found on fantasy fan forums with several people who are now key members of the DreamWorlds community. The Dead Path also owes its creation to another online friend and blogger, Tara Sparling, who threw down a flash fiction gauntlet via a very entertaining ‘Literary’ Title Name Generator series — in this case for crime novels from which the story sprang fully formed like Athene out of Jan’s lurid imaginings . . . 
Jan is currently working on the first of a series of fantasy novels set in a galaxy far, far away, and a long, long time into the future. Dragons, and possibly unicorns, may be in it as well. Further poetry by Jan can be found at - 
and she’s now blogging fairly often at janhawke.wordpress.com

The Breakfast Rush ~ The Stealing of the Signal Cross

Mary Patterson Thornburg was born in Long Beach, California, and moved at the age of five with her family to eastern Washington. She attended Holy Names College in Spokane and completed her undergraduate education at Montana State University in Bozeman. She took her M.A. and Ph.D. from Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, and taught English at that school until 1998, when she returned to Montana with her husband, Thomas Thornburg.
Thornburg, known to friends and family as Miki, has always been a fan of speculative fiction. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and her first short fiction sale, Darkness and Distance (published in Zahir, 2005), is a brief sequel to Shelley’s great novel. Since then she’s had stories published in several print and online magazines, including Cicada; Strange, Weird, and Wonderful; and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Two of the stories earned honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (Datlow, Link, and Grant, 2006, 2008), and Niam's Tale (Cicada, 2010) – set in the same world as The Stealing of the Signal Cross in this volume – won the 2011 Magazine Merit Honor Certificate given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
Miki’s fantasy novel A Glimmer of Guile was published in 2014 by Uncial Press, which will bring out another novel, The Kura (again set in Dorya on the alternate world of Aerte), in the spring of 2015. The Boy-Wolf, a short prequel to A Glimmer of Guile, is available for Kindle on Amazon. She’s currently working on sequels to both those novels, as well as more short fiction. You can visit her on the web at –
marypattersonthornburg.com

Eclipse

S. J. O’Hart is a writer, primarily for children, and a freelance proofreader/copy-editor. She is represented by Polly Nolan of the Greenhouse Literary Agency. She holds a PhD in Medieval English Literature and Language which she now primarily uses as source material for stories, and she drinks far too much tea.
She blogs at sjohart.wordpress.com
and Tweets @SJOHart

Dark Magic in the Root Cellar

L. James Wright, a teacher, writer, game designer, and amateur anthropologist, was born in the Dust Bowl of America and raised on its Golden Coast. Trained as an archaeologist and student of religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he instead found his stride working with minority youth and a mixed salad of immigrant students all culminating in a stint abroad where he taught, learned, loved, worshipped, grieved, and traveled beside so many others for three years in Japan. All along, he was never able to shake the curse of an overactive imagination, expressed through endless days, weeks, and years of reading, watching movies and TV, story writing, and gaming. From Roald Dahl to R. A. Salvatore, Raiders of the Lost Ark to Twelve Angry Men, historical thrillers to farcical comedy, and Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series to Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms setting, a myriad of influences and interests have informed his craft.
Anything from snatches to volumes of his writing can be 
found in products for ICOSA Entertainment, LLC, most notably the Pure Steam Campaign Setting™,
online at the aforementioned -
Soon-to-be discovered works of his include The Alchemist's Trilogy (three steampunk novellas set in the world of Pure Steam), and Rogue Blood, a strangely dark modern disaster-thriller that conceals history revised, low fantasy, speculative science, and a dash of romance. 
He currently dwells in Sacramento, California.

The Rogue's Odyssey

Louise Findlay writes fantasy (generally short stories) and inspirational poetry. She enjoys reading and writing about mythological creatures such as angels and demons but has a soft spot for vampires. Louise is currently in the midst of writing a vampire novella about two vampire clans whose deputy’s clash in a big way, entitled A Spy in the Sagax Vampires. Find out more at her website – 

Pest Problems

Arthur Daigle is a lifelong resident of the Chicago suburbs. He earned a degree in biology from of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and has worked at the Brookfield Zoo, Morton Arboretum and Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation. He has been writing for years, including both science fiction and a blend of fantasy and comedy. His first published novel is William Bradshaw, King of the Goblins, and is available on Amazon, with a sequel expected soon. He blogs on GoodReads at – 

Squire

Brandon Ward is a citizen of the world, and a student of all life’s lessons, but, being an author is a hobby rather than a profession. As a history enthusiast he wants to bring the world of knights and armor to life for a new generation of readers. Brandon has begun Squire as part of a series of novels with the help of many talented individuals, and much research, for which the author is grateful.


In early 2015 we are again opening for submissions for another anthology volume and hope that many of our Dreamless authors will have more tales to tell...
Watch this space!

4 comments:

  1. Nice. Planning for another anthology so soon.

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  2. Lessons learned from this time Louise - it's never early enough to plant the idea! ;-)

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    1. True enough. This was several years in the making, was it not?

      I thought the logo from my website/wordpress/gravatar profile pic would show up on the comments here.

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    2. Had the idea for the anthology a couple of years back yes, but then finishing my novel kind of cut in front for a bit ;-)

      Ern - yeah. This blog's on Blogger (Google) so I don't think Gravatar works on here as such, although it ought to show your gmail or google account icons if you have them I'd have thought? I tend to use blogger for the simplicity so it works as a book promo area more easily and somehow I find the dashboard more user friendly too.

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