SHA’DAA Scribes

Rob Adams is a civil servant who lives in Newcastle, U.K. He is the devilish author of many frightening and creepy tales of the dark side. Adams is a civil servant whose alter ego is a writer. He was born in the north-east of England way back in the mists of time (the mid 1970s, anyway), and has lived there pretty much his whole life. At present, he’s living the life of a contented bachelor in the not-so picturesque northern town of Gateshead. He graduated from DeMontfort University in 1998, with a 2:1 degree in History and very little idea of what he wanted to do with it. He moved to Derbyshire and worked on and off (mostly off) for the next two years, including a spell as a football writer for a local newspaper, following non-league Ripley Town FC. He moved back up north to Newcastle in December 2000, and joined the civil service as an administrator in 2001. As Rob says “Being a (very) junior civil servant is a lot like being unemployed: you seem to do very little all day for very little money. Still, it gives me nearly as much time to write as I had when I was at Uni, and this time I’ve started to take it seriously.”

Diane Arrelle has had around 200 short stories published and has two published books, Just A Drop In The Cup, a collection of short-short stories and Elements Of The Short Story, How to Write a selling Story. She lives on the edge of the Pine Barrens (home of the Jersey Devil) in Southern New Jersey with her husband, currently one of two sons and her cat. She is proud to be one of the founding members as well as the second president of the Garden State Horror Writers and is also the past president of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. She began writing stories in college while taking the four-hour once-a-week class, The Geography Of South East Asia, which she needed for her teaching certification in social studies. Growing up extremely rural and listening nightly to the ghastly ghostly tales that her older siblings forced upon her, she naturally turned to horror. To support her writing habit for the last couple of decades, she has held a wide variety of jobs including Teacher, School Bus Driver, Waitress, Sales Clerk, Mystery Shopper, Newspaper Correspondent, Tutor, Freelance Writer, Senior Citizen Center Director and was also that person who stood around in a department store burning vanilla tinged milk and cooking tasteless crepes to sell nonstick pots and pans.

Larry Atchley Jr. grew up in Grapevine, Texas, and has been writing since he was a teenager, mostly poetry, fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories. He published two poems in a high school senior class anthology, and mailed poems out to several small press magazines in the early nineties, but without success. Frustrated with the process, he wouldn’t try to have anything published until almost twenty years later. He became serious again about publishing his fiction writing after attending a writers’ workshop presented by authors Sarah A. Hoyt and Amanda S. Green in 2010, which taught him a lot, and boosted his confidence in his writing. His first big break as a writer came later that year, in October, when Janet Morris and Chris Morris invited him to join a group of writers working on their fiction shared world anthology, Lawyers in Hell, and to submit a short story for the book. They accepted his story, “Remember, Remember, Hell in November” and it was published in the book in June 2011. Working closely with many of the other writers on the Lawyers in Hell project led to him being invited to submit writing to other anthologies that they were working on. In July 2011 Larry had a poem accepted for a collection called The Book of Night, edited by Richard Groller, to be published in 2012, which he read aloud in an author panel at the literary convention, LibertyCon.

Jeff Barnes was an Air Force brat who grew up in such exotic locales as Japan, Alaska, Texas, and Tennessee. After a botched attempt at college (sadly, they do not award degrees for partying and lack of work ethic), he ended up being hired by the FAA to be an air traffic controller. Jeff spent eight years in Anchorage and Dillingham, Alaska before moving to Paducah, Kentucky, then Nashville, Tennessee. From there he left active air traffic control to work in FAA headquarters in Washington, DC, where he has worked ever since. Aside from controlling, Jeff’s 28 years of federal service have been spent in electronic warfare, system development, strategic planning, and computer security. Currently he is the lead safety engineer for the Aeronautical Information Management Directorate, as well as telecommunications infrastructure manager for the NAIMES 2 program. Jeff’s masochism extends to working online to complete the degree he was too unmotivated to get when he was young. He is on track to complete his degree in Professional Aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 6 months. Since all that wasn’t enough of a challenge (only taking up about 23 hours of each day), when his friend Rich Groller described Sha’Daa, Jeff had an immediate story idea for the fourth book in the series. Rich was kind enough to introduce him to the writing group, and Jeff’s idea was accepted. Then he found out there was still time to get his foot in the door with Pawns, so he pitched an idea for it. The pitch was accepted and the rest was…well, you get the idea. Although he has been writing on and off for many years, this is the first story.

Paul Barrett has lived a varied life full of excitement and adventure. Not really, but it sounds good as an opening line. Paul’s multiple careers have included: rock and roll roadie, children’s theater stage manager, television camera operator, mortgage banker, and support specialist for Microsoft Excel. This eclectic mix has allowed him to go into his true love: motion picture production. He has produced two motion pictures: Night Feeders and Cold Storage. Night Feeders was released on DVD in 2007. Cold Storage won the Audience Favorite Award at the 2009 Dead By Dawn Film Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, and has been picked up for DVD release by Lionsgate. Amidst all this, Paul has worked on his writing, starting with his first short story, about Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, at age 8. Paul has written numerous commercials and industrial video scripts in his tenure with his creative agency, Indievision. His script for “The Ozone Zone” won both a Telly and Communicator Award. He has three novels currently making the rounds to agents. Paul lives in Charlotte, NC with his partner, filmmaker Tony Elwood, and their two cats, Skittles and Ashe.

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer with over eighty stories published in ten countries. His first two books were published in 2010: a collection of Gustavo’s previously published stories, Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places was released in October, and his short novel The Curse of El Bastardo in November. His third book, Virtuoso and Other Stories was published in 2011.

Jason Cordova did not want to be a writer. He wanted to be many other things, first and foremost a professional baseball player. After that, a teacher, then a professional videogame player. However, with the deck stacked against him (as well as too many injuries to his shoulder, which killed the aspirations of videogaming and baseball), in 2007 he finally accepted the writing gig and sold his first book three months later. Since then he has had multiple short stories published and more novels in the pipeline. He currently lives in Kentucky, very near to the heart of thoroughbred country.

Bruce Durham is an author from Mississauga, Ontario and has appeared in publications such as Paradox and Flashing Swords as well as anthologies like Return of the Sword and Rage of the Behemoth. Other publications include the graphic novel adaptation of his short story ‘The Marsh God’, available from ComixPress.com and Indyplanet.com. A sequel is planned, as well as an upcoming ‘Zombie’ project. When not writing, much of his spare time is spent administering the community forums for the official website of Conan Properties Inc. His short stories ‘The Marsh God’ and ‘Homecoming’ won back-to-back Preditors & Editors Readers polls for Best SF&F in 2005/2006, respectively. Both stories appear in Flashing Swords. ‘Valley of Bones’, appearing in ‘Return of the Sword’, finished 7th in the 2008 Preditors & Editors Readers poll in the Best SF&F category.

Jordan Ellinger (Author: “Reach in the Acid”). Canadian Jordan Ellinger spends most of his days bent over a keyboard working in languages with exotic sounding names like C++, VB, and PHP. By night he works in the language with which he is most familiar: English. He is a graduate of Clarion West, a 1st place winner of Writers of the Future, and edits the flash fiction magazine, Every Day Fiction.

Michael D. Griffiths is a man who likes to keep busy. He has worked with the magazine Abandoned Towers since its inception, moving from Slush Reader to Marketing Manager. In the past, his writing has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He was awarded first place in Withersin’s 666 contest as well as Golden Vision’s Online Fiction Contest. He is on the staff of The Daily Discord, Cyberwizard Productions, SFReader, and writes book reviews for Innsmouth Free Press. His series The Chronicles of Jack Primus is available through Living Dead Press. Lately his attentions have turned toward the walking dead and besides the various anthologies focusing on the subject, he had appeared in he has also begun a new Zombie Apocalypse series called the Eternal Aftermath.

Richard Groller is an author of fiction and non-fiction. His non-fiction book credits include co-author of The Warrior’s Edge (with Janet Morris and COL John Alexander)and Chief Researcher and contributing author to The American Warrior (Janet and Chris Morris, Eds.). Nominated for Military Intelligence Professional Writer of the Year in 1986, he has published numerous historical and technical articles in such venues as Military Intelligence, The Field Artillery Journal, Guns and Ammo, and the Journal of Electronic Defense, and has been cited as the primary source for sections of several textbooks on Electronic Warfare. A member of both SFWA and HWA, Rich is contributor to the Heroes in Hell series, and has to date been published in 5 volumes of the shared universe anthology (Prophets in Hell, Lawyers in Hell, Rogues in Hell, Dreamers in Hell, and Poets in Hell). He is published in Sha’Daa: Pawns, the latest anthology in the Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse series, created by Michael H. Hanson and in the John Manning’s horror anthologies What Scares the Boogeyman? and the new Night Chills series, in Terror by Gaslight. He has new works already accepted for publication and due for release in 2015 to include Sha’Daa: Facets (Moondream Press), Doctors in Hell (Perseid Press) and the upcoming Night Chills release Dark Corners (Iron Clad Press).

Michael H. Hanson is the author of numerous screenplays, poems, and short stories. His brain-child, the shared-world anthology series THE SHA’DAA, reflects the inner demons that he daily keeps at bay. He lives and works in Piscataway, NJ.

C.J. Henderson grew up in the American Midwest. His family moved around for the first few years of his life until finally settling in Western Bridgeville, Pennsylvania. After attending a local college, he moved to New York City. He began telling stories when he was young. Before he was able to make a living from writing, Henderson worked in a variety of jobs, such as cooking, waiting tables and washing dishes in the food service industry, managing a movie theater, interior painting, and working as a blackjack dealer, road crew technician, salesman and bank guard. He has worked in education as an instructor of English and creative writing, drama coach and camp counselor. Aside from fiction, his publishing work also includes working as a movie critic, magazine editor. His best-known work in the hardboiled genre is Jack Hagee detective series and his supernatural detective Teddy London series, as well as many other short stories and novels featuring many characters from Lovecraftian fiction and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, as well as his own. Henderson has written comic books for such companies as Marvel, Eternity, Tekno Comix, Moonstone Books, and Valiant, most notably on Tekno’s Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice and Moonstone’s Kolchak adaptations.

Nancy Jackson—From her home in Ontario, Nancy edits, writes, reviews, and reads all manner of fiction. The anthologies she has edited include Trip the Light Horrific, Dream the Dark Majestic, Travel a Time Historic, Mind Scraps, Bleed My Heart Romantic, Goremet Cuisine, Vintage Moon, Dreams of Flesh, and Morbid Acts of Kindness. Jackson is a full time author with works in TWILIGHT TIMES, ANOTHEREALM, LOST SOULS, and various anthologies including LABOR POOL HORROR TALES, BROKEN MIRRORS, and the ROMANCING THE SOUL series.

Deborah Koren writes fiction from California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. When she’s not writing or reading (or working at her pesky day job), she is out hiking, playing with her dogs and cats, fencing, watching Combat! reruns, shoveling snow, and frequenting the local library. Her fiction has appeared in several ezines, including Anotherealm, AlienSkin, RaggedEdge Publishing, Gateway, and Kenoma, several of which have won awards. Several anthologies, such as Best of AstoundingTales.com, Ghelenden Revisited, and Cybertales: Live Wire, have included her stories.

Lee Ann Kuruganti, a former mountaineer and kayak guide, is a talented Digital Artist and graduate of the University of Colorado. Lee Ann has written a host of wonderful short stories and two unpublished novels. She works and lives in Colorado.

Shebat Legion’s many stories include “Dree, On Wednesday,” “I Am Anastasia’s Bracelet”, written in collaboration with Michael H. Hanson; “Ophie and The Undertaker,” for Dreamers in Hell, the latest volume in the award-winning Heroes in Hell series and “The Cast Iron Skillet” published by CHBB. She is the creator of Vampire Therapy: Chronicles of The Cat’s Ass Boutique, which includes “A Cat’s Ass Christmas,” “A Cat’s Ass Valentine,” and “Lilly Brings Home A Leprechaun.” She is the producer of the anthology Klarissa Dreams: The Art of Klarissa Kocsis. Shebat Legion is the author of Vampire Therapy: Jackson and Eva and is presently at work on book two of the Vampire Therapy series called “Elizabetta.” Recent anthologies include “Rise of the Goddess”, “The Tale of the Fairy” and “Darklight Four”, published by Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly press.

D.R. MacMaster is a writer/filmmaker/cartoonist and occasional pop-culture columnist. Currently he’s keeping with his tradition of doing way too much at one time, by rewriting two novels while writing a first draft of an original screenplay. He’s a graduate of the Ryerson University Film Studies Program and currently lives in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Mallory Makepeace was born on April Fools Day in 1980. Barely graduating from Mertier High School in Northern New York state, Mallory was later kicked out of the U.S. Air Force after one year in service for frequent misconduct of a discreditable nature. Mallory was next fired from a Resident Advisor position at Syracuse University after a mere month on the job. After eight years of drowning sorrows in beer, depression, and wanton hedonism, Mallory managed to acquire a Bachelors degree before running away to New Jersey. Divorced with no kids, Mallory continues a lifetime campaign to fail all the way to the top.

John Manning, a Halloween baby, considers his love of horror, dark fantasy, and generally scary tales his birthright. Although he has written a number of non-fiction articles for various magazines (and one tiny short story), it is only within the last couple of years that he has come into his own with the release of his first novel, Black Stump Ridge, a tale of supernatural horror set in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. “Disclaimer,” a short story that is part of the shared world setting of Lawyers in Hell (itself a part of the series Heroes in Hell edited by Chris and Janet Morris). Now he is testing the waters of the apocalyptic world of Sha’Daa with his story, “Asylum”, and another titled “Mr. Bassman” in the upcoming Sha’Daa IV – Catechism that will follow this book. As if writing is not work enough, he is also editing his own horror collection titled What Scares the Boogeyman? to be published by Perseid Publishing and scheduled for release Autumn 2012. Originally from Detroit, he now resides in Denton, Texas.

Edward F. McKeown is a native son of NYC from which he draws much of the color and attitude of his stories. He moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in search of reasonable housing prices and a commute free of the “non-bathing public.” In Charlotte, he developed an interest in the martial arts, achieving a black sash (belt) in Kung Fu and now studies Taekwando. He’s proved less adept at ballroom dancing but continues to plug away at it. Writing was always a desire and became a passion after his muse took up full time residence behind his eyeballs. He’s fortunate to be married to the noted artist, Schelly Keefer. Edward has authored both fiction and non fiction and is represented by The Faye Swetky Literary Agency for novel length work.

Beth W. Patterson was a full-time musician for over two decades before sidestepping into the world of writing (a process she describes as “fleeing the circus to join the zoo”). Much of her fiction is based on real-life musical experiences made more plausible by the infusion of things that go bump in the night. Her most recent book is Mongrels and Misfits and her short stories and poetry have appeared in the anthologies A Bard Day’s Knight, Cogs in Time 2, Rise of the Goddess, Poets in Hell, and Klarissa Dreams. She has also penned some nonfiction articles on music.

Patterson has played in fifteen countries across the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Asia. She appears on over a hundred and twenty albums (including seven solo albums of her own) in addition to a smattering of soundtracks, videos, commercials, and voice-overs. Various artists have recorded over a hundred of her compositions and co-writes. She studied ethnomusicology at University College, Cork in Ireland and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music Therapy from Loyola University New Orleans.

She is a lover of exquisitely stupid movies and a shameless fangirl of the band Rush. You can find her at www.bethpattersonmusic.com

Adrienne Ray is a graduate of Mary Washington College. She lives with her husband, Mick, and their two children, Mike and Elizabeth. Mike is in college now and Elizabeth is in high school. Adrienne is the Director of Religious Education at St. Peters Catholic Church and is also a Eucharistic Minister. She has written several short stories for online magazines. Adrienne is a sly humorist with a keen mind for funny characters.

Arthur Sanchez was born and raised in Manhattan and though he hasn’t resided on that overpopulated island for close to two decades, he still regards it as “Mother Concrete.” He has a degree in Theater and another in Political Science from Fordham University at Lincoln Center. He is, or has been at one time or another: an Actor, a Copy Writer, a Customer Service & Internet Services Manager, a Day Camp Leader, a Documentation Specialist, a Doorman, a Fiction Writer, a Grocery Clerk, a Playwright, a Project Manager, a Poet, a Receptionist, a Record Department Sales Clerk, a Secretary, a Security Guard, a Stained Glass Craftsman, a Technical Writer, and a Webmaster. He currently resides in Florida.

Jamie K. Schmidt—USA Today bestselling author, Jamie K. Schmidt, also writes erotic contemporary love stories and para-normal romances. Her Club Inferno series from Random House’s Loveswept line has hit both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble top one hundred lists. The Emerging Queen’s series has had excellent reviews on Goodreads and book two will head up Entangled Publishing’s new Otherworld line in 2015. Partnered with New York Times bestselling author and former porn actress, Jenna Jameson, Jamie’s hardcover, SPICE, continues Jenna’s FATE trilogy.

An avid knitter and jewelry maker, Jamie is never bored. She can often be found with a mug of tea on the computer flanked by her little dogs & fluffy white cat. You can follow her on twitter at @Jamiekswriter or on her author page on Facebook. When she’s not writing or crafting, Jamie loves playing games, everything from board games to strategy card games, console and online MMORPGs.has written many tales of the fantastic. A master of the short form, her sci-fi, horror, and fantasy stories are always delightful.

Hildy Silverman is the publisher of Space and Time, a nearly-five decade old magazine featuring fantasy, horror, and science fiction. She is the author of several works of short fiction, including “The Darren” (2009, Witch Way to the Mall?, Friesner, ed.), “Sappy Meals” (2010, Fangs for the Mammaries, Friesner, ed.), and the WSFA Small Press Award nominated “The Six Million Dollar Mermaid” (2013, Mermaids 13, French, ed.) She also contributed an essay on the history of genre magazines to Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (2011, Leigh Grossman, et al, eds.) In the real world, she is a Digital Marketing Communications Specialist for Siemens Hearing Instruments.

T. Anthony Truax was born in Hammond, IN and raised in and around the south side of Chicago, IL. He attended Northern Illinois University (go Huskies!) and finished with a Business degree in Banking/Finance and a minor in Communications from Cleveland State University. He presently works as an Analyst for a large bank. He lives with his wife and children outside of Cleveland. He is the author of A WHOLE NEW BREED, which is Book One in “The Naphtali Chronicles.” Since AWNB was accepted by Publish America, he’s done a TV interview for the show “Another Look” as well as interviews for the Sun Newspapers, Reader’s Nook Web-Zine, and West Life newspaper. Some of his short stories have been published in web-zines such as SHADOWGLASS and THE WRITER’S NOOK AND READER’S CORNER. Besides writing fiction, Mr. Truax also enjoys studying history and religion and lives with his family in Northeast Ohio.

John Vise—A proper lunatic, John Vise has spent most of his life telling lies and making monsters. Only Fate and sheer force of will have kept him from using these talents in an abominable field like politics. His wanderings have currently landed him in New Orleans, where he makes his scotch money by creating bronze statues and amulets while occasionally putting his bizarre musings into writing.

Any resemblances of this bio and persons living, dead, or John are sheer foolishness, and you have only yourself to blame if you take them too seriously.

Sarah Wagner lives in West Virginia with her husband and two sons. Most of her work tends towards science fiction and fantasy but she won’t thumb her nose at any good story that comes to her mind. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines, ezines, anthologies, and her own collection of science fiction, Hardwired Humanity. When she’s not writing, she’s either playing with her kids, watching so bad they’re good sci-fi B movies, or attempting to win her battle with laundry.

James I. Wasserman—The late James I. Wasserman was born on Halloween, October 31, 1974, and started reading at the age of 3. In elementary school, he was prevented from bringing a short story to a Young Writer’s Convention because the plot involved a decapitation. He wrote short stories as long as he could remember — with his “prodromal period” ages 14-16 when he started submitting short stories to various print magazines [and actually received a handwritten response from W. Paul Ganley despite the manuscript’s rejection]. The majority of his writing centered on supernatural/horror fiction. Before his death, he had published a scientific article in the journal Schizophrenia Research (his Masters’ Thesis at Queen’s University) in 2003 and his latest fictional work had appeared in the Lovecraft issue of Simulacrum Magazine. James received the Ph.D. degree in Behavioral Neuroscience from Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, shortly before his tragic death at the age of 31. “Sha’Daa: Last Call” is dedicated to the memory of James.

James jumped on board this cataclysm right before the cut-off date, and he did so with unswerving drive and enthusiasm. The last time I communicated with James he was very proud of his Sha’Daa chapter, and was looking forward to its eventual publication. Thank you for joining our team, James. Your contribution will never be forgotten. – Mike

“As an emerging writer it was great working with all kinds of talented people. I am pleased that I was asked to write a chapter for this book, and it’s been a really fun experience. It’s always nice to be able to showcase my somewhat deranged speculative fiction. I’d like to thank Michael Hanson for putting all this together (I can imagine him pulling his hair out right about now) – he’s been a great supervisor of the project. I hope that in the future I may be able to do something like this again. Until then, I remain the demented soul that is James I. Wasserman.” – James (April 27, 2005)

Rest in Peace, James. (EFM)

Leona Wisoker’s work is fueled equally by coffee and conviction; her debut series, “Children of the Desert,” is set in a world which is still struggling through a number of basic moral and developmental issues. The final result leaves room not only for serious questions but moments of laughter, and inevitably involves coffee. Her short stories have appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Futures: Fire to Fly Magazine, Alienskin.com, and Anotherealm.com. She is a reviewer for Green Man Review and the Sleeping Hedgehog; an editor for Damnation Books; and regularly blogs about writing and creativity.