John Haggerty is a writer living in Northern California. His stories have appeared in Confrontation, The Los Angeles Review and The Santa Monica Review, among others. He is currently at work on a novel about greed, gambling, religion, sex and death set in the deserts of Nevada. It’s a comedy!
Francesca Haig grew up in Tasmania, gained her PhD from the University of Melbourne, and was a senior lecturer at the University of Chester. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and anthologies in both Australia and England, and her first collection of poetry, Bodies of Water, was published in 2006. In 2010 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. The Fire Sermon, her first novel, was published in 2015. She lives in London with her husband and son. Visit FrancescaHaig.com and follow her on Twitter @FrancescaHaig.
Paul Haines (8 June 1970 – 5 March 2012) was a New Zealand-born horror and speculative fiction writer. He lived in Melbourne with his wife and daughter.
Raised in Auckland, New Zealand, Haines moved to Australia in the 1990s after completing a university degree in Otago, where he became an Information Technology consultant. He attended the inaugural Clarion South writers workshop in 2004 and was a member of the SuperNOVA writers group. Haines had more than thirty short stories published in Australia, North America, and Greece. In 2007, he volunteered as a mentor for the Australian Horror Writers Association. (more…)
Dr. Hal is most known for his voicework on the Half-Life and Dota 2 videogames, as well as his long-standing position as Master of Church Secrets for the Church of the Subgenius. He is also an author, screenwriter, movie and tv actor and Underground Cartoonist, having appeared in R. Crumb’s WEIRDO magazine, as well as being an expert on dinosaurs. He can be heard and seen as the chief raconteur of the ASK DR. HAL on Twitch (see https://gonzotronics.net/adh/)
Shane Halbach is a writer and blogger living in Chicago with his wife and three kids, where he writes software by day and avoids writing stories by night. He has been accused of being obsessed with pirates, bacon, zombies and his kids (not necessarily in that order). He is a knitter, guitar player, budding accordionista, and a board and card game enthusiast. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, among others. He blogs regularly at shanehalbach.com, or can be found on Twitter @shanehalbach.
Marianne Halbert is an author from central Indiana. Her quiet horror stories have been described as “whimsical and terrifying” as well as “elegant and macabre”. Her latest collection is “Cold Comforts” (Crossroad Press, 2019) and is full of slow-burn horror stories. Marianne is a member of the HWA and was on the “How to Haunt a House” panel at V-Con (virtual Necon) 2021.
You found M. Halstead dabbling in fiction writing in an overpriced apartment in central North Carolina. You were looking for a graphic designer, but instead found remnants of various crafty hobbies and interests, a pile of swords, and an unread stack of books. You have uncovered no evidence of M. on social media but did eventually find the website mhalstead.com. You retreated quietly, so as not to disturb the artist (allegedly) at work.
In J.R.’s first collection, You Shall Never Know Security, he included a publication history of all the stories contained therein, thinking that was the thing to do. Nowadays, he’s not so sure if anyone cares about that sort of stuff. Instead he’ll just provide a hat tip to some venues where his work has been published or produced, such as the Drabblecast, Pseudopod, Nossa Morte, 19 Nocturne Boulevard, The Harrow, and Revolution Science Fiction. He appreciates them (and the other magazines that have published his work, some now long-departed) for their support.
Writing is not how he supports himself financially, which explains the general delay in his output. He’s sometimes asked if he’ll ever consider writing full-time, to which he’s amassed considerable pithy responses. (One such response: “I have, but I’ve gotten used to eating daily.”) Until the market improves dramatically for depressing, despairing weird fiction that appears exclusively in small press magazines or podcasts and is published by an author with a cookie-inspired nom de plume (google “hamantaschen”), then part-time his writing shall remain.