Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher is the published author of the Dresden Files, telling the story of wizard Harry Dresden, who solves crimes in modern-day Chicago. The series is published by Roc, and its eighth book, Proven Guilty, came out May 2006, in hardcover. He has another series in the works from Ace publishing, titled the Codex Alera. The second book, Academ's Fury, came out in hardcover in July 2005.
Jim is a martial arts enthusiast with fifteen years of experience in various styles including Ryukyu Kempo, Tae Kwan Do, Gojo Shorei Ryu, and a sprinkling of Kung Fu. He is a skilled rider and has worked as a summer camp horse wrangler and performed in front of large audiences in both drill riding and stunt riding exhibitions. Jim enjoys fencing, singing, bad science fiction movies and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog.
Jim goes by the moniker Longshot in a number of online locales. He came by this name in the early 1990's when he decided he would become a published author. Usually only 3 in 1000 who make such an attempt actually manage to become published; of those, only 1 in 10 make enough money to call it a living. The sale of a second series was the breakthrough that let him beat the long odds against attaining a career as a novelist. All the same, he refuses to change his nickname.
Jim's Dresden Files are coming to the Sci-FI Channel. Check out the promo!
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Robert Crais
Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels. A native of Louisiana, he grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River in a blue collar family of oil refinery workers and police officers. He purchased a secondhand paperback of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister when he was fifteen, which inspired his lifelong love of writing, Los Angeles, and the literature of crime fiction. Other literary influences include Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker, and John Steinbeck.
After years of amateur film-making and writing short fiction, he journeyed to Hollywood in 1976 where he quickly found work writing scripts for such major television series as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Miami Vice, as well as numerous series pilots and Movies-of-the-Week for the major networks. He received an Emmy nomination for his work on Hill Street Blues, but is most proud of his 4-hour NBC miniseries, Cross of Fire, which the New York Times declared: "A searing and powerful documentation of the Ku Klux Klan’s rise to national prominence in the 20s."
In the mid-eighties, feeling constrained by the collaborative working requirements of Hollywood, Crais resigned from a lucrative position as a contract writer and television producer in order to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. His first efforts proved unsuccessful, but upon the death of his father in 1985, Crais was inspired to create Elvis Cole, using elements of his own life as the basis of the story. The resulting novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, won the Anthony and Macavity Awards and was nominated for the Edgar Award. It has since been selected as one of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.
Crais conceived of the novel as a stand-alone, but realized that—in Elvis Cole—he had created an ideal and powerful character through which to comment upon his life and times. Elvis Cole’s readership and fan base grew with each new book, then skyrocketed in 1999 upon the publication of L. A. Requiem, which was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller.
Crais followed with his first non-series novel, Demolition Angel, which was published in 2000 and featured former Los Angeles Police Department Bomb Technician Carol Starkey. Starkey has since become a leading character in the Elvis Cole series. In 2001, Crais published his second non-series novel, Hostage, which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and was a world-wide bestseller. Additionally, the editors of Amazon.com selected Hostage as the #1 thriller of the year. A film adaptation of Hostage was released in 2005, starring Bruce Willis as ex-LAPD SWAT negotiator Jeff Talley.
Elvis Cole returned in 2003 with the publication of The Last Detective, followed by the tenth Elvis Cole novel, The Forgotten Man, in 2005. Both novels explore with increasing depth the natures and characters of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. The novels of Robert Crais have been translated into 36 languages and are bestsellers around the world.
Currently, Robert Crais lives in the Santa Monica mountains with his wife, three cats, and many thousands of books.
Visit Bob's website. Photograph by Julie Dennis Brothers - Two Minute Rule, Simon & Schuster
Eric Maisel
Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is widely considered to be America’s foremost creativity coach. His more than thirty works of nonfiction and fiction include many classics for the creative person, among them Fearless Creating, The Van Gogh Blues (a finalist for the prestigious Books for a Better Life Award), The Creativity Book, Affirmations for Artists, Coaching the Artist Within, A Life in the Arts, Performance Anxiety, A Writer’s Paris, A Writer’s San Francisco, and many others.
Maisel, a licensed family therapist, national certified counselor, and trainer of creativity coaches, as well as a creativity coach with a thriving San Francisco practice, teaches core courses for the Integral Coaching Program at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and for the Creativity Coaching Association Certification Program. He lectures and delivers workshops nationally and internationally and is a sought-after keynote speaker for artists’ conferences and events, for instance recently delivering the keynote at the Novelists Inc. Conference in New Orleans.
Maisel holds undergraduate degrees in psychology and philosophy, master’s degrees in creative writing and counseling, and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology. He delivers staff development workshops on artists’ issues to institutions (for instance, for the staff of the U.C. Berkeley Counseling Center, the Savannah College of Arts and Crafts Counseling Center, and faculty of the American Conservatory Theater), is preparing a book on the addiction issues of creative people with addictions specialist Susan Raeburn, and founded and wrote Callboard Magazine’s “Staying Sane in the Theater” Column.
Maisel currently writes a monthly column for Art Calendar Magazine, the most widely-read business magazine for visual artists, has given hundreds of radio interviews and scores of print interviews on artists’ issues and creativity, and has appeared on television shows like PBS’s Thinking Allowed and The Quest. He currently provides a bi-weekly segment called “Creativity for Life” for The Art of the Song, heard on seventy-five stations nationwide, and delivers his message to the thousands who subscribe to his monthly creativity newsletter. In his private practice, he works with Academy-Award-winning screenwriters, Emmy-Award-winning composers, bestselling authors, and an international array of artists.
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Mary Jo Putney
Mary Jo Putney was born in Upstate New York with a reading addiction, a condition for which there is no known cure. After earning degrees in English Literature and Industrial Design at Syracuse University, she did various forms of design work in California and England before inertia took over in Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived very comfortably ever since.
While becoming a novelist was her ultimate fantasy, it never occurred to her that writing was an achievable goal until she acquired a computer for other purposes. When the realization hit that a computer was the ultimate writing tool, she charged merrily into her first book with an ignorance that illustrates the adage that fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Fortune sometimes favors the foolish and her first book sold quickly, thereby changing her life forever, in most ways for the better. (“But why didn't anyone tell me that writing would change the way one reads?”) Like a lemming over a cliff, she gave up her freelance graphic design business to become a full-time writer as soon as possible.
Since 1987, Ms. Putney has published twenty-nine books and counting. Her stories are noted for psychological depth and unusual subject matter such as alcoholism, death and dying, and domestic abuse. She has made all of the national bestseller lists including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USAToday, and Publishers Weekly. Five of her books have been named among the year’s top five romances by The Library Journal. The Spiral Path and Stolen Magic were chosen as one of Top Ten romances of their years by Booklist, published by the American Library Association.
A nine-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA, she has won RITAs for Dancing on the Wind and The Rake and the Reformer and is on the RWA Honor Roll for bestselling authors. She has been awarded two Romantic Times Career Achievement Awards, four NJRW Golden Leaf awards, plus the NJRW career achievement award for historical romance.
Though most of her books have been historical romances, she has also published three contemporary romances and is now expanding into paranormal historicals with strong fantasy elements such as The Marriage Spell (released June 2006 in hardcover) and Stolen Magic (written as M. J. Putney), which was reprinted in mass market in July 2006. Her first fantasy historical, A Kiss of Fate, won the Romantic Times award for best paranormal historical of the year.
Ms. Putney says that not least among the blessings of a full-time writing career is that one almost never has to wear pantyhose.
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