Kevin Killiany

I was raised in the heart of Florida in the 1950s and '60s, growing up in a pink cinderblock house in a community hemmed by orange groves against the edge of a swamp and the shore of a lake. I didn't read anything not assigned by a teacher until te summer of 1967, when an injury--the outcome of an idea that looked good at the time--laid me up for several weeks. In an effort to keep me sane my mother brought me armloads of books from the library, which I used to build forts... until the red-and-yellow cover of Have Space Suit, Will Travel lured me into looking inside. To my surprise, I read it--twice--and was hooked. In later years, I read and loved mysteries, fantasies, and historicals, but my reader's heart first imprinted on YA science fiction.

I left Florida for California in 1973, and wandered a bit before settling on North Carolina's coast. Along the way I became a husband, a father (three times), and in 2013 a grandfather. I've had a half-dozen careers in those forty years, working in education or mental health. These days, when I'm not writing I'm teaching English at a community college.

Oh, did I not mention writing? I began in 1967, right after I started reading, and--if you overlook thousands of rejections and thirty-three years of practice--was an immediate success. Since my first sale in 2000 I've sold three novels, a half-dozen novellas, and thirty-one short stories. I've also co-written or co-edited nineteen role-players' resource and rule books.

My writing is fueled by two questions: "What happened?" and "What if?" The first motivates my exploration of lesser-known history, and the second drives my speculations about how our world would be changed if we had chosen differently. From those two streams my stories flow.