BIOGRAPHY: MAYNARD SIMS www.maynard-sims.com

 Supernatural novels, Shelter, Demon Eyes, Nightmare City, and the three Department 18 books (www.dept18.com) Black Cathedral, Night Souls, and The Eighth Witch, have been published mass market and eBook in the USA. Samhain have published a further standalone supernatural novel, Stronghold, in 2013, and the fourth Department 18 book, A Plague Of Echoes, is for 2014. Their first four novels have been purchased by Amazon Publishing. They have completed a standalone ghost story, Stillwater, and are working on Department 18 book 5.

 Thrillers include an adventure thriller, Dark Of The Sun, which is a 2013 publication and has its own website www.lenmaynard.co.uk . Falling Apart At The Edges, a crime thriller, Through The Sad Heart, an action thriller, Let Death Begin, a mystery thriller, are completed, and they are working on the Dark Of The Sun sequel.  

 They have written screenplays based on the first two Department 18 books, The Eighth Witch, and some of their ghost stories. They have just completed an original, commissioned screenplay. They are working on a commissioned mainstream story.

 Collections include, Shadows At Midnight, 1979 and 1999 (revised and enlarged), Echoes Of Darkness, 2000, Incantations, 2002, two retrospective collections of their stories, essays and interviews, The Secret Geography Of Nightmare and Selling Dark Miracles, both 2002, Falling Into Heaven in 2004, The Odd Ghosts, 2011, and Flame And Other Enigmatic Tales, and A Haunting Of Ghosts, both 2012.  

 Novellas, Moths, The Hidden Language Of Demons, The Seminar, and Double Act, have been published in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2007 respectively. His Other Son, a novella, is completed.

 Numerous stories have been published in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, the anthology, Strange Tales, which won the World Fantasy Award 2004 and the Del Rey anthology, The Children Of Cthulhu.

 They worked as editors on the first seven volumes of Darkness Rising, and the two annual Darkness Rising anthologies. They co-edited and published F20 with The British Fantasy Society. As editors/publishers they ran Enigmatic Press in the UK, which produced Enigmatic Tales, and its sister titles. They wrote essays for the Mark Chadbourn website At The World’s End.

 Email contact can be made at Mick@micksims.f9.co.uk or len@lenmaynard.co.uk

3 Cutlers Close, St Michaels Mead, Bishops Stortford, Herts, CM23 4FW, England 

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So here I am, checking my email and lo and behold I find a link to this wonderful social network.  I'm pretty excited about it for its not often that there are networks that I assume cater to authors or artists, so this is quite nice.  I first wanted to take the time to introduce myself.  

Once upon a time there was this crazy broad named Julie.  Yep, she was crazy but in a good way.  People had this tendency to call her 'Jewelz, Julie-bird, The Jeweled Canary' etc. which she didn't mind so much.  Pet names I suppose but the final nickname became a sort of totem for her.  This girl loved to sing as much as she loved to write.  Dancing around her house, in the shower, in the middle of Wal-Mart produce section with her two children in tow she'd belt out a song that would resonate through the entire building.  She's never had security called on her for it...yet...but she has received countless stares, giggles, and shaking of heads as the common folk of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan walk past.  

This woman has such a story to tell though.  If you give her the chance, she'd be apt to talk your ear off.  She'll tell you the tales and woes of her past battling the monster called Divorce and severing the ties that bound her into a miserable existence.  Of her forthcoming rebirth within the arms of her knight in vomit colored PJ's.  She'll talk of her struggles through distance and time apart from her love, and how soon her soldier will be returning for good this time.  This girl is a dreamer, you see, creating blankets with the yarns that unravel through her subconscious.  From pen to paper she draws the reader in like a deep breath and with quite a hypocritical stance on the subject, she has nary a whisper of a care for grammatical faux pas, but meticulously grinds down, and polishes the rough edges of others' work.  She takes her time much like a samurai perfecting his form, though she is much too quick in her thoughts to spend too much time on the trivial; always in a hurry and rush in her own life.  For others, though, she gives so much time.  

Creator of a reinvented household where she learned the tools of her trade and went far beyond that in the literal sense; she reinvented her house and transformed it into a whimsical world full of pleasantries, paint jobs, new cupboards and walk-in closets.  From there, architecture and renovation was simply not good enough for her, no, she wanted more (and she was bored) so she started a company with a namesake that plagues the writers of history.  The proverbial cinder block to the head upon where the silent dead and dumb reside behind.  Writerz Block.  From there, she would transform the work of independent authors and dreamers such as herself with the help of her magical friend, Caffeine.  These two became inseparable; accomplishing so much that even Time became quite jealous.  With their powers combined they wrote, compiled, edited, formatted, and published a book of poetry with none other than Aramey, another kindred spirit.  Once the dynamic duo (this Julie chick and Caffeine) had finished this venture, they began on others including following Irony, Karma, and Fate around observing how these three goddesses tormented a tryster among others in epic poetic fashion.  They swam within the Faces in Still Waters and became haunted by the spirits and souls within them.  They ventured hand in hand in two other books while during a third, reflected upon the past while doling out advice during a warped mental time-traveling excursion (memoir).  Unfortunately, they went without a TARDIS and had to foot it.  They also didn't have an interpreter available to decipher the scrawling but they made away with it anyway and remembered the peculiarities.  They also developed a sort of warped codex.  On their adventures, they happened upon other adventurers with their own mega bosses to defeat.  So they stopped along these side-quests and lent a hand.  

Now, currently this adventurous, perhaps slightly twitchy and overworked individual manages to live her caffeinated life much like a cyborg (it has been said that her energy level far exceeds that of a fictitious pink bunny rabbit who apparently spent copious amounts of time being the wall-flower bandgeek in school, sporting shades and dancing about drumming his drum as she skips to its beat.  She and that bunny go waaaaaaay back not unlike Alice as well (no, not the future-seeing sparkly vampire Alice although she's kinda cool too and probably the best out of the lot of them.  Well...Jasper's cool too.).  Aside from her day job raising two angels (angels in disguise,mind you.  Terrible twos and sanity severing six's) she finds other ways of keeping herself too busy to breathe such as taking a few courses on coursera.org to further develop her craft or bragging  about (Development and Marketing Director) a miraculous literary magazine, Miracle E-zine.  

She looks forward to sleeping roughly once a month which is about two seconds after she collapses into a heap and power naps for 12 hours then wakes up ready to go it again!  At 32 years young, tattooed, pierced, and 32 flavors of all kinds of funky, this girl...well...is honestly quite modest yet obscenely quirky.  When she does something, she opts for flair because subtlety isn't exactly 'her thing' or so she says.   

So this Jeweled Canary takes flight and soars through the mind, body, and soul in search of adventure, personal ethical philosophy and wisdom whether its domesticated adventures or following the jet-stream within the mind.  If you close your eyes and listen really closely though, you can probably hear her belting out 'The Sound of Music' as she does the dishes.