OryCon 32

Page last updated Sep 07 2010.


P.N. Elrod
P.N. Elrod has sold more than twenty novels, at least as many short stories, scripted comic books, and edited several collections, including Strange Brew and Dark and Stormy Knights. She's best known for The Vampire Files series, featuring undead gumshoe Jack Fleming, and would write books more quickly but for being hampered by an incurable chocolate addiction. More about her toothy titles may be found at www.vampwriter.com.

Sharyn November
Sharyn November is senior editor at Viking Children's Books and editorial director of Firebird Books (www.firebirdbooks.com). Her many authors include John Barnes, Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Diana Wynne Jones, Ellen Klages, Kelly Link, Nnedi Okorafor, and the editorial team of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. She is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Professional Category -- in 2004 for Firebird, in 2005 for editing. Firebirds Rising second anthology in the series she edits, was a 2007 World Fantasy Award Finalist. She lives outside of New York City, where she drinks entirely too much tea and leaves chaos in her wake. Her personal website is www.sharyn.org.

Chad Savage
Chad Savage was a dark artist from the moment his pudgy little hands were able to set crayon to paper. He was the kid that loved Halloween better than Christmas, rooted for Godzilla and Dracula, and really worried his Southern Baptist parents. It was very clear early on that Chad wanted to celebrate Halloween 365 days a year.

With a degree in illustration and graphic design, 20 years' experience drawing and designing for the horror genre and over 10 years' experience in web design, Chad got his wish. Halloween, for him, is every day. His company Sinister Visions Inc. is thriving, providing web design, print design, illustration, sound design, font design and more for the horror, Halloween and haunted attraction industries. Sinister Visions currently hosts/manages close to 200 dark websites; odds are you've already been to at least 10 of them.

Chad's artwork has appeared in (and on the cover of) numerous books and magazines and garnered awards from same. His original fonts have appeared on books, magazines, DVDs, CDs and in movies. Besides running genre sites like DarkChicago.com and ZombiePinups.com, he is the Art Director and Lead Designer for annual horror conventions like Flashback Weekend, HAuNTcon, and the World Horror Convention (2006), and proudly sponsors numerous dark genre events and projects.

Chad instituted and runs the annual HorrorFind Weekend Horror Art Show; he was also the Art Show Director for Convergence 10 in Chicago in 2004, the World Horror Convention in New York in 2005, co-chairman and Art Director for the World Horror Convention 2006 in San Francisco and the Flashback Weekend Horror & Dark Art Show in 2006.

Chad currently lives and works outside of Chicago (OK, in Indiana) with his fabulous (and tolerant) wife Alex, lovely daughters and their fairy dogmothers Bishop & Pumpkin. His personal website is www.chadsavage.com.


Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn't killed for using her typewriter at three o'clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite. Her upbringing has left her with a love of rattlesnakes and a deep fear of weather, which really explains a lot.

Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan's personal anecdotes end with things like "and then we got the anti-venom" or "but it's okay, because it turned out the water wasn't all that deep." She has yet to be defeated in a game of "Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?," and can be amused for hours by just about anything. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir's Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.

In her spare time, Seanan writes and records original music. She has three CDs currently available: Pretty Little Dead Girls, first released in May of 2006; Stars Fall Home, released in May 2007, and Red Roses and Dead Things, released in January of 2009. She is currently recording a fourth, titled Wicked Girls, scheduled for release this year.

She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, "With Friends Like These...", as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie that has the words "blood," "night," "terror," or "attack" in the title.

Last but by no means least, Seanan is also an author; her first novel, Rosemary and Rue [Amazon] |[Mysterious Galaxy], was published by DAW Books on September 1st, 2009. The sequel, A Local Habitation [Amazon] |[Mysterious Galaxy], was released on March 2nd, 2010. She's working on several other books, just to make sure she never runs out of things to edit. In 2010, she was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author; over Labor Day weekend at Aussiecon 4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, she beat out four other authors to win that prestigious award.

Seanan's short fiction has appeared in Ravens in the Library, Grants Pass, and The Edge of Propinquity. Her Sparrow Hill Road series is one of the featured Universes on The Edge of Propinquity for 2010, and she belongs to the Book View Cafe, an organization of professional authors who like to give away free fiction. It's fun! Check them out.

Seanan also writes as Mira Grant, author of the Newsflesh trilogy. For more information on Mira and her works, see MiraGrant.com.

OryCon 32 is a production of Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. (OSFCI), a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation.
Artwork is copyrighted and graciously provided by the Artist Guest of Honor, Chad Savage.

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