Introductions

The Wyrdsmiths were started in 1994 by Lyda Morehouse and Harry LeBlanc, who met at a writing class at the Loft. By the time I joined (in 1997), it was a well-established group and I had to audition to get in. At that point, no one in the group had any professional sales: Harry had sold a short story to the respected semi-prozine Tales of the Unanticipated, and Lyda had an agent. That was it.

Now -- well, Lyda has had five books published, has turned in a sixth, and is working on a seventh. Kelly McCullough had his first novel published in July. My fifth book came out in July. Harry has had multiple professional short story sales.

Of the writers in the group who aren't yet professionally published, Rosalind, Bill, and Doug have all completed novels since joining the group.

Our two newest members are Sean Murphy, who is currently unpublished -- and the multiple award-winning author Eleanor Arnason.

When we do critique as a group, everyone participates equally: published or unpublished, multiply-award-winning or not. We all know and respect each other's work. I'm hoping that everyone in the group (with some time to spare, anyway) will feel free to post on this blog. One of the things I've found incredibly valuable about this group is the diversity of opinion. We have very different writing styles; we also have different writing processes and different approaches to editing, we write in different subgenres (and in some cases completely different genres), we have different areas of expertise. (Doug and Kelly, for instance, are the people I most want to vet my combat scenes.)

This blog will probably be primarily about writing, reading, SF/F, publishing, and topics that are at least tangentially related to one of those, but we all reserve the right to write about anything we find interesting.