BETH HUDSON

As a reader, Beth started early, going quickly from Doctor Seuss to Tolkien, with some stops along the way for Bambi, The Little Prince, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, and some Celtic and Norse mythology.  She embarked on her writing journey in third grade, when she wrote a short book about sentient planets.  Her enormous fantasy world of plastic animals sparked her own mythology and love of story, and the make-believe games played with her sisters cemented a  facility for wild creativity, and a sense that there were no limits to the imagination.

 

From junior high through her first years of college, Beth continued to write, producing three drafts of one novel, a handwritten manuscript of another, and a third novel which may someday get dusted off and revised as the bones of something better.  In college she took courses in Middle Welsh, Old Irish, Old English, Shakespeare, General Mytholgy, and Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and drifted out of a major in Astronomy and into a major in Linguistics with a minor in English.  These classes cross-polinated with her own stories, and taught her a great deal about culture and language that she is very grateful to have learned.  It was also in college that she was introduced to science fiction fandom.  She has been an active particpant in ICON, Iowa's oldest sf convention, for over thirty years, running panels, working with the drama group, and for many years designing the program book.

 

Post-college she fell into Real Life, and writing was temporarily sidelined.  During this time she managed to acquire a family, and has three amazing sons of whom she is very proud.  Deciding not to let her writing fall by the wayside, she began working hard on both old and new projects, and has been publishing short stories for the last decade, in anthologies and small press magazines.  In 2008, she released an illustrated chapbook, "Following Seas" (originally released by Sam's Dot Publishing and reprinted in 2013 by Alban Lake Publishing's "Outposts of Beyond"), and in 2011 published a novella, The Herd Lord, about a war among centaurs.  In 2017, she released a short story anthology, Seeing Green.

 

In addition to fiction, she composes poetry and music, sings, and plays guitar, harp, and piano. Other hobbies include Arthurian literature and mythology, Celtic mythology, jewelry making, and of course, reading.  She draws inspiration from many varied sources such as artwork, music, mythology, thunderstorms, and designer coffee.

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Etched in Fire and its sequel A Gift of Flame take place in the same world (though not the same time) as The Herd Lord.