Together, freelance writers and authors Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell are known as "The Renegade Writer".  Besides keeping up with The Renegade Writer website, they put out a monthly newsletter and have published several books.

Diana Burrell: Marketing manager. Laboratory assistant. Technical writer. Proofreader. Full-time mom. There are plenty of job titles on Diana Burrell's resume, which just goes to show that you don't need a journalism degree to make it as a freelance writer - a variety of occupations in one's past is far more useful!

Diana committed every cardinal sin of freelance writing from the beginning. A graduate of Smith College, she sold from her first ever proposal (single-spaced, two pages) to Connecticut Magazine when she was working as an advertising account executive in 1996. Soon she was making plans to quit and live the glamorous freelance life.

Okay, now that you've wiped that diet soda off your keyboard...It only took her a little over a year to realize this fantasy (she had to move to Boston and marry her gainfully employed fiancé first). But soon Diana was selling her words to Walking, 1099, Psychology Today, Contract Professional, Travelocity Magazine, Publish, and other magazines, Web sites, and businesses that needed a dependable writer.

Then, in 2001 she went and got herself in the family way. Took a year off to throw up and undersleep, and came back to a totally different economy. Her son was a 24/7 idea generator, however, and soon she was mining his life for Parenting articles and talking to editors at Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Day, and Family Circle about other projects.

Linda Formichelli: Start flipping through magazines at your local newsstand, and within minutes you're bound to land on Linda Formichelli's byline. Since 1997, Linda's written for more than 100 magazines, including Woman's Day, Wired, Writer's Digest, Redbook, Oxygen, Men's Fitness, Family Circle, Psychology Today...impressed yet? (If not, you can check out her publication credits at www.twowriters.net .)

Moreover, she cracked most of these markets by recklessly breaking most of the sacred rules of freelancing. Linda has also contributed to several health and pet-related books for Rodale press, and once sold a cheesy greeting card to Gibson Greetings

When she's not plotting world domination, Linda's working with cat
rescue groups and teaching e-courses in how to break into magazines. A graduate of SUNY Albany and University of California at Berkeley, she
lives with her freelancing husband, W. Eric Martin, and two freeloading
cats in Concord, NH.  http://www.lindaformichelli.com . 

Check out their books here. 

She spent fifteen years writing her first novel, Cannibal, finally taking a class with the famed wild man Gordon Lish, who unscrewed her head and stamped her poetic license. The book won the Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association first fiction prize. Vogue called Cannibal "a woman's Heart of Darkness" and it was also chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by Spin. Her most recent book of fiction, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, the New York Times called "a book of genuine grace and beauty." In Trailer Girl and Other Stories, she returns — as most authors do, eventually — home, with a novella about a wild child who hides in a herd of cattle.

Treason, her most recent book of poetry, concerns betrayal: child to parent, wife to husband, a nation to its people. Many of the poems circle the subject of mother as betrayer, creator and destroyer, both seductive and maternal, the tie that terrorizes while it comforts.

Svoboda also wrote film proposals for a number of years, and acted as producer for the Columbia Translation Series and the Voices and Visions series. After finding PBS-commissioned documentaries fraught with compromise, she joined ranks with the new videomakers and produced poetry videos and documentaries that have been shown on PBS, internationally, and at the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty. When not teaching at St. Petersburg or Miami or Williams or William and Mary or Miami or the New School or Sarah Lawrence, she writes proposals for new technology. Two boys and a husband complicate her life with gusto.

Steven Barnes is one of today's most exciting writers in the fields of speculative and science fiction. His books have been called "Exciting", "Inspirational", and "Ground Breaking". With Lion's Blood Steve has taken his work to a new level.

Steve, best-selling writer of the Emmy-winning OUTER LIMITS episode A Stitch In Time, as well as episodes of TWILIGHT ZONE, OUTER LIMITS, and ANDROMEDA., has been nominated for the Hugo, Endeavor and Cable Ace awards. (Check out Steve's bio on IMDB.)

Steve lives in Longview, Washington with his wife, award-winning author Tananarive Due, and his daughter Lauren, and with a dog, an assortment of cats, and a houseful of tame, invisible tyrannosaurs.

For twenty five years, Steve toiled in the trenches, creating books like "Dream Park" and "The Legacy of Heorot" (a New York Times bestseller) and writing for The Twilight Zone . His twentieth novel, Great Sky Woman (set 30,000 years ago in East Africa) comes out in June of 2006, and he has a film in development at Fox Searchlight.  (Check out his books on Amazon)

Over the years, Steve has spent countless hours lecturing on story telling, myth, and human consciousness--as well as the nuts-and-bolts of practical, selling writing.   

He taught at  UCLA and Seattle University, lectured at USC, Mensa, the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Lab, the Smithsonian Institute, the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop, and the Maui Writer's Conference.

Steve says "If Law Schools produced as few working lawyers as Writing programs produce working writers, they'd be prosecuted for Fraud!" He remembers when he was a little kid from South Central L.A. who just wanted to be a storyteller, and the agony he went through learning the lessons that enabled him to survive. After years of talking about it, he finally created a writing course called Lifewriting, designed to take the novice writer and zoom them ahead faster than they ever dreamed, in one year.

Lifewriting is a process that links the internal and external worlds of the writer, so that everything you learn in life automatically makes you a better storyteller, and everything you write automatically makes you a better person. Get more information at www.lifewrite.com .

Check out his books here.

Sylvia Day is the multi-published author of highly sensual romantic fiction set in historical and futuristic settings.  A former Russian linguist with the US Army Military Intelligence she now writes for Avon Books, Kensington Brava, Amber Quill Press, and Virgin Books Black Lace.

Sylvia woke up one morning and decided to pursue her life-long dream of becoming a romance author.  A year later she received her first offer of publication from Kensington following her Reader's Choice win in the Brava Novella Contest.  Less than a week later she was contracted with Black Lace.  Over the next few weeks she was offered contracts from three more publishers taking her from aspiring to multi-published almost overnight.

Check out her books here.

He is the Shamus Award-winning author of the Thomas Black detective series, which includes The Rainy City, Poverty Bay, Nervous Laughter, Fat Tuesday, Deviant Behavior, Yellow Dog Party, The Portland Laugher, The Vanishing Smile, The Million-Dollar Tattoo, Deception Pass and Catfish Café.

He is also the author of the Mac Fontana mystery series, including Black Hearts and Slow Dancing, Help Wanted: Orphans Preferred, Morons and Madmen, Going Crazy in Public and The Dead Horse Paint Company.

Earl has also put his knowledge of fire-fighting to use in his stand-alone novels, Vertical Burn, Into the Inferno, Pyro,  and his latest novel, The Smoke Room.

A good man, a skilled and dedicated firefighter, cracks his moral compass, in the best yet from the Seattle firefighter and Shamus Award-winning author. . .Emerson (Pyro, 2004, etc.), always reliable, surpasses everything he's done before with this sometimes painfully funny, occasionally poignant suspenser that adheres to its genre roots while achieving considerably more."

      --Kirkus Reviews (April 01, 2005)

"How can a book go wrong when it opens with the immediate aftermath of a pig's 11,000-foot drop into a Seattle home? The answer is: it can't really. Emerson's compelling latest defies easy categorization. Its mystery elements echo Seattle-based Thomas Black detective novels; suspense comes from the felony and cover-up that lie at the center of the story; and then there's the comedy of the deliciously deadpan Jason Gum, narrator and rookie firefighter, which spins the novel out of any conventional genre. There is, though a definite coming-of-age story, as rookie Jason learns the ins and outs of his challenging job, for starters. Jason's rocky affair with the lady of the pig-wrecked house, Iola Pederson (who's 20 years his senior), is just the first of many lessons he learns at this school of hard knocks . . . Emerson is funniest when he's at his most serious--and vice versa--in this consistently and always surprising yarn."

    --Publishers Weekly (March 21, 2005)

Check out Earl's books here

Former biologist turned author/editor Julie E. Czerneda has been a finalist for both the John W. Campbell (Best New Writer) and Philip K. Dick Awards, twice on the preliminary ballot for a Nebula, and has won all three English language Prix Aurora Awards (Canada’s Hugo), one for her standalone novel In the Company of Others, one for her short story, “Left Foot on a Blind Man,” published in Silicon Dreams, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, DAW Books, and most recently, for editing Space Inc., DAW Books.

Julie has published ten biology-based SF novels with DAW, including two ongoing series, the Trade Pact Universe and the Web Shifters, recently translated into Russian, with five more novels under contract. Her latest is the trilogy: Species Imperative, in which the potential impact of biological drives on civilization are examined through the eyes of a BC salmon researcher. Survival, a SFBC featured title on the Nebula Preliminary Ballot, came out in May 04 followed by Migration, (DAW, May 2005). Regeneration will be released in May 06.

Julie is currently at work on the first of her two book prequel to her popular Trade Pact Universe series, Stratification #1.

Check out her books here.

Stephen Spignesi is a New York Times bestselling author who writes about historical biography, popular culture, television, film, American and world history, and contemporary fiction. He is also a songwriter, a novelist, a screenwriter, a poet, an editor, and a book doctor.

Spignesi — christened “the world’s leading authority on Stephen King” by Entertainment Weekly magazine — has written many authorized entertainment books and has worked with Stephen King, Turner Entertainment, the Margaret Mitchell Estate, Ron Howard, Andy Griffith, Viacom, QVC, and other entertainment industry personalities and entities on a wide range of projects.  He has also contributed essays, chapters, articles, and introductions to a wide range of books.

Stephen’s three dozen books have been translated into several languages, including Farsi and Dutch, and he has also written for Harper’s, Cinefantastique, Saturday Review, TV Guide, Mystery Scene, Gauntlet, Lighthouse, and Midnight Graffiti magazines; as well as the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New Haven Register, the French literary journal Tenébres and the Italian online literary journal, Horror.It.

His 2005 debut novel Dialogues (Bantam), now out in trade paperback, was hailed as "a reinvention of the psychological thriller" and called "impressive" by the Boston Globe.

Stephen has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and other TV and radio outlets.  He appeared in the 1998 E! documentary, The Kennedys: Power, Seduction, and Hollywood, as a Kennedy family authority, and in the A&E Biography of Stephen King that aired in January 2000.  Stephen’s 1997 book JFK Jr. was a New York Times bestseller.  Spignesi’s authorized Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia was a 1991 Bram Stoker Award nominee.

In addition to writing, Stephen also lectures on a variety of popular culture and historical subjects and teaches writing in the Connecticut area. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the small press publishing company, The StephenJohn Press, which will soon be publishing a slipcased, limited edition of his historical fantasy, The Husbands of Coventry.

Stephen is a graduate of the University of New Haven, and lives in New Haven, CT, with his wife, Pam, and their very intelligent asthmatic cat Carter, named for their favorite character on ER.

 http://www.stephenspignesi.com

BLOG: http://drbexley.livejournal.com

His books include: Goat Dance, Breeder, Neverland, Dark of the Eye, The Children's Hour, The Halloween Man, The Nightmare Chronicles, You Come When I Call You, Purity, Nightmare House, Naomi, Mischief, The Infinite, The Machinery of Night, The Hour Before Dark, The Abandoned, Afterlife, The Priest of Blood; and Red Angel, Bad Karma, and Night Cage (these last three writing as Andrew Harper).

"Astonishing. Douglas Clegg writes of...nightmares with such clarity and passion you don't end up reading his books; you end up drinking them in. The Priest of Blood is a bloody gem."
::Christopher Rice New York Times bestselling author of A Density of Souls and Light Before Day.

"Clegg's Vampyricon offers a bold epic of a shadowy medieval world and a dark tale of swords, sorcery and vampires in The Priest of Blood."
::Christine Feehan NY Times bestselling author of Oceans of Fire and Dark Secret.

"Clegg's stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby."
:: Dean Koontz bestselling author of Odd Thomas and Watchers.

Check out Doug Clegg's books here.

Richard Montanari is the author of five hardcover novels of suspense:  Deviant Way (Simon & Schuster 1995), The Violet Hour (Avon Books 1998), Kiss of Evil (William Morrow 2001), The Rosary Girls (Ballantine Books 2005), and the upcoming thriller The Skin Gods (Ballantine Books 2006).  His books have been published in more than a dozen countries and in nearly as many languages. In 1996 he received the OLMA for Best First Mystery for Deviant Way.  

James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) has called Richard “a master storyteller.”  The Denver Post says his work “represents a stunning new kind of suspense -- stylish, sensual, gripping and direct.”  

His new Ballantine thriller, The Skin Gods, will be released in hardcover on March 14, 2006.  It will also be published in audiobook, audio download and e-book formats, and is slated as a Literary Guild, Book of the Month Club and Doubleday Book Club selection.  The Rosary Girls is scheduled for publication in Great Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Holland, and Denmark next spring. 

Richard is currently at work on the third book of his Philadelphia crime series. 

Read Audrey's review of The Violet Hour here.