Call me K.C.
That’s not the name on my birth certificate or passport, but it’s close enough these days.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio and have nested other places over the years, but these days I call the Pacific Northwest home.
When Rachael and I moved to West Seattle in 2007, it was a three-day, non-stop leap of faith.
No jobs. No place to live. Even so, when we first saw West Seattle, we felt we had come home.
I began writing speculative fiction professionally not long after we settled in.
So far, Sixty-five of my short stories have been published. Two have been prize winners. Coward’s Steel won the 2009 Hubbard Writers of the Future Award and I won the 2012 Older Writer award from the Speculative Literature Foundation with Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole.
Two other stories – both published in Analog – have made it to the honorable mention lists of Gardner Dozois’ annual The Year’s Best Science Fiction – A Quiet Little Town in Northern Minnesota in Issue 31 and The Moon Belongs to Everyone in Issue 30.
I am a 2010 graduate of the Clarion West writers workshop, attended Mike Brotherton’s Launch Pad workshop in July 2011 at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and studied with SFWA Grand Master James Gunn at the University of Kansas, summer 2009.
My work has appeared in various print and online magazines, including Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed, Pod Castle, and Murky Depths, the award-winning but now defunct British fantasy magazine. Other stories have appeared in anthologies. The most recent are Little Green Men – Attack! from Baen Books and Brave Boy World from Pink Narcissus Press.
My first short-story collection, Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities, was published in January 2012 by Hydra House Books. It’s available from Hydra House, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. My first novel, Lifting Up Veronica, also was published in January 2012 by Every Day Novels as an online serial. E-book and print versions are now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Ten years have come and gone since we moved here and we live in Federal Way now, south of Seattle. I remain a fanatic about the written word, oral story-telling, corny jokes, blues guitar [Rachael is a picker], big water, lighthouses, sad country songs and all things to do with motion pictures.
I have been a news reporter, media relations coordinator, property manager, mail carrier, postal supervisor, corrections officer and improvisational comic, but I’m retired now from other things and write full-time.
Finally, I am a child of Joe and Mandy; sister, parent and grandparent, friend, lover, wife and evolving human being. By last count, I am version 5.0.
But you can call me K.C.
K.C. Ball 