Bio:Keith Vlasak
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"Keith Vlasak's prose flows as a river. The surface is smooth, placid; the current, strong. When you step in, immerse yourself, glide with the water, you can certainly feel the pull but you don't know where it's taking you. Then, suddenly, you round a bend, the river opens up, a new light bathes the water and the riverbank, and you realize you're in a radically different place." - George Konstantinow
I started out writing and drawing comic books in 5th grade and moved on to horror and fantasy. It was in 8th grade, which was in the high school where I went to school, in study hall where each page I finished got passed around and the appreciation made me determined to be a writer, when a popular senior stood by my desk trying to track down the last page of a story as the pages were returned to me. He wanted to finish the story, which made me feel terrific, of course; and he said, "I can always tell when you're getting to the good part -- you press harder with your pencil."
I always read a lot of fantasy and science fiction -- Heinlein, Niven, Zelazny, Moorcock and Star Trek novelizations early on; and eventually Robert Asprin, Jordan, Goodkind, Martin, Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts, Feintuch, Lois McMaster Bujold, De Lint, Joel Rosenberg, and everything by David Drake and all that he co-authored with others. The return to writing fantasy and science fiction for me, though, didn't come until the early 1990's from my reading the female fantasists -- Elizabeth Moon, Patricia C. Wrede, Tamora Pierce, Anne McCaffrey, Sherwood Smith, Jane Lindskold, and, more recently, Kristen Britain. I liked reading about the young women or girls who were the main characters in their work, and so I started writing about my own heroines. I wrote under the pen name Beverly Bonnie O'Neill, and I no doubt was and I am a little too male in my appreciation of aspects of my characters to exactly meld, but, hey, maybe that's my particular niche in the genre.
Visiting is a collection of a dozen of those Bev stories.
Wandering in the Wilderness is a collection of short stories as well; however, only a couple of those stories are dark genre suspense which appeared in horror magazines under the Bev pen name. The rest are a suspense story, a few quirky mainstream tales and some fantasies that I would like to think have a more literary bent than a genre focus.
I was born in 1950 and started sending out my stories in 1964, first getting published in the early 1970's. In the 1980's, I placed hundreds of poems and dozens of "literary" stories, reviews and a few history essays.
I've studied under some potent writers and poets: Robert C. Mallett, William Hedrington, A McA. Miller, Ted Deppe, Karen Joy Fowler, and Tim Powers.
After I started to sell my genre writing in the small press (my two professional rate sales were to "The Palace of Reason" and to "Speculon"), I stopped writing and submitting short stories to write "my novel." The first was Epiphany, which, in time — more than I expected — finally turned into the Epiphany that's available in both kindle and paperback at Amazon. Have Amber — Will Travel, which came next, interested Baen for over two years, including a re-write they asked for and re-submission before it was finally passed on and then, to admit how far from publishable it was, it took me another ten years and 70,000 additional words, besides replacing about all of the original 80,000 words, to finally be available in kindle and paperback.
Meanwhile, I've been a musician and song writer performing in garages and coffee shops, a painter, an award winning photographer (proud of that), programmer, farm laborer in high school, a ride-operator at Cedar Point Amusement Park, tree trimmer in Florida, dish washer, house painter, a convenience store clerk, manager, retail supervisor and all kinds of self-employed over the years.
And now I'm settled in and getting it out there. How much fun I've had along the way shows, too, I think. KeithVlasak 03:46, 24 August 2016 (UTC)