William I. Zard
AUTHOR

William I. Zard

Science Fiction & Fantasy
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William I. Zard is the pen name for Patrick G. Heck’s fantasy fiction writing. He was born in Ohio, but moved to Massachusetts at the age of ten. His originally intended career was Biology, and he earned a Bachelors and a Masters in Biology at Clark University and S. U. N. Y. Buffalo. However, he soon found that his hobby of computer programming offered substantially more lucrative opportunities. He spent most of a decade writing Java Web applications and then transitioned to enterprise search systems. Since 2012 he has been a successful independent consultant and is a committer and PMC member for Apache Solr and Apache Lucene. Despite his distinctly non-literary career thus far, he has always been an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction. His first book, Metamancer, started as the final project for his creative writing class at Clark University. Since the assignment was to write a “short story,” and his writing quickly expanded to twenty-seven pages with a lame, tacked-on ending, it wasn’t much of a success as a final project. However, the story wouldn’t leave his head and as new ideas arose, he kept writing them down and adding to the text. After many years bursting with ideas and repeatedly having to re-read his own half written novel to get going again, he finally resolved to push forward and finish it. Nine months later, it was ready for publication. His writing is influenced by a wide variety of authors. In his mind, the strongest influences would be Ursula K. LeGuin, David Eddings, Glen Cook, and Dragonlance Chronicles/Legends. Robert Jordon is also a big influence though in both positive and negative ways. He also admires Patrick Rothfuss, but didn't discover his work until very late in the writing of his first novel. None-the-less two different early readers claimed his work reminded them of Rothfuss, and one friend (who is not a Sanderson fan) exclaimed "Well it's better than Sanderson!" He really hopes these folks weren't just buttering him up (which is the null hypothesis, yet to be disproved by sales numbers). In addition to science, computers, and fiction he also enjoys autocross racing, computer games, the game of go, and flying airplanes. Only time (and sales numbers) will tell if he can turn his writing hobby into a third career.
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