M. Todd Gallowglas

WRITING
I fell in love with writing when I had my first creative writing project assigned in third grade. The task: Write a story where you explore a haunted house. Well, explore I did, and I found all sorts of vampires, ghosts, ghouls, and zombies. I ran back home, went into my secret hideout, got my laser blaster and lightsabre, and went back to the haunted house and made sure those beasties wouldn't eat any of my neighbors. My teacher made the note, "You sure showed those monsters." Well, ever since then my brain seems to be wired to the fantastic when it comes to penning fiction. I've tried my hand at other stuff, and it's just not for me. I appreciate and love reading fiction of other styles, and many great works of literature both classic and contemporary have influenced my writing; without "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, I would never have imagined the short story that lead to the novel I'm working on now, Dead Weight. I have several stories available for Amazon Kindle: the novellas "Knight of the Living Dead" and "The Dragon Bone Flute," as well as my novel TEARS OF RAGE: First Chosen. I am also a regular fiction contributor for the "Call of Chtulhu" card game by Fantasy Flight Games.

Storytelling

I started working the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire at Black Point Forest, Novato when I was seventeen. Being in my late teens, I latched onto the bawdiness of the time period we were attempting to represent with the zest and fervor you might expect of a youth that age. I especially loved short, raunchy jokes and the reactions I got from telling them. A man named "Stripes" saw something in my delivery of these jokes that set me apart from other kids my age, and so he took me under his wing and I became an apprentice gleeman. And no, Robert Jordan did not invent the term, it's been a storytelling tradition in Europe for centuries. Flash forward over twenty years, and I am one of the premiere storytellers in the Northern California Renaissance Faire comunity, with the occasional foray into Southern California and Nevada.