William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty five novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of publishers and his work has appeared in a large number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he's not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory. William Meikle, P.O. Box 319, Catalina, NL, CANADA, A0C 1J0 email: meiklewilliam@yahoo.com Website: https://www.williammeikle.com I'm a sixty-something Scottish lad from Ayrshire originally. I'm a graduate of Glasgow University, in Botany, after which I had a career in IT in London, Aberdeen and Edinburgh before leaving the rat race behind. I now live in a small fishing town on the eastern side of Newfoundland on the Atlantic shore with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. I didn't chose writing, it chose me. The urge to write is more of a need, a similar addiction to the one I used to have for cigarettes and still have for beer. It's always been there, in the background. I wrote short stories at school, and dabbled a couple of times over the years, but it wasn't until I was in my 30s that it really took hold. Back in the very early '90s I had an idea for a story... I hadn't written much of anything since the mid-70s at school, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I had an image in my mind of an old man watching a young woman's ghost. That image grew into a story, that story grew into other stories, and before I knew it I had an obsession in charge of my life. So it all started with a little ghost story, "Dancers"; one that ended up winning a prize in a national ghost story competition, getting turned into a short movie, getting read on several radio stations, getting published in Greek, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew, and getting reprinted in The Weekly News in Scotland. Since then I've sold over 300 short stories, including appearances in the likes of NATURE and THE WEEKLY NEWS among many others, and I've had over 30 novels published in the horror and fantasy genre presses in the USA, with more coming over the next few years. I went full time in 2007. Haven't starved us yet. The biggest influences on my particular style of writing would have to be the reading I did as a teenager in Kilbirnie in the early-seventies, before Stephen King and James Herbert came along. I graduated from Superman and Batman comics to books and I was a voracious reader of anything I could get my hands on; Conan Doyle, Alistair MacLean, Michael Moorcock, Nigel Tranter and Louis D'Amour all figured large. Pickings were thin for horror apart from the Pan Books of Horror and Dennis Wheatley, which I read with great relish. Then I found H P Lovecraft and things were never quite the same. Mix that with TV watching of Thunderbirds, Doctor Who, the Man From Uncle, Lost in Space and the Time Tunnel, then later exposure on the BBC to the Universal monsters and Hammer vampires and you can see where it all came from. Oh, and Quatermass. Always Quatermass. A lot of my work is still particularly Scottish though. My series character THE MIDNIGHT EYE is a Glasgow PI who gets involved with the occult and monsters. He works out of a flat above Byres Road, smokes like a lum and drinks like a fish. I have a lot of fun with him and he appears in three books and numerous short stories and novellas of mine. My current work is largely focused on creature features, in particular the S-SQUAD series from Severed Press. The series is up to book #16, with more coming, and features a team of sweary Scottish squaddies facing up to big beasties around the world. Think Dog Soldiers meets Aliens through a Ray Harryhausen lens and you'll get a feel for them. You can find details of all of these and more at https://www.williammeikle.com William Meikle, P.O. Box 319, Catalina, NL, CANADA, A0C 1J0 email: meiklewilliam@yahoo.com