Helen E. (nee Mercier) Davis

I was born in 1962 in Shreveport, Louisiana. When I was two, my family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. When I was four, we moved to the Canal Zone in Panama. There I started school, shortly before I turned five. We stayed there until the middle of my fourth grade, when we returned to Shreveport. I graduated from Huntington High School in 1980.

I graduated from Oberlin College in 1984, and attended graduate school at the Unversity of Kentucky for two years. My scholastic interest was Cell Biology and Developmental Biology.

In 1987 I married my husband, Steve Davis. In 1992 we had twin girls, Elizabeth and Janette Davis. I am currently what is called a housewife, though a better job description would be Household Manager. I keep things running around here, smooth or not.

Writing. I have created stories in my head for as long as I can remember, and I wrote a few of them down, but I was in the eigth grade when I started writing in earnest. In tenth grade, the year I started High School, I began to submit my stories to professional markets. I picked up my first beta reader that year, a girl who was in choir with me. Every day I would go into class, and she would be waiting for that day's installment I also joined a Writer's Club. Many people told me that they liked my stories, but unfortunately, I received almost no critical feedback. People would tell me, in the gentlest way possible, that I needed to work on my spelling and grammer -- but even handing them red pencils did not encourage them to actually point out the mistakes.

In college I was too busy to get much writing down, but I did a lot of mental work on a story. When I went off to graduate school I started to write it down. It was a complicated story, and I could not handle writing it from start to finish. I could, however, write out scenes. I typed them up, and collected them into a pile in my drawer. I slid each scene into its proper place. After finishing that draft, I had to go back and retype the story, this time putting it transition scenes.

Over the years, in and around all the details of a life cursed with being interesting, I have written much and placed several stories with professional markets. I also wrote several more books, the bulk of which are in two main universes: the Silent Runner Universe (science fiction) and the Wizardlands Universe (fantasy.) Some of these books are offered through self-publication, some of them are still waiting to be published.

In 2019, just before the Great Pandemic, I teamed up with my daughter to create a small press dedicated to retro-style Science Fiction and Fantasy, Dead Fish Books (www.deadfishbooks.com) but with twenty-first century inclusiveness. Our first anthology, Uiverse of Attractions, debuted in the summer of 2021.