Bradley P. Beaulieu is the author of The Winds of Khalakovo, the first of three planned books in The Lays of Anuskaya series. In addition to being an L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award winner, Brad's stories have been published in various other places, including Realms of Fantasy Magazine, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future 20, and several anthologies from DAW Books. His story, "In the Eyes of the Empress's Cat," was voted a Notable Story of 2006 in the Million Writers Award.
 
Fantasy and science fiction were about the only thing Brad ever read regularly growing up. The first thing he recalls reading was J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit in fourth grade. He remembers it specifically because it was such a wondrous experience, losing himself in that book. He went on to read the Lord of the Rings. He didn't really know it at the time, but those books set the stage for everything from then on. He was constantly on a search for other books that created a world as deep and immersive as Tolkien's. The love of creating worlds eventually led him to role playing games. Dungeons and Dragons, Villains and Vigilantes, James Bond, Rolemaster, GURP, Champions, and on and on. Although he played characters and enjoyed it, he felt more at home running the games. Creating the worlds and the characters and the plot.
 
Brad didn't come to writing early. He dabbled a bit in high school, and then again in college, but he really didn't start to become serious about the craft of writing until he was well into his career in software programming. It was a difficult transition, moving from something as structured as software to something as flowing as writing, but it was also freeing. It was like coming home. Those books he read when he was younger he could now create on his own, from scratch, to do with what he would.
 
In 2004, after writing a few books that were (unknown to him at the time) destined for the trunk, Brad went to Edinburgh with his wife. While there, they stopped at the National Gallery and Brad found some amazing pieces and he thought: I'm going to take the ones I like best and make a story out of them. Those paintings, all of them portraits, were the seeds of The Winds of Khalakovo. After finishing up the novel he was working on, he got down to business with Winds. By this time he had attended several highly respected writing workshops. Viable Paradise, Writers of the Future, Orson Scott Card's Literary Bootcamp, and finally Clarion in 2006, the last that was held in East Lansing, Michigan. All of these helped Brad's craft, but it wasn't until years after completing them that the instruction really sunk in. They all helped to prepare Brad for writing Winds, which was by far the biggest undertaking he had tackled in fiction so far.
 
After finishing Winds, Brad went to the World Fantasy convention in San Jose in the fall of 2009. He had known about Night Shade books for years. He'd been tracking their progress and they seemed like a company that was steadily gaining steam. They had always produced great looking books from wonderful authors, so he thought it was worth a shot to approach them and see if they'd like to take a look at his latest project. Jeremy Lassen agreed to look at it, and several months later made an offer on not just Winds, but the entire trilogy. He was kind enough to give Brad some time to find an agent, which Brad did. Posthaste. Russell Galen agreed to take Brad on as a client, and soon after, Brad signed the contract with Night Shade.
 
Brad is a software engineer by day, wrangling code into something resembling usefulness. He is also an amateur cook. He loves to cook spicy dishes, particularly Mexican and southwestern. He lives in Racine, Wisconsin with his wife and two children.
 
As time goes on, however, Brad finds that his hobbies are slowly being whittled down to these two things: family and writing. In that order…

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