Court Ellyn

A child of the American Great Plains, Court Ellyn moved wherever the oil industry took her family. Born in the panhandle of Texas, she has lived from one end of the Lone Star state to the other, as well as New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Indiana. She is settled at last, or so she hopes, in a growing town southwest of Oklahoma City with her husband, her fat cats, and her writing.

Having to move frequently, drove her to fill her playtime with characters and stories that, at first, she acted out with her sister. Then, when she was fourteen, she began writing what she calls “poor and unrealistic historical fiction,” primarily because her mother discouraged her from reading and writing in the fantasy genre. But because of films like The Never Ending Story, The Princess Bride, and Willow, her fate was sealed. Throughout high school her tastes gravitated toward the fantastical until she secretly purchased her first fantasy novel at a gas station. Her mother warned her, “Be careful.” And so Ms. Ellyn has been carefully reading and writing fantasy ever since.

Ms. Ellyn attended the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, which she claims provided an excellent liberal arts education but failed to dispel the dragons. She graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2000 with a degree in English and History and an emphasis in Creative Writing. Shortly after, she married her high school sweetheart and determined to write professionally. Sadly, she learned the hard way that a college education does not guarantee book sales. Regardless, Ms. Ellyn’s stories have since appeared in numerous magazines such as Kaleidotrope, Silver Blade and the Dead Robots’ Society’s Explorers: Beyond the Horizon anthology. In the spring of 2012, she celebrated the publication of the first novel of a fantasy series, over which she labored for a more than a decade. After a literal outpouring of sweat and tears, both Volumes of Book 1 are available at CreateSpace and at Amazon.

Having had struggled with the loneliness that often comes with a writer’s career, Ms. Ellyn began seeking online writing communities. After a brief odyssey, she happened upon a site named LegendFire. She was a member there for only two months when she learned that the community’s builder was selling the site. If no one purchased it, he was going to shut it down. Filled with righteous panic, Ms. Ellyn raised enough support from among the members to save the site. And so for the past three years, Ms. Ellyn has had the honor and privilege of administrating an entire community of like-minded souls, and loneliness and isolation are horrors of the past.

It was at LegendFire that Ms. Ellyn encountered Joshua Mercier, who, upon entering those hallowed corridors, mysteriously called himself “The Bearded Scribe.” Fearing yet another evil spammer was sneaking in among the students, Ms. Ellyn conducted a brief investigation of this new member and approached him with a hand snug about the haft of her Anti-Spammer Sword of Doom for an amiable interrogation. But lo! and behold, what she discovered was far removed from what she expected. Now she is happy to add The Bearded Scribe to her list of blogs and Joshua to her roster of writers and friends.

Check for Court's reviews of a range of Fantasy titles, found in our Book Spotlight section, as well as her website and her own blogs, Wordweaver, and Found, and Unapologetic.  You can also find out more about her by visiting her interview post, or by following her at the sites below.

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