William I ZardWilliam I. Zard is the pen name for Patrick G. Heck's fantasy fiction writing. He was born in Ohio, but moved to Massachusetts at the age of ten. His originally intended career was Biology, and he earned a Bachelors and a Masters in Biology at Clark niversity and S. U. N. Y. Buffalo. However, he soon found that his hobby of computer programming offered substantially more lucrative opportunities. He spent most of a decade writing Java Web applications and then transitioned to enterprise search systems. Since 2012 he has been a successful independent consultant and is a committer and PMC member for Apache Solr and Apache Lucene.Despite his distinctly non-literary career thus far, he has always been an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction. His first book, Metamancer, started as the final project for his creative writing class at Clark University. Since the assignment was to write a "short story" and his writing quickly expanded to twenty-seven pages, with a lame tacked on ending, it wasn't much of a success as a final project. However, the story wouldn't leave his head and as new ideas arose he kept writing them down and sometimes adding to the text. After many years bursting with ideas and repeatedly having to re-read his own half written novel to get going again, he finally resolved to push forward and finish it. Nine months later it was ready for publication.In addition to science, computers, and fiction he also enjoys autocross racing, computer games, the game of go, and flying airplanes. Only time (and sales numbers) will tell if he can turn his writing hobby into a third career. He certainly hopes to find time for at least three more books in the Skeltouch Saga. Read More Read Less