Biolicious:
Welcome to my site! I'm Samantha Holloway, up-and-coming writer, editor and book reviewer. I can be reached at pirategirljack at gmail dot com, and below you can see my bios. If you'd like to see samples of my writing, a list of my publications, the services I offer, or anything else, please feel free to contact me-- just be sure to put the secret code WENCH in the subject line so I don't miss your email.
You can also find me at twitter.com/pirategirljack-- follow me to keep up on all my millions of weekly writings and ramblings!
Thank you!
Bylines:
(From NY Journal of Books): Reviewer Samantha Holloway is a freelance writer and editor, and is working on her first novel. Her most recent short story is in Fiction International’s FREAK issue and an upcoming anthology, and her academic work has appeared in The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader, and at various conferences.
(From Examiner.com): Samantha Holloway has been a scifi and fantasy fiend all her life, presents and published papers on both, and will soon marry her TV.
(From TV Geek Army): Samantha is a freelance writer, editor and book and TV reviewer. She's currently in gradschool and working on her first novel, and one day she'll rule to world. Or marry her TV. Whichever comes first. Follow! twitter.com/pirategirljack.
(From The TV King)
200 Word Bio:
Samantha Holloway spent the first ten and a half years of her life overseas, living in Turkey, Italy, Japan and Scotland, and credits the wide range of social and cutltural influences for her life-long love of and fascination with Fantasy and Science Fiction. That, and the fact that her dad’s bookshelves were always full of the classics. She read Bradbury at ten, McCaffrey at eleven, dove into (and quickly climbed out of) Crighton and Rice at twelve, and has always read as many books as she could squeeze into her head at any given moment. When she learned to read, she skipped from the practice books to Charlotte’s Web because the practice books were too slow and boring. She started writing in self-defense when the family was too poor to buy new books and hasn’t looked back since. She wrote her first complete novel at sixteen, and immediately declared it ‘derivative dreck’ and decided to focus on not doing that again. She writes the stories she wants to read, stories about girls who go and have adventures, worlds that crumble as you watch, gods born out of mortal upbringings, and is thrilled that other people want to read them, too.
500 Word Bio:
Samantha Holloway was born in Georgia, outside Atlanta, but quickly moved on to a decade of travel and cultural experience all over the world. Between the ages of a year and eleven years, she lived in Waynesville, North Carolina; Orlando and Pensacola, Florida; Isanbul and Ankara, Turkey; Brindisi, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Kirn and Dunoon, Scotland. She’s attended fourteen schools between preschool and gradschool, met hundreds of people, picked up random cultural appropriations and snippets of language from all over the world, and grew up steeped in a rich tea of ideas, cultures, mythologies, and landscapes.
In Japan, she learned to read and almost immediately decided that the learner books were too slow and boring and moved on to Charlotte’s Web. It took three months to read, but she read it four times that year. In Scotland, her teacher had a wonderful collection of British fairytales and children’s lit, which she devoured, two or three books at a time. By fourth grade, she was reading novelizations and mythology, and by sixth, she’d grown bored of kidlit and started reading adult novels. Victoria Holt showed her how people can fit together, but it was Anne McCaffrey who changed her life.
Samantha was always a storyteller, often making other kids play along, but one day in sixth grade when she was home sick, she grew bored of mom’s romance and mystery books and went instead to dad’s shelf where a girl rode on the neck of a dragon, and never turned back. It’s one of those ‘coming home’ stories: Science Fiction and Fantasy held all the action, adventure, weirdness, speculation, human condition, emotional entanglements, and nifty gadgets that she’d always been looking for. Within a day of finishing that first book, she’d written three stories; within five years, she had a novel done and three file boxes full of notes, stories, never finished projects, and ideas for hundreds more. That first novel was ‘derivative dreck’, but the decision had been made: this was the only option to answer the question What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?
She started taking writing classes, reading books about inproving the craft, devouring her way through classic scifi and all the anthologies and magazines she could find. She read fantasy, horror, science fiction, magical realism. She majored in English in college and absorbed all the classics.
Samantha’s first published work was a poem called “Night” published in highschool, followed by a scattering of stories and poems through college, some academic work after. After college, she started freelance editing and continues to write.
Now, she lives with her best friends and two cats, three fish and dozens of plants in a poorly-renovated Victorian in the Nation’s Oldest City, writing, reading, telling stories, and lucky enough to be part of a grad school that encourages her to keep doing all of that. She’s working on her first real novel and about fifteen side projects, and hopes to be a full-time writer within the next two years.
