When James Davies isn’t repairing linear accelerators or parenting his eighteen daughters—four feral humans and fourteen well-mannered hens—he reads, writes, and fells trees.
James was raised among the rolling green hills of England’s “home counties” but was introduced to fantasy and science fiction when he stumbled across David Farland’s The Sum of All Men in a random bookstore in Kenya when he was ten.
After devouring the entire Runelords series, James joined the Runelords online community where David Farland then introduced him to the Writers of the Future Contest and urged him to write.
Various stages of life have interrupted James’s passion for writing (living in China with Shaolin monks, a master’s degree in electronics, falling in love, and relocating to Maryland, US). But two years ago, he approached it from a new direction: no longer writing for the sake of writing, but studying the craft with a focus on improvement.
“Ashes to Ashes, Blood to Carbonfiber” is the amalgamation of a vivid dream and an extrapolation of technology under the shadow of human nature at its worst. And its best.
“Ashes” asks: If you could sacrifice body parts to make anything of equal mass, what would you create? What would you sacrifice?
James also has a complete epic fantasy novel that he is hoping to publish in the near future.
For updates and more of James’s work, visit www.jd-writes.com.
May Zheng was born in 2003 in central New Jersey. She has been creating art for as long as she can remember, almost always centered around fantastical characters and narratives of her own invention. Searching for a means to fully realize her imagination, at the age of twelve she began attending the Art Academy of Hillsborough, founded by Kevin Murphy, world-renowned illustrator and portrait artist and founder of Evolve Artist Education. At sixteen, May began to apprentice with Murphy in illustration and portraiture. Although her apprenticeship applies artistic training and skills in oil paint, May also works digitally to create illustrations and fan art.
Her first book cover was published by kOZMIC Press in September 2021 for The Mad King by Rebekah Mabry. At age nineteen, she was recognized by the 16th Art Renewal Center Salon Competition in the professional tiers of Imaginative Realism and Portraiture. May has also worked with Evolve Artist Education to paint via livestreams to an international audience. Selections of her work are on display at Highlands Art Gallery in New Hope, New Jersey.
In addition to her apprenticeship, she is currently a full-time student at Rutgers University, pursuing a major in cognitive science, as well as minors in history and Russian literature. She is looking forward to working in art full time as the owner of an art school, a freelance illustrator, and a portrait artist.