Authors Quill Joel C. Scoberg artist Breanda Petsch author Patrick MacPhee author Seth Atwater Jr

Joel C. Scoberg lives on the beautiful Gower Peninsula in Wales, United Kingdom, with his very supportive wife, two somewhat feral children, and a growing menagerie of animals. He predominantly writes science fiction and fantasy stories, usually at night after his children have gone to bed and before he collapses from exhaustion. His stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Gwyllion Science Fiction and Fantasy, 365tomorrows, and Every Day Fiction.

Joel’s love of science fiction and fantasy goes back further than his earliest memories. From watching The Never Ending Story so many times he wore out the video, to his family’s Christmas tradition of watching the original Star Wars trilogy back-to-back, and discovering The Hobbit on a caravan holiday as a teenager and reading it, utterly mesmerised, in one sitting. He hopes to one day write a story that will equally enthrall a reader and make them fall in love with fantastical characters that, currently, only exist in his head.

“The Stench of Freedom” was inspired by the transformational perspective that becoming a parent brings. Joel had long dreamt of becoming a writer, but pursuing a career in law and the long hours that entailed, as well as the fear of ridicule for putting something so personal as your own creation into the world, acted as excuses not to follow those dreams. Then, when his children were born, he realised he could hardly tell them to pursue their dreams if he hadn’t done so himself.

The Contest, one of the most prestigious writing and illustrating competitions in the world, is currently in its 42nd year and is judged by some of the premier names in speculative fiction. Englewood, Colorado artist Ms. Breanda Petsch is a winner in the L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future Contest earning her a trip to Hollywood for a week-long master-class workshop, an awards event and her winning art will be published in the international bestselling anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 41. Breanda is currently studying at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Breanda Petsch was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1998. Most friends and family call her Bre, but she appreciates when her full name is used and pronounced properly: “Bree-ann-duh.”

Breanda has been glued to the page from the moment she learned how to draw and paint. When she wasn’t filling her imagination with adventures around the neighborhood, she was playing pretend through endless comics.

She used to watch animated films on repeat. Seeing the animators’ stories through behind-the-scenes clips made her want to bring amazing stories to life too.

She took her first painting and drawing classes in high school, and won awards in art shows and other larger competitions. She was proud to see her work on the walls, and had an itch to find out what more she was capable of.

Although she was encouraged to follow a practical career path with her high academic standing, Breanda knew she needed to pursue art the moment she stepped into the “art lab” of an art institution. Nothing else made sense anymore, and her father did everything in his power to support and push her toward her dreams, even driving her to night classes at that very institution. As a young child, Patrick frequently saw his mother engrossed in a forest’s worth of fantasy and science fiction novels. Wanting to join in the fun, he read his first ‘big-person’ novel, The Fellowship of the Ring, when he was eight. Although far above his reading level, he pushed through, several hours a day, taking literally longer to reach Rivendell than Sam and Frodo. This magical experience hooked him on speculative fiction forever.

In his teens, he was bit by the writing bug and later abandoned a degree in engineering to pursue a degree in English literature. He fell into teaching, first as a way to support his writing hobby/habit, then as a vocation where he was lucky enough to spend every day helping young people become better versions of themselves. Over a twenty-year teaching career, Patrick has taught phys-ed (i.e. dodgeball) to Fortnite-obsessed middle schoolers, the enigmatic complexity of Hamlet to university-bound high schoolers and everything in between. He has learned that almost every part of the curriculum has room for a little humor — sometimes a lot of humor.

When he’s not writing fantasy and science fiction, Patrick enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons with his wife and two children and going on long walks in the woods with his golden retrievers, Ciri and Arwen. Seth Atwater Jr is a twenty-four year old homebody who loves books---both writing and reading them. He has always had a passion for good stories and the real human beings they help us to understand and empathize with, but he didn't settle on writing as a career until he attended his first "Life, the Universe, and Everything" speculative fiction symposium in Utah in 2017. The inclusion of his short story, "A World of Repetitions," in this anthology is a big step toward achieving that dream, and he is extremely grateful for the opportunity that the "Writers of the Future" team have given him.

Seth currently lives with his parents and five of his seven younger siblings on a family farm in the midwestern United States. He works as a tech specialist for his dad, who is a marriage and family therapist who runs his own life coaching business. Seth's family are all very talented artists and writers, and it is their support in the form of love, encouragement, and critical feedback that has made it possible for him to come this far as a writer.

Almost all of Seth's stories start with a "what if?" The stories themselves then take the form of an answer to whatever interesting question was on his mind, and usually relate to both the vastness and intimacy of human experience. In the case of "A World of Repetitions," the question was, "What if the world was stuck in a time loop, but everyone kept their memories, not just the main character?"