McKiernan was a draw for me to attend World Fantasy Convention 2010 in Columbus OH (I had seen him in WFC1996). Also, a draw for me was S.T. Joshi, writer of weird fiction and nonfiction. I tracked him down to sign a copy of Atheism; he was walking with Darrell Schweister in the vendor room. At that time I didn't know who Darrell was. It was years later when I learned to love his weird fiction (he eventually ran the programming for WFC 2016 and got me to moderate a few panels, and I interviewed him too in 2018)
I discovered Howard Andrew Jones here as he talked on a panel about Black Gate Magazine. He got me hooked on it, but it ironically was nearest the end of its print era. I got HAJ to sign a copy of Issue 15 2011 when I met him at GenCon 2017. HAJ encouraged me to get involved with the GenCon Writers Symposium (I volunteered since then, even chairing the event in 2023) and interned with HAJ's Tales from the Magician's Skull. Via GenCon and several connections with John O'Neil and HAJ, I took on an editing role at the Black Gate website in 2019.
At the time I was beginning to look for markets for my Dyscrasia Fiction worked. I was eyeing ChiZine Publications and EDGE -Tesseracts; the latter invited me to hear readings from their authors.
