Biography: Patricia Simpson

Patricia Simpson grew up in a tiny mountain town and turned to reading as a doorway into the world of imagination. She was encouraged by teachers to develop her writing talent, but she pursued a degree in graphic design instead.

Though Patricia was not raised in a religious household, she was interested in spirituality from a very early age. She read stories of saints, of heretics, of eastern prophets and extraterrestrial visitors, of reincarnation and mummification. The concepts of life, death and the afterlife fascinated her. She was especially struck by stories of those who tried to cheat death—and thus began her lifelong interest in vampires, aliens, and paranormal phenomena. Through her incessant reading, she came to believe in other planes of existence, aware of a world different than the everyday life she knew in her little town. This belief structure set her up for a lifetime of curiosity about other cultures, philosophies, and alternate realities. Never one to accept someone else's dogma, she began as a child to investigate the true meaning of spirit, and is still in the process of developing her own brand of spirituality.

Her first work, "The Day He Opened the Coffin," was penned when she was twelve and illustrated in black and orange felt-tip marker. By high school, she was writing 200-page novellas about the American Revolution, ancient Egypt, and India. All through college and her first marriage, she dreamed of becoming a published author. She wrote so much on her old manual typewriter that the "e" fell off the striker key!

Luckily for Patricia, computers soon arrived on the scene. When she fell in love with her Macintosh, she came up with the idea for her ground-breaking first published novel, Whisper of Midnight. In the book, the ghost of a time-traveling Scotsman transforms into a 3-D hologram and steps out of the heroine's computer.

This book set the pace for her other works—all explorations into the unknown, the what-if, and the spirit world. Her books consistently garner superior reviews, and many of them have won awards as the best paranormal contemporary of the year. She has written about immortal French pirates, Native Americans who physically changed after a bone marrow transplant, and Egyptian shape-shifters. But her very favorite hero is the irascible Scotsman, a character type she has written into several novels.

Patricia's latest project is a new series called The Forbidden Tarot, which features a cursed deck of Egyptian tarot cards that can change a person's life forever. The first book in the series, The Dark Lord, will be published by TOR in January 2005. Currently, Patricia is hard at work on the second book, The Dark Horse.

For more details, please visit www.patriciasimpson.com