Biography
Ryan Southwick was born October 1973 in Erie, Pennsylvania, and moved to Southern California at age six. His overactive imagination took root in grade school, where he and his superpowered friends vanquished many an imaginary foe in epic battles that surely made their classmates wonder which asylum they’d escaped from.
His first computer, a Tandy 1000 EX, came in junior high and kicked off a lifelong obsession. He spent countless hours poring through the GW-BASIC programming guide, where he and his brother created dozens of text adventure and simple graphic games, pushing the poor 8088 processor to its limits. Jr. High also introduced him to Dungeons & Dragons and Palladium role-playing games, the latter of which planted the seeds for his first novel.
Summer of his high school sophomore year found him working in a hotel in a remote part of England, where he became friends with the head waitress. The two fell in love during a rampant pen-pal relationship. They married in 1992 and moved to San Francisco, where they reside to this day.
Ryan earned an Associate of Science degree from the City College of San Francisco and treated cancer patients as a Radiation Therapist in Berkeley for many years until a friend recruited him into OpenTable.com, beginning his much-anticipated tech career. Over 25+ years in the industry, he worked for several biotech firms and startups doing everything from programming to databases to game development, management, system administration, and agile coaching. He spent the latter part of his career building up a software team in Armenia.
In 2010, during the middle of his tech career, he had just read an unappetizing urban fantasy novel and arrogantly thought, “I can write better than that!”
No. No, he couldn’t. Two years and five drafts produced the first version of Angels in the Mist, universally regarded by beta readers as “meh.” So he reimagined the characters, revised the plot, and found a publisher willing to take a chance. Two editors and a lot of learning later, Angels in the Mist launched to 4- and 5-star reviews. Since then, Ryan has published four additional books in The Z‑Tech Chronicles plus a novelette.
Holtondome (2022), set on a dystopian Earth 400 years in the future, marked his first foray outside the Z‑Tech universe. In that same year, he released the stand-alone sci fi cozy romance One Man’s Trash, and an experiment in spicy romance, Dragon Assassin. Book 2 of the Timeless Keeper Saga, New Denver, followed in 2023. He is currently working on a new science fantasy series, the Lost Colonies, which he plans to self-publish in 2024.
Ryan’s skills as a Writing Coach earned him a spot on the Coach Foundation, one of the biggest names in the coaching industry. In addition to writing, coaching, and enjoying retired life, he is also a founder of the entrepreneurial networking startup HyeTech.
