Diana Gabaldon, 1997 Guest Editor

Diana Gabaldon holds a master's degree in marine biology and a Ph.D. in ecology, and spent a dozen years as a university professor before turning to write fiction full-time. Her previous publishing history includes scholarly articles and comic book stories for Walt Disney, as well as the award-winning novels Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, and the recently-released New York Times bestseller, Drums of Autumn. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband, three children, and a large number of animals.

Jeff Carlson, Series Editor

Jeff spent several years doing desktop publishing before jumping into the Web publishing arena by founding and editing eSCENE, the Internet's only yearly anthology of the best short fiction appearing on the Web. A stint as Managing Editor at a small Seattle-based book publisher convinced Adam and Tonya Engst that they should tap him for the same position at the widely-read newsletters TidBITS and NetBITS. Jeff has published articles in Macworld and Adobe Magazine, and was a contributing editor and columnist for Adobe's online venture, adobe.mag. In addition to writing and editing, he's an accomplished Web designer and consultant through his company Never Enough Coffee creations. People around him seem to possess strong urges to constantly ask him questions.

Shannon Christenot, Assistant Editor

"Many aspects of editing fascinate me, but the effective use of language is more stimulating to me (for the sake of a now very extended metaphor) than a good cup of coffee. Language can be both startlingly aggressive and powerfully delicate. Therefore, I spend as much time as I can, while still making the rent, reading both literature and garbage. In the midst of a horrible novel I'll find a brief passage of lyrical brilliance that simultaneously amazes and depresses me. Amazing, because it captures and immortalizes a brief piece of truth; depressing, because the rest of the novel is so bad. In these instances, I flash back to a childhood fascination with those globe paperweights full of snow that look suspiciously like that Southern delicacy grits. The trappings were tacky, the snow swirled sluggishly, but at the heart of it was an immutable scene.

"When I'm not dividing my time between the literary canon and whatever else in reach from the couch, I passively-aggressively garden in my window boxes (I will grow peas), ignore both my refrigerator and my treadmill (they cancel each other out in the great cosmic weight battle), see an occasional movie, and take an occasional walk."