E.C. Ratliff

My name is E.C. Ratliff, late of Hardin, Montana...and I have officially lost my mind.

After spending my entire life expecting to be a musician, training as an actor, as the child and grandchild of music -teachers-...I became a writer.

Apparently, this isn't entirely unexpected to everyone else in my life.

(Especially my parents. My long-suffering, always-willing-to-stop-at-a-bookstore parents, who raised up a child who wanted to visit Books-a-Million instead of Toys-R-Us...and occasionally got detention for reading in math class. A kid whose senior picture involves sitting in a literal pile of books. Oh, and did I mention we moved five times? WITH all them books...)

You see, an asthmatic boy born in Eastern Montana has a lot of time to sit in bed reading. That's dangerous enough, because it makes him vulnerable to such ever-so-modern-and-sensitive things as chivalry cycles, OLD faerie tales, and, worst of all: Rudyard Kipling and Brian Jacques. Because then that boy falls in love with That Kind of Story.

Falling in love with stories of swords, warriors, and heroic last stands is a dangerous, dangerous thing. It might lead one to other things, like learning the history about those last stands, finding old songs and poems (singing them, in public, God bless Scotland and her bloodthirsty music), and THEN -egad- actually writing things like them!

So, naturally, when Ian (aka LawDog) opened up an anthology about possibly the most famous island of desperate last stands in history...I had to pitch something.

Not only did someone like it, HE ACTUALLY PUBLISHED THE THING.

Enjoy this, and everything else.