Russell C Connor was born in Tennessee in 1979, but moved to Texas soon after. He showed an aptitude for writing at early age. His first works of fiction were composed in kindergarten, mostly sequels to the movies that captured his young imagination. His father’s film preferences eventually turned his interests toward horror and suspense; movies such as Them!, The Exorcist, and The Evil Dead--coupled with the newly discovered writing of such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Robert McCammon--sealed his lifelong ambition.     He began his first serious attempts at fiction in high school, including his first unpublished novel--“The DeviAToRS”, the story of an evil, time-traveling government agency--and “Hookman and the Accidents,” a comic book about mutants who survive a nuclear war, influenced by a vast amount of time spent reading the illustrated adventures of various heroes each week. While attending college at Texas Tech University, he wrote the short story that would eventually gain him his first professional publishing credit: “Restroom Break,” detailing one man’s encounter with a gremlin-like creature while using a public restroom.     Others would follow over the next few years, but it wasn't until he wrote the short story “Goggles,”--later published in “Black Petals Magazine”--that the major driving force behind his fiction became clear. The story, about a public school under attack from a psychopathic gunman wearing goggles over his eyes, became the basis for his novel Race the Night, and is the first instance where the ‘Dark Filament’ is mentioned. This shadowy organization of evil and its frontline agents, called Incarnates, show up in several of Connor’s works, but other than the eradication of all children, their exact nature and goals remain unclear.     Russell C. Connor is a proud member of the DFW Writer’s Workshop and lives in Fort Worth, TX with his rabid dog, large movie, book, and comic collections, and is hard at work on his next novel.