Marco Guarda

I was born in quite a small town. At age eight, I moved to another small town; however, this had a nice library with a huge science fiction catalog nobody had yet read, except for the librarian. The books were new and I was falling in a new world I never thought could even exist. I owe that librarian a lot (Mr. Cosmo in my "The Librarian" is shaped quite a bit around him, whom I loved dearly.) In the basement of that library I was introduced to almost all the classics -- Bradbury, Simac, Asimov, Heinlein, Wyndham, Clarke (not yet Philip K. Dick -- I discovered him later on.) I can remember the long summers reading about Rama, or the Illustrated Man from Something Wicked This Way Comes, to Asimov's mysteries about robots. I can still picture that kid falling through all that!

I guess the fact that I was never been able to build a stable friendship with friends at an early age pushed me to explore other avenues of entertainment, one of which has certainly been reading.

I used to write small poems since I was eight or nine. I wrote stupid little things for my friends at school even at a later age. I wrote my first nonsense vomit draft (nobody is ever going to see that, I promise you) after a four-month session reading some of Stephen King's early works, from Shining to It, to Cujo, to Pet Sematary, to Carrie (being horror another genre the library was quite stocked up with as well.) But it wasn't until 2005 when I dared write something longer. It all started with another awful piece of writing -- a screenplay. Then I wrote another. And another. And Another. I started to place in a couple of screenwriting competitions, all the while beginning to know how a story should be told (if there ever was one way only.) Credence became a finalist at the Page Awards Competition in 2011, a year after The House of the Sun also placed, in 2010, a year after Etruscan won a bronze in the historical genre. All in all, the two early stories still need a bit of work, while I think Credence hits all the checkmarks for a good story.