Kevin Hearne biography

Born and raised in Arizona, Kevin Hearne attended college at Northern Arizona University, earning a degree in English Education. It was during this time that he first got the writing bug, thanks to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He worked for the college newspaper both as an editorial cartoonist and as a feature columnist, and started a novel that he never finished. He taught high school English for three years in California before returning to teach in Arizona.

Hearne decided to try an epic fantasy. He wrote for three years and came up with 200,000 words or so, which turned out to be a bit long for an unknown author's debut. He chopped it down and sent off a 114,000-word version to some agents, who all rejected it, but he also sent it to one publisher, who replied after only two weeks that it had passed the "first round" and would get passed on to other editors soon. No other word came for many moons and he began to work on something else while he waited. Kevin had an idea for a web comic featuring a Druid who could communicate mentally with animals, especially his own hound. Zuda.com was running a contest, and he scripted out eight pages and completed six of them before realizing that if he submitted his work, DC would own a piece of the characters, or maybe own them outright. He didn't want that, because he liked these characters too much to share with anyone else. So he wrote a novel about Atticus and Oberon instead, and it turned out to be great fun and easier to write than anything else he'd tried before. He finished writing Hounded in eleven months, and still hadn't heard back from the publisher about his epic fantasy.

He sent out a round of twelve queries and got some nibbles, but all ultimately rejected him. He tweaked his first chapter for the twentieth time, revised his query letter, and sent out another round of twelve queries. He got some more nibbles, more rejections, but also an offer of representation from Evan Goldfried at Jill Grinberg Literary Management.

Evan sent Hounded to nine publishers on September 9, 2009, along with teasers for the next two books in the series. Inside of two weeks, four of those publishers bid on the book at auction, and one of them, ironically, was the same publisher who had been sitting on his epic for a year.

Hearne wrote Hexed in five months and Hammered in six to accommodate the back-to-back release schedule.

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