ABOUT

My name is Fred Rayworth and I’m a writer. I’m also a small-time published author with several short stories under my belt. My short story, The House, appeared in Between the Pages, 2003.  The Walk Home was published in Writer’s Bloc, 2006 and The Basement in Writer’s Bloc 2, 2008.  Those three stories were part of my West Virginia horror trilogy, or as I like to call horror, “icky bug.” My first sci-fi short story, Fun In The Outland, was included in First Voyage, 2008.  Don’t Mess With a Snorg was included in the anthology A World Of Their Own, 2010. It introduces Meleena, the main character in my fantasy novel Meleena’s Adventures – Treasure of the Umbrunna, released by Mystic Publishers on November 12, 2015.

Other short stories include the autobiographical story Galf which appeared in the anthology Writer’s Bloc IV, 2012, another autobiographical short story Dye-No-Myte which appeared in Writer’s Bloc V in 2014. My short supernatural story The Mine Pit was selected for Writer’s Bloc VI in 2015 and my latest non-fiction op-ed piece, Orange Orange Orange appeared in Writer’s Bloc VII in 2016.

My driving passion is for novels. I started writing in 1995 with the science fiction novel, The Cave. That first attempt inspired me to continue on and I dove right into The Greenhouse, my first full-blown icky bug novel. From there I switched to action/adventure novels or the more politically correct term today which is adventure/thrillers. I started with Lusitania Gold which was just published by New Link Publishing on August 20, 2017, and over the next decade wrote Spanish Gold, Palmdale Gold, Turkish Gold, Lompoc Gold, and Las Vegas Gold. After that, my wife said I should try my hand at fantasy and from there, Meleena’s Adventures – Treasure of the Umbrunna came forth.

After 17 years of querying agents and publishers, and 689 rejections, I finally found that publisher for Meleena’s Adventures and Lusitania Gold.

I also write articles on telescope making and visual observing (some published in The Reflector magazine put out by the Astronomical League) and edit the monthly Observer’s Challenge for the Las Vegas Astronomical Society, which includes participants nationwide.  When not writing, I may be found gardening, woodworking, or at a dark site with my telescope looking for faint fuzzy galaxies. Some of my experiences may be found on other pages here on this web site.

I contributed weekly autobiographical articles for several years to the now-defunct Lets Talk Nevada web site. In these Sunday installments, I talked about living overseas. The first group was living in Turkey. They included, at first, just text but the feedback asked for photos. I dug into my archives and started adding images. Because of that, I went back into my long-dormant project to scan all of our family photos onto the computer. I expanded on that and went back to the beginning of my Air Force career and then to Spain in the 70’s, Arizona, West Virginia, Texas and back to Europe again. I was in the middle of our second tour in Spain in the mid 80’s when the site was taken off line due to the death of the site founder. It was a fun ride while it lasted!

The Let’s Talk Nevada project was something I’ve always wanted to do and avoided having to slog through an autobiography that nobody would ever buy. After all, I’m no celebrity and the premise for purchasing my book isn’t all that special. However, individually, I seem to have some pretty decent and humorous anecdotes, given the feedback I received from the web site. They kept asking for more, and I was more than happy to oblige! Unfortunately, there are about a hundred or more links to my articles out there at Let’s Talk Nevada and all of them are broken!

Oh well…

Maybe one day, I’ll post them here at Fred Central.

In the meantime, I’m concentrating on my published novels, which include Treasure Of The Umbrunna and Lusitania Gold.

Enjoy the site!