Library of Souls (Riggs) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Englewood, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.A., University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Santa Monica, California


In his words:
Hi, I'm Ransom, and I like to tell stories. Sometimes I tell them with words, sometimes with pictures, often with both.

I grew up on a farm on the Eastern shore of Maryland and also in a little house by the beach in Englewood, Florida where I got very tan and swam every day until I became half fish. I started writing stories when I was young, on an old typewriter that jammed and longhand on legal pads.

When I was a little older I got a camera for Christmas and became obsessed with photography, and when I was a little older still my friends and I came into possession of a half-broken video camera and began to make our own movies, starring ourselves, using our bedrooms and backyards for sets.

I have loved writing stories and taking photographs and making movies ever since, and have endeavored to do all three.

Education and early career
After high school I went to Kenyon College, a very pretty and quite old by American standards college in rural Ohio, where I studied literature and got a degree in English. Then I fulfilled a long-held dream and went to film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

I'd been making films since the backyard-masterpiece days of my childhood, but at USC I learned how to make them bigger and better and shiny-looking. I graduated with what I thought was a pretty slick thesis film under my arm and went out into the world to conquer the film festival circuit and then Hollywood—or at least that was the plan, though it didn't quite work out that way. I spent a few years writing scripts and taking meetings and getting not very far, trying any way I could to get noticed.

All the while I was writing: for five years I had a gig as a daily blogger for mentalfloss.com, and I also wrote for their magazine, contributed to a few books they published through Harpercollins, and wrote for a couple of other publications here and there, as well.

Books
All of which turned into an opportunity to do some work for a small publisher who knew my editors at mentalfloss. That was Quirk Books, who asked me if I was interested in writing a book about Sherlock Holmes for them. I jumped at the opportunity. That was The Sherlock Holmes Handbook (2009).

Next came Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, born out of my love for vintage photography and bizarro stories, and I never looked back.

I still love movies and I still make short films (here are some recent ones) and one day I will make a feature—when the time and the material are right. These days, though, I'm loving being a novelist, a photo collector, and an occasional short filmmaker.

Personal
I live near Los Angeles, California, with my wife, the lovely and talented Tahereh Mafi—who is also a writer, and if you haven't read her lovely and exciting Shatter Me books you're missing out—and we type and travel and drink tea together and it's really quite wonderful. (Adapted from the author's website.)