Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. He has published nine novels (including the Avery Cates cyberpunk series and The Ustari Cycle urban fantasy series) and over fifty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006 and “The Little Birds,” published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2023. He writes about books for BookBub, the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest (which published his book Writing Without Rules), and everything else for Lifehacker. His tenth novel Five Funerals will be published by Ruadán Books in Fall, 2025. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.