Rick Overwater is a longtime Calgary-based journalist, fiction author, internationally distributed recording artist and songwriter.

Rick’s crime stories and speculative fiction are available in a number of anthologies and novels. His nonfiction has appeared in publications ranging from Snowboard Canada to the Globe and Mail and his songs have appeared on Canadian campus radio top-ten charts.

His graphic novel, Futility: Orange Planet Horror was nominated for an Aurora Award in the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Best Graphic Novel category. As well, his short story, “House of the Knight’s Nail,” appears in the anthology By the Light of Camelot, and was nominated for an Aurora in the “Best Related Work” category.

Recent works by Rick include the illustrated novel Sky Devil and the Haunted Air on Stranger Fiction Press, and the crime-fiction anthology Murder Most Alberta on 7th Terrace, in which Rick is both the co-editor of and a contributing author.

A lifelong musician, Rick occasionally performs under the pseudonym Ric Ornery and is a founding member of the country-punk band Agriculture Club. He is also frontman/guitarist for the Calgary “space punk” band The Deadly Skulls. He is increasingly obsessed with the idea of pairing books and music, and recently created a comic with a soundtrack recorded specifically for it, assisted by the Deadly Skulls, released by Sketchy Records and Metal Nerds Comics.

Rick holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Broadcast Studies from Gonzaga University and a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Besides studying fiction writing extensively under several noted Canadian authors at UBC, he also studied graphic novel writing under critically acclaimed graphic novelist and instructor Sarah Leavitt.

Assuming his dues are paid up (he’s always late on at least one), he is a member of:

– The Society of Composers Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN)
– The Imaginative Fiction Writers Association (IFWA)
– The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC)
– The Writers Guild of Alberta (WGA)
– The Science Writers and Communicators of Canada (SWCC)
– The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CRA)

When writing promotional copy, he can never decide whether to refer to himself in first or third person.