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The Home of Carter Roy and the Award-winning
BLOOD GUARD TRILOGy
Who Is
Carter Roy?
Curious about where Carter came from? How he got his start writing novels? What odd jobs he worked before putting his name onto the jackets of books? Those questions and more, answered below!
Trying to look mysterious in Dublin.
A Short Answer
Carter Roy has painted houses and worked on construction sites; waited tables and driven delivery trucks; been a stage hand for rock bands and a videographer on a cruise ship; worked as a line cook in a kitchen, a projectionist in a movie theater, and a rhetoric teacher at a university. He has been a reference librarian and a bookseller, edited hundreds of books for major publishers, and written award-winning short-stories for adult readers that appeared in a half-dozen journals and anthologies.
But this is the first time he has written a novel.
He lives in New York City.
A Longer Answer
Carter Roy grew up in Southern California, the youngest of five children. He was a pretty happy kid, despite the buck teeth (later corrected by orthodontia). And he was a reader starting early. He always had friends, but the friends he kept closest were the ones bound between covers.
As a boy, his favorite books were The Mad Scientists Club by Bertrand R. Brinley and The Furious Flycycle by Jan Wahl, but also the novels of Beverly Cleary, Ruth Stiles Gannett, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Early on he began writing stories. His first—called "The Night My Pillow Talked to Me"—appeared in a school-produced anthology when he was seven. (The story was one he'd shamelessly cribbed from a tale his older brother made up, who never let him forget this act of plagiarism.)
His choice of storytelling medium changed after a claymation film he directed in sixth grade called "The Bionic Mouse" won the California Student Film Festival. Movies, he decided, were what he was most interested in. He made a half-dozen Super-8 films before enrolling at the film production school of the University of Southern California.
First grade. Adored that gray shirt.
In college, messing about with a camera before a shoot.
He'd never stopped reading, of course, but it was at USC that he rediscovered the pleasures of writing fiction while taking creative writing classes with T.C. Boyle. And so, though he continued to shoot and produce films as part of his degree coursework, he began increasingly to think of himself as someone who was happiest working with the written word.
After he left USC, he began working for a smaller children's books publisher. Then, a few years later, he began working freelance while doing a master's degree program at Hollins College (now Hollins University). During his time at Hollins, he won the Andrew James Purdy Award for Short Fiction and began publishing short stories for adult readers.
He also began working in publishing again, eventually ending up as Editorial Director for a major New York house before at last quitting and again turning his attentions full-time to storytelling.
A few more of his short stories and essays appeared, one of which won the Sherwood Anderson Short Fiction Award from Mid-American Review. And he began working earnestly on what would become the first of the Blood Guard novels.
He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, New York, where he is writing a new novel unrelated to the Blood Guard sequence, as well as working as an editor for a company called the Inkhouse.
Carter Roy in Brooklyn, 2013.
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