Pen like a sword and winning awards since 1987…sorta.
Did someone ask for a disabled, shitposting, weed smoking, spell toting, dark joking, fun poking, demon invoking, pant soaking, anarchy provoking, enemy yoking chaos gremlin? No? Well, I’m here anyway…
My name is Stacey J Silver, and I think I’ve already established that I am the strange little creature that lives between the cracks. Bios are REALLY boring to write AND to read, so I’ll try to blast through it. Buckle up bitches!
I came shooting out of the womb with a pen in my hand on the 24th of March 1987. Unfortunately, I didn’t know words yet, so I had to wait a while. Between those two events, I nearly died. No biggie, but it did change my brain permanently.
Then I got a little sniff of horror (thanks, mum!) and from there I had the itch. I consumed all the horror content I could find, which in the 90s consisted of TV and books.
My mum had a wicked collection of horror novels - Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Dean R. Koontz, James Herbert…you know, all the good ones.
But six-year-olds aren’t allowed to read horror books. Luckily for me, my school teacher had just taught a class on how to protect your schoolbooks with a DIY book jacket.
It took me two hours to draw the cover for “Sweet Happy Glittering Unicorns”, and I had already spent weeks staring longingly at my book of choice - James Herbert’s The Rats. (Side note: that cover started my lifelong obsession with rats!)
During my childhood, I realised that my mum was a secret poet, writing in her room and getting published in poetry collections. Soon it was both of us sitting in her room writing poetry by moonlight (I mean, we had electricity and the curtains were closed, but it sounds cooler.)
When I was 9, I went all out on a school project about volcanoes. I wrote a poem and drew some volcanoes, some people getting burnt by volcanoes; I even pilfered my auntie's red lipstick to make the lava. It was so good that my teacher put it up on the classroom wall and wanted to keep it forever, which eventually led to an ownership war between Mrs Hodgkinson and my mother. Anyway, my mum drew first blood, and I got “Volcano” published in a collection of poetry.
Soon I spent most of my childhood reading, writing, and turning every school creative writing prompt into a short horror story. In high school, I started writing a novel, scribbled in school books purchased from the library for £1 and wrote in during the boring lessons. (Which is why I suck at geography.) It was called Bloodlust and was apparently good enough that my classmates used to ask to borrow the collection of notebooks to read at home.
In my late teens, I began dabbling in what a lot of young adults with an internet connection in the 2000s did - write erotica. But obviously I wrote erotic horror, or as I called it: Horrotica. (It’ll scare you stiff!) It wasn’t great, but it was good enough to gain me a small online following, some collaborative work, and more than a brush with indie publishing houses. Legend has it I still write horrotica to this very day, though it’s under a super secret pen name and is literally just me clowning around.
I watched the original Dawn of the Dead for the first time in 2011, and it scared me so badly — despite the pie fight! When it finished, I locked my doors, checked every room, and stood at my bedroom window, staring up and down the street, looking for zombies. My nerves weren’t fully calmed until I accidentally saw my neighbour doing nude aerobics. If that guy was flapping his junk like a cracked-out Mr Motivator, I figured the apocalypse hadn’t arrived just yet — and I could finally relax.
I got into TikTok and started reporting on an emerging cult before the newspapers even got a sniff. Through that, I somehow became good friends with British actress Kelli Hollis, who was working with a new author agency. When I told her I had a book sitting around, she basically suplexed me off the cliffs of anxiety. I joined BookStars and was immediately informed about the upcoming competition at the White Rose Festival. With a passionate fire under my arse, I smashed it all into a real book, made a cover, and navigated the treacherous labyrinth that is Amazon KDP.
Fat Bob’s was released into the world on November 25th 2025, crying and covered in blood.
From there, I wrote a script treatment for the film festival and was surprised to be nominated, since I’d been too broke to pay the submission fee. I found out I’d won a place in the semi-finals five minutes after finding out FBA had been submitted, in January 2026.
But my brain was still uneasy about the living dead, and as I slept, my brain cooked up vivid nightmares that made me toss and turn until I woke up in a cold sweat. That was my first glimpse into Fat Bob’s Apocalypse - I was stuck in a building of zombies with lift doors that refused to close. As I freaked out, the men behind me laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s just a game!” The man and his son dealt with the zombies quickly while explaining their “Battle Royale” style bomb collars to me. When it was zombie-free, they led me to their Jeep and took me on a zombie-hunting safari through a terrifying theme park.
When I woke up, I scribbled a note in my dream journal and forgot about it until a few weeks later, when I discovered NaNoWriMo for the first time. Having always wanted to write a book, I decided to freestyle my way through a rough story with minimal writing experience.
The first draft of FBA was 50,000 words and was written from Kamkio's perspective. It was far from good - to meet the NaNoWriMo word limit, I had Axel sing a song (read as: I straight up wrote the lyrics of Children of Bodom’s song ‘Are You Dead Yet?’ in its entirety to boost my word count). I was very proud of it, and everyone who read it generally enjoyed it.
That was very shortly followed by my education era, where I started dicking around with writing courses trying to improve my skills after a “friend” laughed and said, “I used to write like that in primary school!” (P.S. - Her writing was shitty purple prose that was just a wankfest of archaic words. P.P.S - Which one of us is published now, biatch?!) But that led me to do all sorts of cool writing courses. I began getting into non-fiction writing, submitting articles to well-known British magazines (Take a Break - Fate and Fortune, Chat, Bizarre), websites, and blogs. I made bank ghostwriting silly news pieces and online casino instructions. I even dabbled in blogging, children’s stories, and illustration.
After a good few years in the naughty drawer, I pulled the FBA manuscript out, read it, and declared myself an idiot. It got an entire rewrite, then another, then another. The plot expanded, and the characters stopped being cardboard cutouts. I took all of the feedback from test readers and went to town. I submitted it to a few agents and got several replies saying they don’t really like horror.
I felt dejected. How dare they not like my deformed little child?! So it got stuffed back in the naughty drawer alongside all the other half-baked plots and pieces.
UNTIL!!!
Then I got REALLY serious. I started planning the FBA series, collecting my short stories from the far corners of the internet, and finishing all my half-baked ideas. More importantly, I wanted to establish myself as a ‘real author’ before the WRFF finals. I chose my outfit, started my website, designed business cards, and was about to book a hotel when…
I nearly died again. (No, biggie!)
I tried to sleep off a burst appendix because I thought I had severe food poisoning. Usual hijinks. Turns out I was an hour away from death. I had to do a stint in hospital, then a long-assed recovery, which meant I couldn’t attend the fest. I will be forever upset about it, but I WON!
And there was a bright side: fox trotting with death threw petrol on the aforementioned arse fire!
So now I write furiously, every day, for hours. And that’s where the story is now. If you want to know what happens next, check out the news section at the top of this page.