Ransom’s personal essays, articles, short fiction, & memoir © Ransom Stephens, 2012. Like a dragonfly - darting from task to task and mastering every one. Made with Xara Fade to Pink is the story of a physicist single father raising his adolescent daughter.      The story begins when Heather is eleven and her mother moves out. A year later, Heather is immersed in shadows. She dresses in oversized dark clothes, wears black and white makeup, worships her goth-rock idol, and begins pulling out her hair. When a boy at school tells her she’s fat, she cuts his face with her fingernails.      A psychologist tells them they are pioneers and not to expect their house to be normal. It’s not. They are an absent-minded physics professor and a band-geek, a swinging bachelor and his tolerant, head-shaking daughter; they are also the overweight obsessive-compulsive adolescent and her hand-wringing paranoid father. But underneath the roles and rebellion, they are just Heather and Ransom growing up together in Texas. When she walks across the stage at the Fort Worth Convention Center and collects her diploma, he graduates too. There are no more bald patches on her head and she’s wearing a pink skirt.      Pink!      If you’d told him the day he found the list of “reasons to kill myself” on her bedroom floor that Heather would wear a pink skirt to her high school graduation, he’d have laughed and defended her:      “Nah. We wear black.” Fade to Pink: From goth to graduation Personal Essay “Expert Training: Lift, Bike, Run, ... Score!” published in Real Solutions Magazine #77, February 2009. “The Properties of Paradise,” published in the anthology Writin’ on Empty edited by  Joan Cehn, Julie Renalds and Risa Nye, 2008 - a San Francisco Chronicle Best seller! “Anchor Made of Wood,” (Featured article for special Christmas editions) The Monthly, December 2008. • If I pounded in enough nails, I was sure it would sink. “Coming Home,” The Monthly, June 2008. • I suppose it was genetic, that primitive hunger that drives yearling coyotes to leave the safety of their pack and make their own way. Or maybe it was the vapid stupidity of a native Californian spoiled by the beauty, the comfort, the benevolence, the generous plurality and innovative spirit of the Golden State. “Just Say Know,” Sacramento Parent, May 2008 and reprinted in Baltimore’s Child, June 2008. “Heart of Glass,” The Monthly,  August 2005. • It’s hard for your kid to earn your trust when they live (and drive) in a world with traffic. “Dry the Rain,” More Bridges: The San Francisco Writers Conference Anthology, 2007. “After the Storm,” Building Bridges from Writers to Readers: San Francisco Writers Conference Anthology, 2007. Short Fiction "The Humbling of Earth's (Second) Greatest Predator," sPARKLE & bLINK, Vol. 2.9, October, 2011. • An excerpt from The Sensory Deception. "A Crystalline Certainty," , Yellow Mama, #23, Dec-2010. • What happens when friendship collides with ambition? This short story puts two football players to the test - it's horror, it's suspense and it's football as metaphor. "My Uncle Doesn't Speak English," published in the anthology Walking Wisdom edited by Gotham Chopra and Deepak Chopra, October 2010. • The life of a dog and his master only makes sense to them! The Future of Publishing The IndieReader three part series: • Part 1: “Better than anyone but not as good as everyone” focuses on book development and acquisition, IndieReader, September 2010. • Part 2: “Modernization puts an end to the Vanity Press and Rescues Booksellers” is about the evolving state of self-publishing, business practices and new distribution channels, IndieReader, November 2010. • Part 3: “The next big move in publishing is geographical” presents the inimitable strengths of the legacy publishing industry and what that might mean given that more books will be published in Silicon Valley in the next 12 months than have been published in New York City in the last 12 years, February 2011. “Booking the Future,” openDemocracy, June 2009. Ransom’s original predictions for the future of books and publishing.