Who is Rian C. Stone?

As a child, I was usually somewhere quiet, surrounded by books I couldn’t yet read. Once I could read, I devoured them indiscriminately — genre, age bracket, tone. It didn’t matter. My grandmother supplied the books and quietly raised the bar. She handed me stories slightly above my level and expected me to rise to them. I did. We spent long road trips listening to her romance audiobooks. She’d lower the volume during certain scenes. I didn't appreciate it.

It didn’t need to be written for me — if it was a story, I was in. At five, my favorite films were The Adventures of Milo and Otis and Dances with Wolves... that should tell you everything. As I grew older, I drifted toward darker material. Gargoyles. Are You Afraid of the Dark. Goosebumps. Patricia Cornwell. Mary Higgins Clark. An entire shelf of R.L. Stine. Darkness didn’t frighten me, it captivated my attention.

Then my grandmother introduced me to Harry Potter as the series was just beginning. I grew up alongside it, watching a children’s story stretch into something more complex, and more dangerous. It was my first blueprint for building a world that could evolve.

At nine, I stepped onto a stage in front of a live audience and began bringing stories to life. For nearly a decade, I studied cadence, breath, and restraint. I learned breath control before I understood theme. I learned pacing before I understood plot. I learned that silence, used correctly, can command a room. I learned where to pause, where to press, and how to let a line land. By the time I reached Shakespeare, I understood something essential: storytelling isn’t only about what is said. It’s about presence. That was my first education in narrative control.

My writing journey began when I was a child, but what I lacked at the time wasn’t skill. It was permission. Creativity felt indulgent. So, when adulthood arrived, I chose the safe, sensible path and turned away from the creative one.

Then I met Verlyn Klinkenborg. He was the first person to take my writing apart on purpose. He dismantled sentences with surgical precision. Comfortable habits were stripped away. He taught me to unlearn false rules and break the right ones deliberately. The pillars of cadence, rhythm, structure, and restraint became my doctrine.

I built a writing career in science, sneaking in stories wherever I could. And for a while, that was enough. But eventually, it stopped being enough. The creative impulse in me refused to stay buried. I thought I’d outgrown it, but I was wrong.

That’s when I began writing The Burning of Saint-Gilles. It took four years of obsession, perseverance, and a level of fixation that bordered on unreasonable. I drew from the authors and stories who shaped me, from lived experience, from questions I couldn’t answer any other way. It was darker than anything I’d written before. It was liberating. After that, there was no going back.

In fan fiction — a space more permissive than publishing — I pushed further. I stopped tempering the darker instincts I’d once mistaken for indulgence or wickedness. Certain characters demanded that I confront my appetite for moral ambiguity, power imbalances, and tension that doesn’t resolve cleanly. Some characters demanded patience and tenderness, others demanded nerve. I stopped holding back, stopped worrying about what people would think.

The Burning of Saint-Gilles was only the beginning. Other stories are already waiting in outline — noir romance, gothic, folk horror. It's my hope that I can continue nurturing this side of myself, sharing stories with the world that make people laugh, cry, stay up way too late reading, hunger to know what happens next. I hope you stay with me on this journey.