Who is Rian C. Stone?
In short, I am a professional science writer with over a decade of experience, but at my core, I’m a storyteller.
To put it mildly, I’ve been obsessed with stories longer than I can remember. From the earliest ages, I was one of those toddlers you hear about demanding bedtime stories every night—but the manner in which I did this is legend in my family. When my mom and dad started dating, I didn’t hesitate to recruit my new boyfriend into my storybook cult. I all but elbowed my mother aside so I could take center stage and have him regale me with story after story.
Even when they tried to have clandestine, late-night rendezvous, I would not be denied.
Picture this: It’s late. You’re in the kitchen with your new paramour, whispering so as to not wake the feral toddler upstairs, when suddenly you hear the pattering of tiny feet barreling down the hallway. The next thing you see is a toddler, clad in nothing but a diaper, carrying a stack of books and shouting “Read me! Read me!” at your boyfriend.
Pour one out for my mom. She’s a real one.
It’s a miracle my parents ended up together, given that I barely gave them any time to be together, alone—and it’s a testament to my dad, who loved us both and adopted me without a second thought, knowing full-well how crazy I was. It was a fitting setup to what became a goofy, tight-knit family and I was always encouraged to be my weird self.
When I was little, it wasn’t uncommon to find me holed away somewhere, surrounded by books I couldn’t even read. But once I learned how, I could not be sated. I was like a vampire, ravenous for book after book. My grandma, an avid reader herself, helped feed the monster and always pushed me to more advanced reading levels. The two of us even spent many a road trip enjoying her romance audiobooks together. She’d lower the volume for the, uh… more adulty scenes, much to my vexation. “I can’t hear it, grandma!”
I loved stories, whether they were for kids or not, whether they were written, audiobooks, or films, I didn’t care, I just loved stories. To put it in perspective, at the age of five, my favorite movies were The Adventures of Milo and Otis… and Dances with Wolves. Totally normal kid stuff.
Growing up, I continued to gravitate towards darker stories. My favorite shows were Gargoyles, Are You Afraid of the Dark, and Goosebumps. I read murder-mysteries by Patricia Cornwell and Mary Higgins Clark, and—of course—I had an extensive collection of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books. It was the height of the 90s, the golden age for spooky stories, Halloween, and monsters. I was living the dream.
Then, my grandma—my loyal book-dealer—introduced me to Harry Potter just as book two published (I have an early-edition copy of book one that looks like it’s been through war) and I was lucky enough to grow up alongside Harry and his friends, which helped shape my identity as a fantasy writer.
When I was nine, I started reciting poems competitively in local music festivals. What I mean by that is that I’d memorize poems like The Dirtiest Man in the World by Shel Silverstein, then I’d get up on a stage and perform the poem in front of an audience and an adjudicator, dramatizing and flourishing to make it engaging. I did that for about ten years, eventually working up to long-form poems like Annie and Willie's Prayer by Sophia Snow, dramas like The Forest Fire by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, and I was even coerced into reciting Shakespeare at least once. I was pretty good at it, and while I’m not as keen on public speaking as I once was, what I loved about that artform was telling stories. Captivating audiences.
It's a calling as old as time. I was born to be a storyteller.
Even when I got into science writing, I was constantly pushing boundaries, challenging my supervisors to embrace more creative forms of storytelling in science. Storytelling runs through my veins; it fuels my passion in a way I hadn’t realized until I picked up the pen (okay… keyboard) for the first time to try my hand at fiction writing.
Sure, I’d written little stories throughout grade school, even writing a whodunnit in fifth grade, but what I lacked at the time was confidence. You might be surprised to learn, after everything I’ve just told you, that my top grades were not, in fact, in writing or English, but in math and science (take that with a grain of salt; I was a straight-A student, but my English-teacher grandma never forgave me for getting an A- in English and A+ in Calculus).
As I left the nest and began my adult life, my career trajectory took me further and further away from the creative arts—and I wouldn’t return for almost twenty years.
It wasn’t until I met someone in my graduate environmental science program that I began to reawaken. His name is Verlyn Klinkenborg and he’d be loath to know he produced a fiction writer (the horror!). Verlyn is a non-fiction author and academic who potentially had the single greatest impact on my writing career. When I began grad school, I was a good writer. I’d aced the GRE and I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then Verlyn got a hold of me. My classmates and I watched, horrified, as he eviscerated our writing in the most educational and inspiring way I’ve ever witnessed. He taught us to unlearn bad rules and learn how to break the right rules properly. He taught us about cadence and rhythm, sentence structure and length, and how to identify broken clauses. I left his class feeling like I’d been unplugged from the Matrix.
And then, several years later, something jumped up and bit me.
An itch... an impulse.
A calling.
And that’s when I began writing The Burning of Saint-Gilles. I poured everything into the story—drawing from the authors and stories that inspired me, channeling personal traumas and pieces of my soul to create the kind of story I wish I'd had growing up. After that, I was hooked. I have the Unholy Empire series planned out, another horror novel outlined, and I'm starting to dabble in fan fiction. Where my career takes me next is a mystery, but I feel more at home now than I have in a long time.
Stories that shaped and inspired me
Goosebumps (R.L. Stine) 
Harry Potter 
Sword of Truth (Terry Goodkind) 
Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) 
Dan Brown
Copyright 2025 Rian C. Stone. All rights reserved.