Jay Werkheiser has always been a bit of a science geek. His love of science fiction began when he read Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" early in elementary school. The mind-bending concepts of traveling through higher dimensions sparked his imagination. From then on, he devoured every bit of science fiction he could get his hands on, much of it space opera like Star Trek novels and the Perry Rhodan series. It wasn't long before he started writing his own science fiction stories, also mostly space opera. Picking up a copy of Larry Niven's "A World out of Time" opened his eyes to the idea of emphasizing the science part of science fiction. He read wide-eyed the descriptions of relativistic time dilation, red and blue shifting, and the wonderfully weird effects of black holes. Several trips to the library confirmed that the science was real. He became an instant Niven fan (and still is!) and soon discovered other hard science fiction writers. It didn't take long to fall in love with Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, which specializes in science-based hard science fiction. He got a subscription (which he still has) as soon as he could talk his parents into it. 

A love of science fiction matured into a passion for science. If nothing else, he wanted to be able to get the science right in his own stories, so after school and weekend research during high school led naturally to a science major in college. He earned a Bachelor's degree in chemistry and teaching certification in both chemistry and physics. He settled into nurturing a teaching career and raising a daughter and did little writing for a while. His daughter was bitten by the writing bug at a young age (it must be genetic) and started writing her own stories. That got him going again, and soon he and his daughter were comparing story arcs and typing away on their computers. 

His first story sale came early in 2009. He had been getting some positive feedback from Stan Schmidt for a while, and his writing was improving significantly under Schmidt's guidance. Selling a story to Analog, the magazine he had been reading since childhood, was a thrill like no other. There is quite a long wait from story acceptance to actual publication; it felt like an eternity until "Thanksgiving Day" finally appeared in the November issue. Since then, he has sold many stories and a few science fact articles to Analog and other magazines and anthologies. He has had a story translated into Chinese ("One Giant Leap") and another translated into Czech ("Usher"). Kepler's Laws is his first novel. 

Listing 1 story.