Valerie Griswold-Ford (also published as Val Griswold-Ford) is an American dark fantasy, paranormal romance, horror, and urban fantasy novelist and writing-craft editor, best known for her work editing the Dragon Moon Press Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy series. She began her professional career in journalism, covering political beats and writing a weekly column before rising to associate managing editor of The Daily Campus, the fifth largest daily newspaper in Connecticut, and lives in New Hampshire with her husband.
She is the co-editor (with Tee Morris) of The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, Volume 2: The Opus Magus (Dragon Moon Press), and co-editor (with Lai Zhao) of The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, Volume 3: The Author's Grimoire (Dragon Moon Press), the third book in the series, which takes the working writer beyond writing the book and into the world of publishing, book promotion, dealing with critics and the media, working with critique groups, and the working business of turning a first novel into a sustainable career. Contributors across the series include working professionals from across the fantasy publishing world.
Her fiction includes the dark fantasy novel Not Your Father's Horseman (Dragon Moon Press, 2005), a contemporary take on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse grounded in a magic system steeped in mythology and legend, and Dark Moon Seasons (Dragon Moon Press), which extends the world of Not Your Father's Horseman with the Council of Nine, the Elemental Lords, and the working Balance of Light, Earth, and Shadow Magic. She is the editor of the Dragon Moon Press pirate-and-magic anthologies Rum and Runestones and its sequel Spells and Swashbucklers, the latter including stories from Gail Z. Martin, Stuart Jaffe, and other working fantasy authors.
She is a working member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an avid pirate enthusiast (the origin of the Rum and Runestones anthology series), and an active participant in the New England speculative fiction convention circuit including RavenCon. Outside of writing she sews, knits, cooks, and follows the Boston Red Sox.
