Linda S. Cowden was born in San Francisco, California and raised in and around Pacifica, California and Houston, Texas. She lived in Jubail, Saudi Arabia with her family off and on for four years while her father worked there, and they traveled extensively in Western Europe and Kenya, Africa. She graduated from Tomball High School in 1987.
Proud to have served in the Air Force outside of Sacramento, California, she was a driver for the Transportation Squadron at Beale AFB in the early 1990s. She holds a black belt in the Korean martial art of Kuk Sool Won.
Fond of travel, history, grammar, psychology and sociology, among other diverse interests, her love of spooky things started early and grew into a healthy obsession with surprising speed. Often a fan of the fiends of literature and cinema, she was given the moniker 'Auntie Maim' as she began work on tales of the oft-maligned Grim Reaper.
Linda married author Kevin A. Ranson at the Texas Renaissance Festival in 2012, and currently resides on a farm in San Leon, Texas, surrounded by cats, horses, and the occasional dog. She can often be found burying her face in a pair of painfully adorable Pomeranians, or lost in a good book.