Career
Flint worked on a Ph.D. in history specializing in southern African history. He left his doctoral program over political issues and supported himself from that time until age 50 in a variety of jobs, including longshoreman, truck driver, and machinist, and as a labor union organizer. A long-time leftist political activist, Flint worked as a member of the Socialist Workers Party.
After winning the 1993 Writers of the Future contest, he published his first novel in 1997 and moved to full-time writing in 1999.
Shortly afterwards, he became the first librarian of the Baen Free Library and a prominent anti-copy protection activist. He has edited the works of several classic SF authors, repackaging their short stories into collections and fix-up novels. This project has met commercial success, and has returned several out-of-print authors to print.
In 2004, faced with a persistent drain on his time by fan-fiction authors seeking comment on the four years old 1632 Tech Manual web forum focused on his 1632 series, he suggested to Jim Baen the experimental serialized fan-fiction e-zine The Grantville Gazette which also found commercial success. Four of the Gazette magazine editions were collated into anthology formats, bought by Jim Baen and brought out in either hardcover or paperback or both formats, though the last purchased remains unpublished. Subsequently, Flint became editor of the new Jim Baen's Universe science-fiction e-zine while concurrently remaining a creative writer bringing out three to five titles per year. After the death of Jim Baen due to a stroke and after completing the contract for the tenth Grantville Gazette, Flint founded a new website "grantvillegazette.com" which is not only continuing to bring out The Grantville Gazettes, but increasing the publishing rate from four per year to bimonthly while paying better than standard magazine pay rates and is modeled on the JBU e-zine.
As of October 2007 he lives with his wife Lucille (also an ex-labor organizer) in East Chicago, Indiana.
In 2008, he donated his archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.
Flint is the author guest of honor for the 2010 NASFiC, ReConStruction.
He is also participating in the The Stellar Guild series published by Phoenix Pick. The series pairs bestselling authors like Flint with lesser known authors in science fiction and fantasy to help provide additional visibility to them.
Read more about this topic: Eric Flint
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