Ken Rand died last week. For those not fortunate enough to have known him, Ken was a local Utah writer who spent the better part of the last two decades treading the twilight area between commercial and purely personal writing. I’ve met few writers who managed to so go their own way and yet bring a respectable number of readers with them.

Ken wrote what he wanted to write, comical space westerns and living soap bubble characters, in books with titles like Golems of Laramie County and Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon. After years of journalism, I suppose he determined he’d earned a reprieve from fact and documentation and then would take his writing wherever he wanted it to go, and be satisfied with the destination even if others weren’t. He never antagonized readers or claimed that being read and enjoyed was too plebian—but he never regretted a reader who didn’t enjoy his stuff as well as he did.

Ken was one of the first real pros to ever take an interest in me, and I’ll be forever grateful. He’d been fighting illness for a long time (cancer, I believe), and last week it won. He was a member of SFWA, and you can read the in memoriam they have for Ken here.

Happy trails, Ken.