Kevin Seney
The Life
The Beginning
A Wyoming family, four generations deep.
Buffalo, Wyoming. My great-grandfather, Ralph Seney, was one of Wyoming’s early aviators. He also started a fishing camp on the shore of Lake De Smet.
His sons, the twins Frank and Fred, turned the camp into Seney Point, a resort you could drive to or fly to. They built their own airstrip at the resort and kept a hangar in town. Frank, my grandfather, liked to say he was the world’s greatest fly fisherman. He and my grandmother Ruth kept the place running.
I spent my boyhood summers there, busy all day with work and play, and wary of rattlesnakes. My father had me on commission at the family pharmacy before I could see over the counter, and I left Wyoming with tuition earned in a coal mine. I did not know then that a coal shovel and a working aviation family were the whole education. I know now.
The Formation
San Diego. One happy accident.
I went to San Diego State for the sciences. Pre-med sounded good, and my grandmother liked to brag about me.
The literature was the accident. Someone told me about a professor whose classes were an easy A. He taught in Birkenstocks, under a tree on the grass, and I could not stop taking his classes. I ended up with a Comparative Literature degree I had never planned to earn. The reading has not stopped since.
Technical writing became a paid internship in La Jolla, writing corporate profiles and prospectuses. That is where the working writer began.
Alongside all of it: pharmacy technician, a few rental properties, shifts behind a bar in Ocean Beach, cars bought and sold for margin. My mother called me a horse trader.
Later came business school, and a long executive career in finance and the industries around it. That career paid for the eventual permission to write.
The Work
Storyteller first. Then publisher.
Everything I do now starts with a story. I write thrillers and reimagined classics, 40+ books so far.
As CEO of Wake Up Publishing, I work in partnership with Steven E, a publisher for more than thirty years. I bring the operating discipline. He brings the credibility only decades in publishing can produce. Together we build books that were never going to happen without both.
And for a few individuals and organizations, I still advise on decisions where clarity matters more than speed.
The Aviation
Still flying.
Private pilot. Hundreds of hours, first in a Piper Saratoga and now a Piper Malibu. Serious terrain and weather flying into Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, the country the family came from.
Numbers are less interesting than lineage. I was a boy the first time Frank let me take the controls of his Cessna 210 over Lake De Smet. I still have the key to that airplane. Flight was inherited before it was earned.
The Life Itself
Wyoming, for keeps.
The mail comes to Utah these days. Wyoming is still the country I return to, and Montana in summer, whenever there is time. Buffalo, Lake De Smet, the Bighorns: I know that landscape the way a man knows the room he grew up in. Because I grew up in it.
My wife, Carrie, is the ground of every day. Everything in the writing life, the novels, the publishing, the return to the West, has happened alongside her. She is the reason it holds.
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