Meet S.L. Leitner

S.L. Leitner is a pseudonym who has lived his entire life as Someone Else. That life was destined to be about writing. Someone Else went to as many different schools as there are grades and was raised mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, with stops in San Francisco, Mill Valley, Lucas Valley, Terra Linda, Oakland, Santa Clara, Davis, Sunnyvale, and Fantasyland, along with about a year and a half doing easy time in Australia. Someone Else won his first writing award at the age of nine, took a detour to become a United States National Master of chess, then won an Early Universe Science Fiction Writing Award in college.

Because Someone Else liked to eat regularly, he became a technical writer and learned all sorts of technical things about software, networks, cybersecurity, quantum computing, and how to pick the one tech job that doesn’t get paid when everyone else in the industry is getting paid. I mean paid. When it became clear to Someone Else that starving without a paycheck was just as easy as starving with a paycheck, Someone Else quit the world of technical writing and went back to what makes Someone Else happy—writing and telling stories.

–Someone Else, Santa Clara, CA, November 2025