Gene Ayres(I)
- Writer
An award winning novelist, journalist, columnist, film and television
writer/producer, E. C. (Gene) Ayres grew up in New Jersey, but spent
much of his adult life working in California, and later in Florida.
Recently he worked in China as a freelance editor, writer, and lecturer
in English at the Harbin University of Commerce. He now lives, writes
and works in Seattle, with his wife and daughter.
Ayres is a graduate (B.A.) of the Syracuse University Creative Writing program, which also produced such writers as Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and Joyce Carol Oates. He worked in New York for seven years producing short films for the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, New York University, "Sesame Street," ABC, and Time Life Television, then went on to write and produce for various other PBS television series at stations in Baltimore and Phoenix. Among the public affairs shows he wrote for were Consumer Survival Kit, Bill Cosby's Feelin' Good, and Understanding Human Psychology.
Settling in Los Angeles in the late '70s, Ayres continued working in public television, and then began writing for commercial television, primarily in animation, including numerous episodes for the first two seasons on the animated hit series, The Smurfs, as well as Scooby Doo, Kissyfur and Dennis the Menace. In 1981-2 he worked as co-producer and feature development writer for director Jack Arnold at Universal Studios (Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Mouse that Roared), wrote the original (unproduced) draft of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (among other projects) and was recipient of a Warner Brothers Writers Fellowship in 1982. Ayres left Hollywood in 1989 to return to Florida (where he spent some early, formative time as a child) and write a mystery novel with a Florida setting. During that time, he divided his time between writing, raising his young son as a single parent, and working as film critic for TV Channel 10 in Tampa/St. Petersburg.
After a brief stint as a newspaper columnist in New England, Ayres was lured back into the film world in late 1992 to write and produce films for a small company in Santa Fe, New Mexico called 20/20 Productions A week after moving, he got word that his first novel manuscript, Hour of the Manatee, had just won the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers Association of America's Best First Novel competition. The book was published in hardcover in 1994, and subsequently released in paperback, both from St. Martin's.
Ayres moved back to Florida in 1994 to continue this series (see other credits). He has been a featured speaker at the Florida Suncoast Writers' Conference, the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival, Sleuthfest in Ft. Lauderdale, and the Riverside Writers' Conference in Tampa. In 2003 He published the cover story in Worldwatch Magazine about perchlorate in the food chain, and a story in the Chicago Heartland Journal about sports in China. His 5th Tony Lowell novel, is being published by Booktrope in 2015, to be followed shortly thereafter by his YA hero's journey novel Toon Man based on his career as an animation writer (per his listings in IMDB.com) He also has other books in the works including a mystery novel about the Shakespeare authorship. His nonfiction memoir about his three years working in China, Inside the New China, was published in Spring of 2010 by Transaction Publishers of Rutgers University.
Ayres is a graduate (B.A.) of the Syracuse University Creative Writing program, which also produced such writers as Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and Joyce Carol Oates. He worked in New York for seven years producing short films for the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, New York University, "Sesame Street," ABC, and Time Life Television, then went on to write and produce for various other PBS television series at stations in Baltimore and Phoenix. Among the public affairs shows he wrote for were Consumer Survival Kit, Bill Cosby's Feelin' Good, and Understanding Human Psychology.
Settling in Los Angeles in the late '70s, Ayres continued working in public television, and then began writing for commercial television, primarily in animation, including numerous episodes for the first two seasons on the animated hit series, The Smurfs, as well as Scooby Doo, Kissyfur and Dennis the Menace. In 1981-2 he worked as co-producer and feature development writer for director Jack Arnold at Universal Studios (Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Mouse that Roared), wrote the original (unproduced) draft of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (among other projects) and was recipient of a Warner Brothers Writers Fellowship in 1982. Ayres left Hollywood in 1989 to return to Florida (where he spent some early, formative time as a child) and write a mystery novel with a Florida setting. During that time, he divided his time between writing, raising his young son as a single parent, and working as film critic for TV Channel 10 in Tampa/St. Petersburg.
After a brief stint as a newspaper columnist in New England, Ayres was lured back into the film world in late 1992 to write and produce films for a small company in Santa Fe, New Mexico called 20/20 Productions A week after moving, he got word that his first novel manuscript, Hour of the Manatee, had just won the St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers Association of America's Best First Novel competition. The book was published in hardcover in 1994, and subsequently released in paperback, both from St. Martin's.
Ayres moved back to Florida in 1994 to continue this series (see other credits). He has been a featured speaker at the Florida Suncoast Writers' Conference, the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival, Sleuthfest in Ft. Lauderdale, and the Riverside Writers' Conference in Tampa. In 2003 He published the cover story in Worldwatch Magazine about perchlorate in the food chain, and a story in the Chicago Heartland Journal about sports in China. His 5th Tony Lowell novel, is being published by Booktrope in 2015, to be followed shortly thereafter by his YA hero's journey novel Toon Man based on his career as an animation writer (per his listings in IMDB.com) He also has other books in the works including a mystery novel about the Shakespeare authorship. His nonfiction memoir about his three years working in China, Inside the New China, was published in Spring of 2010 by Transaction Publishers of Rutgers University.