Mel Todd

About Mel

Mel Todd is a speculative fiction author and the owner of Bad Ash Publishing, an indie press built on the belief that genre fiction deserves both craft and heart. Writing under her own name, she spans urban fantasy, epic fantasy, and science fiction — including her flagship Twisted Luck series, the Noble’s Luck trilogy, the urban sci-fi Kaylid Chronicles, and the Cori at Large series. She co-authors the Blood War series with Doug Burbey, and under the pen name Renee Lovins, writes romance for readers who want a different shelf entirely.

With 40+ titles and counting, Mel has built her catalog the way she built everything else at Bad Ash: hands-on. She’s done her own WordPress development, run her own Shopify storefront, and sold face-to-face at conventions for years — there isn’t much of the indie publishing process she hasn’t touched herself. That same DIY instinct shows up outside the writing too, in landscaping projects and home fabrication work she takes on with the same problem-solving energy she brings to a manuscript.

A longtime student of Stoic philosophy, Mel approaches both her business and her life with a clear-eyed, risk-aware practicality — she’d rather plan for the worst and write toward the best. When she’s not writing, publishing, or building something with her hands, you can usually find her at a convention panel, deep in a craft conversation, or making the case — again — that Kaylid Chronicles is sci-fi, not romance