In years past, before he found out he could make more money writing about spaceships than painting them, Bill worked both as an illustrator and a game designer; he has forty games and game modules to his professional credit. His SF artwork has won fan and best-of-show awards at various SF conventions and shows, including Chicago's WindyCon and Pittsburgh's Confluence. His WWII role-playing game Behind Enemy Lines won the 1982 H.G. Wells Award for Best Role-Playing Game, and his Going Home module for Twilight: 2000 was an Origins Award Winner as one of the Best Games of the Year in 1986. He still does artwork occasionally, and his paintings are have been on display each summer at Confluence, Pittsburgh's SF con. Bill has applied his illustration experience to create computer-manipulated photographic images, venturing into a brand-new field of artistic exploration. He uses this chiefly to provide publishers with photorealist sketches of the aliens, ships, and equipment that appear in his novels. Have a look at the artwork pages to see some of these photos.

When he's not writing -- a strange, twilight dimension of unreality dimly experienced from time to time between novels -- Bill Keith can be found hiking in his beloved mountains, participating in the local chapter of Mensa, and murdering defenseless paper targets with weapons of various calibers. He's also appeared as a guest lecturer at various nearby colleges and at Mensa events, speaking on topics ranging from writing genre fiction to future spacecraft propulsion systems to the future of Humankind in space. He practices and teaches Reiki, researches metaphysical phenomena in hopes of another non-fiction book contract, and can often be found soaking in a hot tub, in the words of the late Frank Zappa, "pondering eternity, and fractional divisions thereof."  He lives in a small town in the Laurel Mountains with three cats, a bearded dragon, a human partner named Brea, and various aquatic critters and plants.