Joseph Picard - About/Contacts

B.C. Lower mainlander since 1992, Joseph has always tinkered with art, music, and writing. He chose to focus primarily on writing in the early 2000s, and his short stories have since evolved into character-driven novels of science-fiction and broader speculative fiction. In 2001, he found out that cars are harder than mountain bikes, and has been a paraplegic ever since. Near the end of 2021, he was additionally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Miraculously, this has not altered his career arc as a quarterback, basketball star, pole-dancer, or kung-fu movie stunt double.

Thankfully he has that whole 'life-long-nerd' thing to fall back on.

With a daughter, Caitlin, born in 2007, and a son, Lachlan, in 2011, free time has become a very valuable asset, and most of it gets poured into writing.

CONTACTS

email joe@ozero.ca
(you can drop a quick like there to join or unsubscribe from my mailng list, which I only use for new releases, so at my writing speed.... once every few years.)

Amazon page containing all my published works here.

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/josephpicard.bsky.social

Cara: I'm a fumbling acrylic painter, and I post pretty much everything on Cara @josephpicard . They're anti-AI and are quickly becomeing the kind of artistic community that DeviantArt was once upon a time.

My facebook group, Rubberhack. (I'm putting less and less effort in FB lately due to zuck's recent behaviour and policy stances)

I do various talks and readings from my books on tiktok.

On occasion, I blog.

Now and then, I make a fool of myself on Youtube, my vids sometimes dealing with my books, sometimes pure nonsense, sometimes gaming things, like tours of my Fallout 4 settlements, or my unimpressive Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon battles.

Oh, by the way,
WHAT'S AN OZERO???

Ok, it's about my online name... waaaaay back when a friend got my computer to dial a bulliten board, I was about to register with my real name. My friend stopped me, and hot me to pick a handle... I had recently been working on a little comic, so I use the name of one of the characters, so poof, I was:

NINJA DUDE. Which.... served its purpose. I got into creating music, and releasing my tunes on the local BBS networks. My silly name started to feel sillier and sillier... I was deep in my black-wardrove phase, so I picked a new name,

Onyx. In my dialling area, it was unique, and definitely served its purpose... until I started getting on the internet, and found 8735635603953 other Onyxs. So... name change. I picked another black rock, and to avoid duplicates, I added a 'last name', which I stole from a summon in Final Fantasy 7, and so I became-

Obsidian Zero. Which was fine for a long time. But I got sick of typing the whole thing. So I knocked off the "bsidian" and the "ero", and I became-

Ozero. I liked it quite a bit and secured the domain name. AFTER that, someone told me it was a real word in Russian. Worried that I had named myself the Russian word for Monkey Scrotum or something, I looked it up. It means 'Lake'. I can deal with being a lake. I run into a little hassle as it's also a last name, but that's no big deal. I carried the name to create Ozero Publishing, which is only used for my own publications.