I was born in 1991, the year of our Lord, in Dallas, Texas to two loving parents who had no idea the burden that had just entered their lives.

Not really. I was a relatively tame child, teen, and all the hormonal stages in between. I channeled that teenage mild streak into a short-lived junior golf career. I know what you’re thinking, writer and golfer? Yes, I do live life on the edge.

When my PGA Tour career didn’t work out (zero career starts), I enrolled at Texas Tech University as a computer science major. By the end of freshman orientation, I had switched to broadcast journalism. After my family reminded me that I had a face for radio, I decided to switch my major three more times before landing on Energy Commerce, which is effectively pre-law that recruiters don’t know about. Turns out, marketing matters, even on a resume.

Writing. That’s why you’re here. That all started a bit later, sometime during my first job. At the time I had several hobbies, two of which were watching my favorite show at the time, Game of Thrones, and playing a strategy game on the computer called Civilization. I promise I’m going somewhere with this.

Something I loved about Civilization was that each new game started out with a completely randomized and unique map of a ficticious world. Each new game gave me an opportunity to create new storylines about why I settled in certain places, why I had gone to war, or why I had aligned with certain civilizations. I didn’t know it then, but I was taking my first, very casual steps into worldbuilding.

Here’s where Game of Thrones comes into play. As I watched the show, I realized that one of the best aspects of Game of Thrones was the breadth of history woven into the plot, and how that affected each character and side character’s behaviors and actions. I thought to myself “Jeez, it must have been really fun to invent all these different webs of conflicting interests!”

It probably took me about a year to realize how closely related these two daydream topics actually were. And so, on one rainy weekend in my Austin, Texas apartment, I began to draw out my first original, fictional universe. When I decided that wasn’t enough, I decided to add a story to it.

My initial thoughts, storylines, and tropes were heavily influenced by anime and manga, and so creating a manga seemed like the most accurate representation of my story. Except I can’t draw. So I gravitated towards writing, something I had little experience in. And thus, I began working on my first ever, Game-of-Thrones style epic novel with manga influences, including 8 different independent character storylines.

And it sucked.

I would spend the next six months comparing my ideas against writing’s best practices and soon realized I had several problems, including that I was writing in the wrong genre. And so, I dropped the Game of Thrones ambitions and decided to start writing shorter, faster, more pointed novels, with dialogue and pacing to fit my protagonists’ age and lessons learned. Soon I had my first, second, and third novels written, all firmly in the YA fantasy camp, which is what I primarily write today.

Through those first few years of world building, bad manuscripts, and finished novels, I finally created something I could call my own: Tengoku, the fictional universe in which my debut novel, The Shogun’s Second Son, will take place.

Have you really read all of this? I’m glad you have, and I’m glad you’re here! As a reward for your patience, I’ve uploaded a teaser snippet of my upcoming novel, a scene where our hero embarks on his journey! You can read chapter 4 of the Shogun’s Second Son by clicking this link. I can’t thank you enough for your support, and I hope you enjoy my stories!