I am a gamer and a nerd. I am married with two teenage-kids. I am a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army. I really liked anime in 2002 when I would watch Cowboy Bebop at 2a.m. while doing my thermodynamics homework, but my Wife helped me really fall in love with it when we moved in together in 2005. I live in the Midwest U.S.

I learned to write from two main influences: being a game master and creating my own campaigns and settings, and from many of the things that I had to do in various duty assignments in the Army.

Fiction influences from my youth to current times are Lloyd Alexander’s Taran the Wanderer series, Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series, David Eddings’ Elenium and Tamuli, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings (of course), Timothy Zahn’s stories from the Starwars universe, the Starwars movies, G.I. Joe, both the comics, the cartoons, and the 1986 movie, Starcom and Exo-Squad (these last two are fairly obscure cartoons), and plenty of anime that my Wife has shown me and we have enjoyed together since we met in 2004.

Non-fiction influences are Guns, Germs, and Steel by Dr. Jared Diamond (the single biggest influence on my view of world-building), On War by Karl von Clausewitz, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu by Bernard B. Fall, The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 by Robert Citino, various Army publications and my experiences over those twenty years including deployments to Iraq and Kuwait, living overseas and at various posts around the U.S., many things that I learned while studying international relations, and my short time as a Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) fighter.

In gaming, specifically, the games I would say had an influence on what I am trying to bring to you are: <tabletop> Burning Wheel (this game changed gaming for me), Chronicles of Darkness/World of Darkness, Changeling, Pathfinder (1st Edition), D&D (2nd and 3rd editions), StarWars (West End Games version); <PC Gaming> Mount & Blade I & II, The Sims 4, and Genshin Impact (yes, really), among others.

I should also mention that in this year of 2024, there is such a wealth of information and so many very helpful content producers that made research for all of this much easier than anyone trying to write a book twenty or more years ago. I should like to point out Modern History TV, Shadiversity, Robinswords, Adorea Olomouc, and many others on youtube for their thorough and excellent content. Other resources such as Wikipedia, ChatGPT (no she didn’t write anything for me. We would chat from time to time and I would ask her questions about history and music), and various medieval-style clothiers and their online marketplaces have been indispensable.