I started writing in high school, doing pass-along stories with my friends for fun, but never really wrote anything on my own that could stand alone as a piece of work. This gave me a love for the written word, and by college, I decided to see if I could write a 100-150 page adventure story, just for the challenge of doing it. Inspired by The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars movies, The Discworld series, Final Fantasy video games, medieval tales, and all forms of mysthology, I set out to complete this. In the process, I took several creative writing classes and honed my craft while constantly developing my stories, history behind the main plot, and expanding with more characters. During the classes, my professor viewed every one of my short stories in class as a beginning of something bigger, and she said they needed to be made into novels.  I never grasped the concept of the short story. I also failed my creative writing professor's guidelines of starting with a 50,000 word novella for my first piece of work and ended up with a 312,000 word and 700+ page book, which has been split into two works (The Exiled Son, and The Leaves of Dusk). The process began in 1999 and concluded in 2009, spanning ten years, with the years after being spent editing and researching publication avenues. In the meantime, I have been working on a sequel that takes place approximately 20 years after the first two books and exploring my own pantheon of gods and their interactions with the living and the dead. I am continually striving to challenge myself to write stories outside the mainstream I see today, yet I hold true to the works that have inspired me from the beginning. I love to create characters and worlds outside of my own, and until I feel I have nothing left to say, I will continue to relish the joy I get from this art.