I scrawled my first story when I was eleven: a handful of loose-leaf pages, a boy and his best friend who find treasure in their backyard. There was this evil lightning wizard who fit into the plot somehow, and at one point, our heroes rode awesome hoverbikes with laser cannons.

(I watched a lot of Lucas and Spielberg at a formative age.)

In fact, I consumed tons of fiction growing up, and most of it was the same as what I like to write: explosions, romance, feats of derring-do…

But then, there were the special ones: the SFF that transcended genre, that took all the tropes and pithy lines I loved and infused them with the emotional honesty I thought could only be achieved by names like Shelley and Steinbeck. Those stories stuck. And inevitably, I got it in my head to go and make my own. 

See, the cool thing about fiction is that you can write stories with lightning wizards and awesome hoverbikes, yet you can still tell a timeless tale about a lonely teenager who finds his people, or a little girl who values her life more than society does. Fiction is limitless. Story gives you that power.

My goal — and my deepest wish — is to make stories that other people find as much meaning in as I do. Fiction is a linking force, a celebration of what unites, not divides. In my work, I want to get at those precious, tragic things that make us human.

(And, I want to blow some shit up while I do. That’s what makes it fun.)