I've been around the games industry as a writer and designer for more than a decade, working on various titles in that time. Halo 4 and Halo 5 are the most prominent ones, but I cut my teeth at Disney working on Turok, so that’ll always have a special place in my heart. I’m also one of the few people out there who’s worked on an N-Gage title… go Shadow-Born!

After working at Microsoft, I moved to Australia for the better part of a year while my wife was doing a post-doc, which is when I tried writing some long-form fiction for myself. It was a great experience, but that book was definitely a “first try” kind of read, so it won’t be seeing the light of day anytime soon. It did make me realize that I wanted to have a go at writing full-time, though, which is how we got to where we are now.

I discovered LitRPG shortly after working on my first VR game and have been a fan ever since. That said, I’ve always been irked by some of the genre conventions in the books that wouldn’t work in an actual VR environment (I should know—I tried a bunch of them. They made people throw up. Which isn’t nothing, sure, but not quite what we were aiming for). Naturally, that led to the question, “Well, what WOULD a LitRPG look like if everything were contextualized in the real world?” Legends of Arenia is the tree that grew from that seed, and I hope it bears fruit for both of us!