Humble beginnings

​If you landed here or arrived to take a peak, then my first thoughts as a fella from Gen X are guffaw and surprise.
Let me explain...

I’ve published three books in the fantasy series “The Rune Fire Cycle” but only just recently began to dip my foot into the proverbial marketing pool, which involves connecting to readers, which I love, but also means in some way generating marketing content which is like shaving against the grain and even for a bald fella its weird.
And I concede that mainly it’s weird to me. But a blog is much more natural than generating tiktok content, so it feels like a good place to start! So here we go, typos and comfort zones be damned!

Currently, my wife and I live just south of the Missouri-Iowa state line (in Mo), having moved here as an effort to downsize mid-COVID. It’s a long story over good pizza and a few beers, but I still practice emergency medicine in my hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa. I’ve been full-time there since 1998 and expect I can hang in there another 10 years unless this fantasy author gig takes off (yes, please cross your fingers with me).

I enjoy emergency medicine, although the practice today is a far cry from when I started (reason for another outing with perhaps BBQ and beer). I don’t golf and have always been a fantasy Sci-Fi geek. As a teen, my brother, our dad, and our collective group of friends usually met once a week to play old-school DnD, and that was the start of my pursuit of escapism to all things fantasy.
 
Over time, I became an online gamer, MMORPG’s mainly, and realized what a time-suck that was on my life. I needed the same outlet, but on terms I could more easily control (because having an MMORPG loaded on the computer and not playing it is like having mango cheesecake in the refrigerator and telling yourself that’s not on the diet).

So I dabbled, building the thoughts for a world, central characters, a magic system, and the villain who could drive a storyline forward. It will never be as elaborate as Tolkien’s, but I completely understand the concept of losing yourself in the world you create.

And when I’m lucky, that’s what I do, and I hope some of you might enjoy it as much as I do... I mean, there is nothing about left or right-wing politics in here, so most of the time, reading something from the Rune Fire Cycle beats watching anything on the news.

I know... low bar... but a fella has to start somewhere, right?
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If you aren’t put off by squinting modifiers and such come back. I hope to reach more of you in the future!
lmv