Things You Might Not Know

For those of you who are interested in such things I thought it might be worthwhile to list a variety of facts about me. Some true, some not so much.

TRUE FACTS

• I write short stories and novels
• I won first place in the third quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest (2009) for my short story ‘Digital Rights‘
• I have story reprints available on Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and the Nook
• I am a game design consultant with Empire Avenue, the Social Stock Market
• The most recent game I played was Emissary of War
• My first writing sale was an article on role-playing with different languages in Dragon Magazine.
• Videogames I helped make during my ten years at BioWare: Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights (plus expansion packs), Jade Empire, and Dragon Age. I did not work on Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect or MDK2. And BioWare did not make the Dark Alliance games, Planescape, or the Icewind Dale series.
• I have written three novels (plus two others written during college, but I pretend those don’t exist)
• The stand I used to use to hold Dungeons and Dragons books open to transcribe stats into creatures while doing data entry for Baldur’s Gate 2 is now what I use to prop up the iPad when doing rewrites for my novel (the iPad has the annotated version of my drafts)
• I was actually paid, in real money to transcribe Dungeons and Dragons stats. Something I used to do for free throughout high school
• I am amused by strange things
• Father to two wacky kids
• I have a computing science degree from the University of Alberta. Oddly I have never had a programming job though the technical skills I learned are very beneficial in my game design career.
• My most recent release is the non-fiction book: Lazy Designer, Starting a Career in Game Design.

POSSIBLY TRUE FACTS

• My career goals were to become a paranormal researcher (this triggered by some strange occurrences in my youth). Also: I liked the X-Files
• I once tamed a unicorn
• I enjoy fishing
• Piloted an airplane on a couple occasions
• I am building a robot army in my spare time
• For years I ran a small shareware company producing writing software
• I am a brilliant chef
• Was once a member of a specialized branch of the Canadian Armed Forces
• Very skilled at herding cats

Wow… that was an amazingly complicated effort on my part to avoid finishing novel revisions for the day…