For most of my life, I’ve been an aspiring author. Ever since childhood, I’d write single page stories about my favorite movie monsters and would staple them into a book. From there, I’d write longer pieces by hand, into notebooks that I still have tucked away in my closet. Maybe someday, those tales from childhood will worm their way back out into the light and find an audience.

I grew up on a small farm, enjoying video games, scary movies, and lots of R.L. Stine books (my last count of them was 65 books). I eventually headed off to college thinking I’d be a school teacher, and then graduated in 2010, deciding then that the classroom wasn’t for me. And while the student loans haunted me for a period of time, the memories of the classroom were some of the fondest I’d had.

From there, I worked in a sewing factory for a couple of years before settling back into college for computer programming of all things! I got my degree in 2014 and have been working as a full time programmer ever since.

Now not much of that has anything to do with writing, and believe me, I’m sorely aware. My writing “career” did continue from childhood into my college years. Between 2006 and 2020, I wrote over 568,000 words across 26 stories in fan-fiction. I’ve recently picked up writing short fully fictional stories while also working towards completing my first novel for (fingers crossed!) publication.

While I’ve had an account with WordPress since 2009, I’m only now (October 2021) starting up a blog in the hopes to further my reach, and build myself as a writer.

As for my name, “Brian the Wanderer”, “Brian” is my first name and “the Wanderer” comes from my all-time favorite book, Melmoth The Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin. An old Irish Gothic novel from the 1880s, I read it in college for an Irish Gothic class, and from the moment I pulled that book off the shelf of Barnes and Noble, I knew it would be my favorite of the class (and I wasn’t wrong). Also, the name describes my wandering nature. I tend to shift between varying projects and genres (least that’s how my fan-fiction operated).

I’m still an avid fan of video games, with Tales of Arise being my latest addiction. Though The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time still holds a special place in my heart. I do some video game development on the side with Unity. I’m also a huge fan of horror movies as I’ve been enjoying them since I was eight years old, when I watched Children of the Corn 4 for the first time and immediately had nightmares from the movie (with my younger brother no less)!

I’m an Iowa boy through and through, and that’s where I’ll hopefully get to stay.