I’ve heard I should really write these in 3rd person—you know, to be “professional”—but we know each other, right? We’re past that, aren’t we?

Good, I thought so.

So, who am I? Scholars and sages alike have asked the very same question for eons, since time began. My mother always told them they’d have better luck looking at my birth certificate for answers rather than staring into the eye of the universe, but you know those scholar and sage types.

I’ve always written, even before I could read. In fact, I remember stealing printer paper from my parent’s old Xerox machine (do you remember those? Do I remember those?) and “writing” lines of scribbles to create “books” I would then ask my parents to read.

As the years went on, and I grew to the ripe old age of about eleven, I said I wanted to be an author when I grew up. Which was news to my parents because up until this point, they couldn’t convince me to read a book to save my life. And it’s right about here where I decided “adults read books, and I’m eleven now. I should read books.”

And I did! Mostly fantasy. Actually, thinking about it, it was exclusively fantasy.

Fast forward a good number of years, and after being told countless times to “get a day job, writing won’t pay,” I decided to go into 3D Modeling and Animation at my community college. I did pretty well, too, until I hit my first storyboarding class, learned I loved coming up with and pitching story ideas just to be told only people who’ve been animating for 20+ years get to be in those rooms, and got discouraged and dropped out.

I roamed after that. Got married, worked graveyard shifts, tried making it as a video game streamer, had about seventeen separate existential crises, and generally had a pretty bad time.

Then, at a loss of what to do, I started writing fan fiction. Specifically, Destiny 2 fan fiction; a video game franchise I loved and spent a lot of time in, and whose lore was a perfect blend of fantasy and science fiction to keep me hooked for thousands of hours.

That’s how I found out two things: first, I sucked at writing. I hadn’t written anything for almost a decade at this point, and it really showed.

Second: I wanted to do nothing else with my life.

Somehow, this drive motivated me to go back to school in 2019, where I earned a bachelor’s in creative writing, then a master’s in game design, all for the express purpose of becoming a narrative designer for video games. I did personal game projects, joined game jams, published a very rough novella called Forgiveness, lead student narrative teams, and graduated salutatorian and valedictorian in my respective degrees. I somehow managed to get a job in the games industry after that, first as a production coordinator, and eventually as a game writer (which is what I do now, circa 2026).

But right around the time I graduated at the end of 2022, I got an itch to write a book.

And that itch never really went away.

After writing three other novels (that have yet to see the light of day), I eventually wrote King Maker in 2025, my dwarven fantasy novella inspired by both Tolkien’s Middle-earth and The Godfather, with a healthy dose of Riot Games’ Arcane thrown in as well. I published King Maker in August 2025, marking my first real attempt at author-dom (which is definitely a real word, no need to fact-check me).

2026 has been a big year for me. I’ve published short stories, am working on my fourth novel, A Cure for Gods (which will hopefully see the light of day as my full-length “debut” novel), as well as writing a sequel to King Maker and publishing the first novel I wrote back in 2023, Truth’s Overture, as a weekly serial on my Substack.

Which is as good a time as any to plug that, I suppose.

If you want to keep up to date with me and all my writing, as well as read a lot of my fiction for free (short stories and the aforementioned serial (starting in July 2026)), then subscribing to my Substack is the best way to do so. You’ll receive email updates every week with behind-the-scenes, exclusive deals, and much more.

Anyway, that’s me. Thanks for reading, and I’m glad to have you along for the ride.

With a Smile,
Quain Holtey