J. R. read Moorcock at an impressionable age and never recovered. Leiber and Vance followed, then his father's collection of Ludlum and Trevanian, and somewhere between sword & sorcery and international thrillers, a writer emerged.
He programmed computers when he wasn't composing music. Several albums made a few dollars, which funded more SFF books. Some tracks landed on television. A reasonable success by any measure except his accountant's. Who says Rock & Roll is dead? He does—he was selling downtempo electronica. The computer science and the composition both made it onto the page—better fantasy world-building through engineering, and prose that's deliberately rhythmic.
His early fiction was D&D fanfic, then Conan fanfic, until he encountered the Conan Purist Society, the Pure Conan Purist Society, the Absolutely Pure Conan Lore Gatekeeper Union, the Purist of the Pure Conan Lore Gatekeeper Consortium, The R.E.H. Canon Or You Will Die in a Fire Society, and a drunkenly-written cease-and-desist from a Norwegian lawyer representing an Oslo gaming company. (Almost none of that is true, but it may as well be. He learned the "fan" part of "fanatic" the hard way.) He now writes in his own world, where math is magic and our heroes are delightfully sarcastic (his main character). Or sarcastically delightful (also his main character, honestly).
He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his partner and 519 tomatoes (May through October only. For the tomatoes—not the partner). His work in tech and music once landed him a job with A Huge Rock Star—one of the best gigs of his life. He can't say who, but the man is enormous. Eighteen feet tall, no kidding. Fine, yes kidding, but rhetorically: huge.
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