Hello everybody. This page is supposed to give you all the details about my life. About the author, James Master. I'll start with the creation of part of me that's known as the Author. This is my origin story.

I started writing when I was a kid. My friend Jeff and I would write stories about dinosaurs eating people. It was the sixth grade and we had just watched Jurassic Park for the first time. None of those stories exist and I'm kind of sad about that.

I never really contemplated the reality of becoming an author until I was out of high school and failing college. I had written a few stories in high school and even started writing a fantasy novel that was a cheap clone of Magic: The Gathering, but I never really had any aspirations to be an honest to God author.

I was going to college and failing pretty miserably at it. Besides writing, I really enjoyed playing video games in high school so I had this crazy idea to major in Computer Science with the thinking that one day I would create video games. For awhile it was fun. Coding wasn't much of a problem, it was my lack of discipline that doomed that part of my college career. No, I didn't party all the time or get drunk or stoned when I should have been doing homework. I was just focused on other things and didn't have my priorities on studying.

My final semester as a Computer Science major, I knew that I wasn't going to pass most of my classes so I sort of mentally checked out. I went to the classes and attempted the homework, but inside I had already started waving the white flag. I moved out of the college apartments and moved in with my friend Jeff. I got my old job back at the gas station. I felt defeated, like I had failed.

I continued to write this little zombie story during my work breaks. I had started it a few years back in college and thought it had some promise. I was only thirty pages into it. What kicked my writing into overdrive was when the assistant manager, Deanna, saw that I was writing something and asked about it. I had this crush on her, but didn't act on it for two reasons. One, she was my assistant manager and that'd be inappropriate. Two, I'd never been in a relationship before and was self conscious about my appearance (if I'm being quite honest about it).

Well, thirty pages turns into sixty pages, etc... Deanna quit the gas station and we started dating. She encouraged me to go back to college for writing and, while I had my doubts, I enrolled back in.

I got my job back at the cafe I worked at when I had been in college. I started writing more, studying more, and working more. Deanna and I got married in the summer of 2009, Christmas in July was the theme. Because of Deanna's unwavering support, I was determined to graduate.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, her mother, father, brother, and three dogs came to live with us in the two bedroom home we were renting at the time. To say that it was cramped was an understatement. That's were I finished my zombie story. I used the excuse that I had to work on the book in order to hide away in the tiny bedroom Deanna and I had. The title of the book changed from the zombie story to The Book of Roland. It also developed from a single book into a series of seven that would be called The Soul Eater Chronicles.

As time went on, Deanna and I escaped that little house, and her family, and moved to a two bedroom apartment. By that time, I was finished revising The Book of Roland and felt that it was good enough to send out to publishers. Among four different independent publishers, one of them was Permuted Press.

I was sitting on the toilet and scrolling through Facebook on my phone, yes we all do that don't pretend that you don't, and noticed that I received an email from Permuted Press concerning my submission. Glumly, I opened the app and then clicked on the email thinking that it was going to be a rejection letter. It wasn't. Permuted Press had accepted my series and wanted to publish all seven of them. When I told my wife the news, she wasn't surprised. She was always confident that somebody would want to publish them.

That's not the end of my origin story though. Unfortunately a year or so later Permuted decided to cut a whole bunch of unknowable authors due to a business decision. I was one of those authors. I don't blame them, it wasn't personal. It was business.

I sent The Book of Roland into another publishing house, Burning Willow Press and they too accepted the series. On Feb. 25, 2017, The Book of Roland was published. The rest, as they say, was history.