About J. R. Konkol

My path to writing started with tabletop Role Playing Games. As with many, I started with Dungeons and Dragons. I wasn’t satisfied with the rules, so I started working on my own game. I tweaked it all throughout High School.

I started college with the thought of being a music major but got disenchanted with the idea after a few semesters. Something about an almost supernatural inability to stay awake when confronted with any type of chamber music made it a poor fit.

My RPG, Of Gods and Men, was taking shape, so I thought the better course was to learn to be a better writer. I switched my major to English, and eventually graduated with an English degree.

At some point, the game got published. It wasn’t a bad game. A lot of the rules and systems were quite robust, but it also wasn’t a great game. There was really no world to it… just an enormous set of rules defining how things would work once a world was built. It survived a few years. A supplemental source book and a screen got published, but eventually I pulled the plug on that chapter of my life.

The game became something we got together and played every week or two. I kept refining the rules with each new campaign, and, over time, a world started to take shape. When you run so many characters through a place, and build so many stories around those characters, one can’t help but eventually put some flesh around even the most skeletal of worlds.

Life went the normal course it goes for many. I found a career. I got married. I gained weight, and later lost it. We bought a house together, and with no children, started collecting cats. There were ups and downs… nothing too far outside the normal American experience.

Writing was something I always told myself I SHOULD do, but it never managed to claw its way to the top of the hobby list. I was playing with a few bands and releasing CDs. My classical piano studies were progressing, and when my wife, Kelly, settled on marathons and triathlons as her method of dealing with her midlife crisis… well, I added that into the mix as well.

Things changed after my wife had her stroke and started her long decline. I guess, somewhere along that dark twisting road, the concept of life being too short got hammered into my thick skull. So, I did my full Ironman. (barely) I fought through my anxiety and started (occasionally) performing some of the pieces I spent thousands of hours studying… and I finally started writing.

There’s a lot that happened on that long twisting road… it’s impossible to be with someone as they go through something like Kelly did and not have it change you. This isn’t a place to discuss it, but I was told a bio page was mandatory… and the death of my wife of sixteen years is a pretty big event in my life.

Writing has finally clawed its way to the top of my hobbies and pursuits. Book one has a publisher, a release date, and recently won a Maxy Award: the runner-up in the Scifi / Fantasy category for 2020.  Book two is starting to take shape and is moving into the realm of eternal editing, and I’ve already started charting out book three. I guess I’m officially a writer now.