UPDATE: The winner is…Mary Preston!
*~*~*

Life is a journey, and though I’ve hit a lot of bumps, it’s been an interesting ride so far. I’ve spent several years as a musical theater actor, met my husband in a dance ensemble, developed a hunger for travel, and sat behind many a desk pulling my hair out doing non-profit accounting (non-profit can also be a descriptor for the salary…). Creativity has always dominated the course of my journey. Many of those accounting gigs were for arts organizations.

The writing portion of my life journey began in Fourth Grade in the Spokane Valley. I participated in a writing contest, and I wrote my first story, Space Specialties. The Space Shuttle Columbia had launched three years before, and I’d been watching Star Trek and Star Blazers on television. Science and Sci-Fi had a firm grasp on my childhood creative endeavors. My “book” (remember, this was Fourth Grade) was a finalist in the contest. In 1987, I rediscovered Doctor Who on PBS. I’d watched it a bit at a friend’s house in the early 80’s, but I became a dedicated viewer (and still am!). The time travel premise had me enthralled, and I wrote several chapters of a young adult novel called The Time Robber. I entered the first chapter for the Young Writer’s Conference that year, and I remember getting ten minutes to read. I didn’t get to the end of the chapter, but the other teens in the group asked if I could keep going. I recently found the pieces of that manuscript in an old file folder I’d been carting around since junior high school. Who knows, there may be a YA novel in there still.

During high school, I wrote two Doctor Who screen plays that are also collecting dust in my old filing cabinet. I added poetry to my arsenal of wordsmithing, but my high school crowning achievement was a murder mystery I wrote entitled As The Spud Hurls for a party. It was basically one of those boxed murder mystery parties before they became a thing. Through college, I wrote poetry and drew in the margins of my lecture notes, and I wrote and hosted a few more murder mystery parties, but dance and musical theater soon overtook any time I had available for writing apart from weekly multipage letters to family.

After a long hiatus from writing while my journey took me in many different directions, Delilah Devlin nudged me toward a call for submissions board, and I wrote my first gay romance short story for an anthology. It sold, and I became a published author. My cousin, Elle James, congratulated me by saying, “Welcome to the Dark Side!” Several rejections and a few published short stories later, I wrote the Golden Scepter series, which was published by a small Canadian press. They are currently awaiting rewriting and rereleasing at some point in the future.

The Rain City Tales and the Black Rock Cult series are my current projects. The Rain City Tales series is set in the Seattle area, or at least has a connection to Seattle (I took the readers on a trip to New Zealand in Book 7 Memories of Coromandel). Each can be read as a stand-alone. I’m scheduled to release two more novels to complete the series by the end of 2026. I’m in the process of writing the second of three novels in the Black Rock Cult Series to be released later this year. These books are readable as stand-alone novels, but there will be a full story arch over all three books.

My current release, Blaze of Cortez, is the eighth book in the Rain City Tales. The castle firefighter Ray Cortez built around his heart kept him safe from everyone in his life who’d left him, but his coworker Leif Ramsey stormed his battlements with every intention of staying. When a fire at Ray’s childhood home ignites past trauma and threatens their growing trust, can Ray and Leif survive the heat, or will their relationship go up in flames?

Wherever my life journey leads next, I know it will include travel, pastries, wine, and romance!

My story in the Secret Identities anthology, “Masquerade,” goes back to my roots with a suspenseful tale of a coffeeshop owner blundering into a world of intrigue with a mysterious man hiding behind a Harlequinn mask.

If you haven’t ordered Secret Identities: A Boys Behaving Badly Anthology #8, follow the link and grab your copy today!

About Brent

Though writing most of his life, Brent came to romance in 2012. With the support of his husband and his two romance novelist cousins, Brent embarked on a writing career. He’s loving the journey, finding inspiration and a story everywhere he goes, whether it be staring out the window at the local coffee shop, tucked in a booth at his favorite pub, driving through each of the fifty US states, or riding the train to explore the world.

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