About Bryan Cole

Well, hello there.

My name is Bryan, I am Canadian, and I write fantasy books. This is still a very strange thought, but here we are regardless. And you’re interested enough to look me up on my website. I’m grateful you’re here.

Fantasy literature has inspired me for my entire life. I still remember very early on my friend Chris giving me book 2 of DragonLance Chronicles, Dragons of Winder Night. Then he told me not to read it, because it was the second book in the series. I didn’t even understand what that meant at the time. Mostly I just remember him being outraged that I wanted to start reading right away. I was captivated by the cover art despite not knowing anything about the characters I was looking at (which, if you know you know). Also, don’t get distracted by the price of a book in the early 1980s!

For me, this was a pivotal moment, the first time I realized a story could be longer than a single book, and fell in neatly with my permanent love for the Star Wars franchise – I was, and remain, their target audience, and if you haven’t watched Andor, you’re cheating yourself out of something epic. But I digress. Get used to that. I do that a lot.

As for who I am, I am a technologist, having worked in the enterprise software space as a performance testing expert for decades. This, of course, has nothing to do with fantasy writing, but authoring and presenting quite literally thousands of PowerPoints over the decades has given me a lot of practice putting words to a story. It’s just that I now have an outlet for the fantastical elements that live within me, not just how to improve website performance or how to optimize your memory usage on your database server or whatever your problem is. It turns out that not only did I have an entire series within me, but that I adored the writing process. Crafting the characters, taking my vision of them and committing them to the page (I won’t say paper, because I’m a computer person through and through)… it was so rewarding. More than that, it was fascinating to me that as I wrote sections of the story, putting the various characters into the various situations, they almost spoke for themselves, showing me how they’d act and behave and what they wouldn’t tolerate. Tristan especially.

As much as I loved writing, I loved editing even more. Reading my story then reading it again, and again, then twenty more times, finding all the little issues and foibles, then sending it to professional editors and going through rewrites and then editing again… I guess I love my own story. I hope you read it and love it as well!