Ren Cummins

I'm a writer. I tell stories.

The adventure began around the time a few astronauts were nancing about on the moon. There may have been offroading, there may have been golf; but all I saw was one giant leap for mankind. I was reading comicbooks and dreaming of when I'd get to grow up to be Spiderman. The tales of heroes, old and new, infected my otherwise somber way of thinking, and what came out on the other side resolved itself into a love of adventure.

I wish I could tell you that it was a direct path from then until now, but I've embraced the tangents of my life as fodder for material, from such relatively mundane (and disassociated) occupational interruptions like working as a hotel manager, music studio engineer, Middle Eastern drummer for bellydancers, and a crisis response manager. I've even picked up a few foreign languages, which fed right back into my love of English.

One night, not too long ago, as I told my daughter a bedtime story - one she and I were making up - it just clicked for me. Her enthusiastic expression and engagement reminded me of the one commonality of all my experiences that had meant so much to me: storytelling. I returned to writing, to telling stories. The first well-formed endeavor to emerge was a six-volume young adult series collectively bound as the Chronicles of Aesirium, along with a smattering of other assorted projects.

What feats and adventures await me next? Whispers suggest a children's anthology, a contemporary paranormal horror series, a pair of follow-up additions to the Chronicles of Aesirium, and an assortment of stand-alone science fiction and fantasy novels. Astoundingly, with all that in motion, I still continue to play the piano and doumbek in my free time.

Rumors persist that I may have invented some sort of time machine. But... that's another story for another time.