Being cursed with an overactive imagination at 18, I decided I wanted to be a creative writing professor. I then dedicated the following 8 to 9 years trying to do that, and well… it didn’t work out the best.
Turns out, to be a professor, you have to not get paid for a long time. Sometimes, you never get paid. I decided I wouldn’t do that because I’m fond of money and the delicious foods it can be used to purchase. What was I going to do, though?
I imagined having two master’s degrees would entitle me to some decent pay somewhere, right? How wrong I was. Because I only had schooling (and a lot of it), and also because the country was in recession, almost nobody would hire me. I honestly got turned down for a job as a Taco Bell Assistant Manager.
As a result, I tried my hand at being a city tax and crime newspaper reporter for over three years. That was wild and honestly exhausting. I shifted and sold trucks as a salesman, and I was actually pretty good at that. I was just unenthused about it, as that didn’t feel like my destiny either.
On a whim, I did some substitute teaching, which led me to working with kids struggling with disabilities. I absolutely loved their humor, and found they really appreciated mine. So, I went about becoming a fully licensed special education teacher.
For years, I’ve brought roleplaying games to my students and geeked out with them. I’ve also maintained two separate tabletop roleplaying groups for over seven years . The hilarity and antics of our games got me thinking, “hey now, Jade, what if you planned a homebrew campaign but just played through it in the story of a novel?”
Needless to say,
the alfredo sauce was simmering.
In November of 2023, I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized I had studied and practiced creative writing enough. It was time to stop meandering around and actually produce something. My opportunity was NaNoWriMo.
Within the scope of 28 days, in November 2023, I wrote a book of 50,000 words. My pacing was so effective at that end point that I went even further and wrote an additional 12,000 words in just the following week.
Since then, I have been of the single mind to produce my own five-part comedy fantasy series, with the intended audience being my goofy/geeky friends. As I once told my friends at CalArts:
I write to entertain and I tell stories to delight.
If people aren’t laughing or feeling great while they’re moving through my work, it isn’t doing what I want.
That still holds true today and it’s a big part of why I’m writing this series the way I am.
About me?
I’ve been blessed with a unique life and some truly diverse experiences. For starters, I was raised in rural Kansas. Until the age of 18, I worked on my family grain farm, climbed trees, swam in creeks, and struck down thousands of weeds – pretending they were monsters, evil knights, etc.
You might be wondering how it is that I’m a man with this glorious beard and yet my name is Jade. Why not Jayde or Jayden? I actually get this question a lot. The answer, my friends, is a little family legend.
My father, a dwarven artisan and multiskilled creative of some renown, made jewelry as a teenager. One of his favorite stones to work with was murky jadestone. He thought the stone was rugged and interesting. When his first son arrived, he thought something akin to, “maybe a name like that will make my son rugged or interesting.”
You might disagree with that logic, and my mother, who wanted to name me Daniel, would side with you. However, throughout my life, my name has done just what my dwarven father intended. The moral of the story is to never doubt a dwarven artisan — they’re meaner than they look, and you never know what they might do with a hammer.
