Look and Listen

Biography

James Daniel Ross was born in 1973. He is a native of Cincinnati, Ohio who attended The School for the Creative and Performing Arts, which he still contends is one of the finest learning establishments he has ever seen. Surprisingly enough, his major was not Creative Writing, but Drama. After Graduation, Daniel attended Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, but was devastated by the death of Michael Todd Mitchell, his boyhood friend. He did not return for the next year’s studies. Daniel met Rebecca Fildes and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in search of better jobs. Only 19, with few marketable skills, he managed to secure work in various unskilled and semi-skilled jobs to make ends meet. It really wasn’t until the summer of 1994 that he began to guess that he had any skill in writing at all. Since before high school, Daniel had been involved in Roleplaying. In ’94, he began to ‘game master’ a very rewarding Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) campaign that was to span almost seven years of uninterrupted play. At the time, he belonged to a mailing list for WFRP and, as was customary, began sharing information, background and random thoughts under the alias Ouroboros8@webtv.net. After some positive feedback about his contributions, he began a very amateur E-zine called Ouro’s Forge. He wasn’t the best speller, and didn’t so much make grammar errors as he completely mangled sentences in an effort to be poetic. Despite these deficiencies, he developed a vocal fan base and their kind words drove him to write on in the face of his equally vocal detractors. Over the course of a year, he managed over seventy editions of Ouro’s Forge. Incrementally, he improved his work from a layman’s strictly unprintable tangled mass to a crude tapestry of sorts. Then, in the year 2000, Daniel began work on a novelette called ‘I Know Not: The Story of Fox Crow’ set in the Warhammer world. The first chapter was posted on the mailing list, where it drew few comments. It did, however, catch the attention of a medical student from Hudson Ohio named Lewis Bear Pollak. Lewis offered to work as an editor for the story, a decision that would soon change both their lives. Once completed, the story was offered to several official major WFRP publications, but was rejected out of hand from each as being too long to print. Daniel tried one more time with a small, unofficial fan-zine called Warpstone. Though it was over 40,000 words long, they decided that it would make interesting reading. The editors shrunk their fonts and split the story into three parts to fit it into the magazine. Daniel had his first published story. Later in 2000, Daniel and Rebecca, who by this time had produced three lovely children, split up. Though they remained on friendly terms, Rebecca moved back to her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio to be near her friends and family and by mutual agreement took the children with her. It was just after this that Lewis contacted Daniel and pitched an idea that had been brewing since the first chapter of ‘I Know Not’ had been posted. Lewis wished to write a Roleplaying game of his own, and wanted Daniel to provide the creative force behind the project. Daniel accepted, and was instructed to develop something new, fresh and exciting. During this time, he met and fell in love with Jennifer Reed. The duo known as Misguided Games Inc. released Children of the Sun. Hailed as a beautiful, thoughtful book, its sales did not measure up to the hopes of a few, but exceeded the expectations of many. Sadly, funding ran out, and all projects are on hiatus at this time. Daniel was forced to work as a freelancer during a very slow period in the gaming industry. Daniel and Jennifer moved back to Cincinnati to be near his family and children, but had a lot of trouble finding work in his chosen field. He managed to land paying work with BBRACK productions on their Promised Sands line. After this, however, a lack of contracts and other financial constraints moved Daniel to once again enter the work force as semi-skilled labor. While moving boxes in his apartment, he found his old books of poetry, journals, and half-finished stories from high school. He picked up a single scrap of paper which had three paragraphs written fifteen years before. Suddenly, after fourteen years, he knew what came next. This was the seed for his first novel, The Radiation Angels: The Chimerium Gambit, and submitted it for publication by Mundania Publishing. It will be released in March 2006. Though currently a stand-alone novel, he hopes to turn the Angels into a viable science fiction line of books.

Inspiration

Wow... Inspiration. I find that reading absolutely everything I can get my hands on helps me expand my horizons a lot.