who is J. Allen Cunningham?
Beating to one's own drum.
J. Allen Cunningham was born mere days after Star Wars: A New Hope. This became more than just a coincidence, but a connection to a story beloved worldwide. As he grew up, Star Wars became his favorite thing, a story of a poor farmboy that saves the entire galaxy was hard not to fall in love with. The battle of good and evil, heroes and villains, would be something he would become obsessed with for life.
Child of the 80s.
Like many kids of this era, Cunningham grew up with video games. Fascinated with the worlds in which he could assume roles he would never see in real life, it became a lifelong hobby.
While in college, Cunningham discovered how deep the storytelling had become in roleplaying games. This, in his mind, took gaming far beyond just a kid's hobby and into the realm of wordcraft, the kind equal to some of the greatest pieces of literature.
Beyond College
After college, with a budding interest in creating his own fictional universe to share with the world, Cunningham discovered Dungeons and Dragons. It was here that the story of Andoria was born, through the creation of the penitent former assassin Bertrand Arramor, desperate to clear his soul of his sins.
When his plans professionally ultimately fell through, Cunningham devoted time to creating his world, the first concrete elements that built the series now in progress. Each time an attempt was made to start writing, there was a block, a missing piece. It wouldn’t be until the mid 2010s that he finally found the last piece of the puzzle.
Cunningham is fascinated by time, destiny, and the illusions of heroes and villains. This bleeds into his work as he focuses more deeply on the characters and their interconnections to their own personal traumatic pasts and the origins of where ordinary people push themselves into legend, often by accident or with no intent.
Onward
Cunningham's hope, more than anything, is to reinvigorate a taste for reading in an era of high technology. Like his, so many stories go unseen, unread, and missing from a greater audience that would read them.
Explore his works and many more authors at Amazon.
