GUILDIFI CON GUESTS!
A-D
J.J. Ackerknecht
Hey there. Gonna break with tradition and do this bit in the first-person.
I'm Justin Josiah Ackerknecht, aka JJ, aka JayAck. I love Fantasy, SciFi, Horror, and the intersections where those genres meet, as well as almost all of their little subgenre children. I've been writing for about 20 years, whether that be comics, short stories, webserials, and now, publishing to Amazon.
I've lived in America (where I'm from) as well as Asia and Europe (where I am currently). My wonderful wife works as a librarian, and we both adore books and stories of all sorts. We also have a very stinky and absurd dog that we love very much.
J.D. Astra
J.D. Astra writes Sci-fi, Fantasy, LitRPG, and Cultivation novels with deep, meaningful themes wrapped in action-packed adventure. She’s an active member of the SFWA, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and loves to frequent the local cons in Colorado.
Ten years of experience in the gaming industry as a designer, project manager, and QA tester has given her insight into the LitRPG world that elevates her crunch, resulting in well-balance game worlds that feel real. No need for a day-one patch on her books!
When she’s not writing, Jess is spending time with her friends and family, managing QA projects for Disney’s R&D team, or gaming well into the wee hours of the morning.
Her works include: The fan-favorite Viridian Gate Online: Firebrand series (completed); a dungeon delving story with weird magic, Deathless Dungeoneers (one book published); the underdog superhero Zero.Hero series (two books published); a Sci-Fantasy Cultivation series unlike anything in the genre, Bastion Academy (three books published).
Alvin Atwater
Alvin Atwater’s a man of humor, fantasy, character creation and even their dreams. His main flagship is the Rise of the Cheat Potion Maker series, accompanied with a lesser known, Pinnacle of Power and an older light novel series that got his start in LitRPG. He’s written roughly 40 books, spanning across a few genres, though Goodreads state 51, remembering works that he’d rather forget.
Born in Florida, Alvin did military service as a Navy Seabee, and afterward, dropped out of college to foolishly pursue a writing dream.
Matthew J. Barbeler
Matthew J. Barbeler is an indigenous Australian author, and he writes dark fiction to die for. Author of Crematoria Online and EDGE Force, his LitRPG combines his love of video games, games design, and writing page-turners that sink their claws in and don't let go
Austin Beck
My name is Austin Beck. I’m a laid back Southern fellow with a wife and three boys. I’m known for my isekai harem gamelit slice of life novels. That was a mouthful. I’ve written 7 harem novels and have loved every second of it. My most successful series so far are the Reborn as a Fire Mage series and the Mixed Martial Cultivator series. My books are kind of like popcorn movies in the summer. They won’t win any awards, but they are fun and mindless.
Natasha Bennett
Natasha Bennett is a long-time gamer and RPG player. She is also a Canadian author of several books and short stories in the science fiction/horror genre. Lately she has been working to break into the screenwriting industry. This year her latest script, Six Days Before Christmas, was a finalist in the 13Horror.com screenplay Contest. Prior to that her science fiction series, From the Ground Up, was a quarterfinalist in Screencraft’s ‘Upcoming TV Pilots’.
When she is not writing, Natasha enjoys her time urban exploring Vancouver Island.
Jay Boyce
Jay Boyce, daughter of a librarian and wielder of words, is primarily an editor turned LitRPG writer. A crazy dreamer, she creates stories in her head all the time, and finally decided to start writing them down and sharing the love. A perpetual learner, she also works at her local university attending classes with deaf students and gleaning knowledge on any random subject she can get her hands on. She started writing again after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2018. She strives to make the world better through kindness, and showing that you can overcome whatever obstacles stand in your way.
Jay is currently writing two series: A Touch of Power and Rise of the Mystic Mage. Winner of the 2019 Warriors and Wizards award for best new LitRPG author, she was also nominated as a finalist for the Independent Audiobook Awards in 2020.
Jay is well known for collecting the rainbow in the form of dice, wigs, and mugs. Her hobbies, aside from reading/writing, include playing board and video games, ultimate frisbee and volleyball, and traveling the world to experience new cultures.
Xander Boyce
Xander is a USCG veteran and lifelong scifi/fantasy reader. Having begun creating worlds for his pen and paper roleplaying games more than a decade ago, he has always been fascinated by what can be done when people are pushed beyond normal boundaries. He was drawn to Science Fiction as a way to explore the human condition, and his debut book, Advent, is an extension of that desire.
Jonathan Brooks
Jonathan Brooks is the author of over 40 books in the Dungeon Core and LitRPG genres, including Dungeon World, Dungeon Crafting, The Dungeon Fairy, and Station Cores, to name a few. He prefers his LitRPG to be on the crunchier side of the genre, both as a reader and author, so the more stats the better! He currently lives in Colorado with his wife and daughter, writing more books to release every month.
Jez Cajiao
Jez Cajiao was born a regular human, but over many years of trials and tribulations, he managed to survive to become...an older, uglier and larger regular human!
Seriously though, I live in the North of England with my wife, and two sons, Max and Xander, two cats, and a two crazy dogs that love doing 'Zoomies' around the garden.
I'm writing full-time now thanks to all of your support, and generally loving life, so thank you all!
Steve Campbell
Steve Campbell is a Canadian Narrator who has recorded over 135 titles, totaling over a thousand finished hours of audiobooks, equal to 10,000,000 words. He won the Independent Audiobook Award in 2019 for YA (Watcher by AJ Eversley - co-narrated with Chelsea Stephens). Steve has also been interviewed for an article in the Wall Street Journal and has been on multiple podcasts and is a member of SAG-AFTRA.
Steve didn’t start out in the narration business, he previously worked at restaurants entertaining patrons and at an apiary before turning to construction, where he worked for almost 20 years, eventually founding and owning an incorporated company for 10 of those years. Once he discovered his love for narrating he was able to go full-time with audiobook narration after only 1.5 years.
Severe ADHD did not slow Steve down, he was not only an athlete in school, with achievements of being the captain of his high school basketball and volleyball teams, he was also involved in Fine Arts as the lead in many plays, including a community performance of Romeo and Juliet. He was also the high school class president and Valedictorian.
Steve was also a lead singer in a church and youth band to crowds up to 300 strong and toured eastern Canada and northeastern US for a year doing multimedia dramas and music to crowds up to 1,500 in schools, churches, community centres, and minimum and maximum prisons.
Steve is happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have two sons together. He’s a huge fan of movies and comics, and didn’t discover his love for reading until he was 20 and hasn’t looked back.
C.M. Carney
My journey to becoming the Bestselling author of ‘dorky books’ - as my sister is fond of calling them - began in the dark ages long before the internet was a thing with the original Dungeons and Dragons boxed set.
My mother bought that shiny red box for me after reading an ‘editorial’ in the local paper claiming that role playing games drove kids to worship dark forces in the sewers. I was ten, and it's probably a good thing there were no sewers on my street, otherwise, I would have delved down with my hand-crafted wooden sword and my trash can shield, ready to smite evildoers of all stripes, likely to never be heard from again.
Thankfully, my forays into the underworld never materialized, and I faced neither dragon nor goblin nor gelatinous cube. Instead, I turned my eye and my quill to writing fantastical tales.
Today, thanks to my two Bestselling LitRPG series, The Quintessence, which incorporates cultivation elements and measured progression, and The Realms, which burst onto the LitRPG scene with Barrow King in February 2018, I get to put the profession author on my tax return.
In addition to my two current series, I am just finishing up work on the first book in Knightman & Page, a middle grade superhero, action-adventure Arhturian series with LitRPG elements.
Dawn Chapman
Dawn Chapman has been creating sci-fi and fantasy stories for thirty years. Until 2005 when her life and attention turned to scripts, and she started work on The Secret King, a 13-episode Sci-Fi TV series, with a great passion for this medium.
In 2015, Dawn returned to her first love of prose where she revelled in the world of The Secret King, Letháo and First Contact, as an epic prose space journey over three generations.
This year her experience of working with others expanded. From Drama, Sci-Fi, Action, to LitRPG/Gamelit. Dawn’s built a portfolio of writing, consulting, publishing and audio proofing.
Harmon Cooper
Hi, I’m Harmon Cooper.
I write in a variety of genres and styles mainly covering LitRPG, cultivation, post-apocalyptic, and progression fantasy.
I have traveled through Asia extensively, from the Gobi Desert to the outskirts of Japan, which is where I draw the core of my inspiration. I was once a Fulbright Fellow, and in 2021 I won the LitRPG/GameLit audiobook of the year award for the Sacred Cat Island, narrated by Travis Baldree.
L.S. Dealy
L.S. Dealy, a third-year Sociology student from Ottawa, is work on publishing his first book of fiction and will use his experience to encourage other students in self-improvement of their skills.
Ryan DeBruyn
All right. Where do I start?
Honestly, it’s strange looking back at how you got somewhere the further away from it you get.
I grew up an athlete who wanted to read sometimes more than I wanted to compete. I wanted to be on some magical battlefield fighting off evil, instead of just the ugly opponent I also wanted to beat. If anything, this environment allowed me some unique creativity when it came to competition.
It’s probably accurate to say I took sports as far as I physically and mentally could, attempting to represent Canada and compete in the Olympics. It might not have happened but that isn’t because I didn’t work hard enough to get the stats I needed.
When sports ended I went back to school and took Electrical Engineering, it was during my final year there that my passion for reading and long desire to write finally manifested. I started my first story Equalize on RoyalRoad and fell ‘ass-backward’ into the world of being an author.
Now, two years after taking writing full-time, I have three series to my name, and all of them have been best sellers. What a world we live in?!
Give any of them a read ;)
Travis Deverell
Travis Deverell is the unepententently Australian author of the suspiciously bestselling series He Who Fights With Monsters. Also known as Shirtlaoon, a moniker with a disappointingly banal origin, he has gone from a student of literature to a writer of litRPG, which is both more fun and more lucrative. The unfortunate lack of kung fu wizards in the English literary canon turned out to be a dealbreaker.
Matt Dinniman
Matt Dinniman is an artist and writer from Gig Harbor, WA. He writes Dungeon Crawler Carl.