Ryan Mueller is an epic fantasy author. As a child, he was always a storyteller, developing elaborate fantasy worlds and filling notebook after notebook with trivia about these worlds. It took him a while to realize that there was a way to bring these worlds and characters to life for other people.

His first love as a reader was the Harry Potter series. Finally, he found a book that he enjoyed reading. It was a revelation to him that kids could have those kinds of adventures (well, kids in a fantasy setting anyway). However, his first true inspiration for a novel came from reading The Hobbit. He loved the idea of a quest full of action and danger and lovable characters.

In tenth grade, he took his first creative writing class. Although he didn’t learn anything useful in that class, he did read one of his friend’s novels while he was supposed to be revising a short story. That experience, more than anything, taught him that writing a novel was not some elusive goal that only superhuman people can achieve. Naturally, he set out to write one himself, and by the end of the following summer, he had written his first novel. It was titled The Four Prophecy, and it was ninety thousand words of utter crap.

Since then, he has worked on his craft and the originality of his ideas, discovering many great fantasy and science fiction authors along the way. Some of his biggest influences are Brandon Sanderson, Brent Weeks, Jim Butcher, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Tad Williams, Robert Jordan, Michael J. Sullivan, and Rachel Aaron.

Epic fantasy is Ryan’s first love, but he also likes to branch out into young adult and middle grade, as well as urban fantasy and science fiction across all these age groups. His stories are a bit of a throwback to an era when fantasy had heroes you could actually root for. While he enjoys a really good Grimdark fantasy every now and then, he prefers his fantasy a little bit lighter and more optimistic. You’ll find some dark and brutal things in his worlds, but you’ll also find characters who hold on to their inner goodness through intense struggles.

He also enjoys writing a good anti-villain. In so many stories, villains are irredeemably evil, but he prefers to write villains that may be good at heart or may be trying to achieve a laudable goal through brutal tactics. As someone once said, every villain is the hero of their own story.

In real life, Ryan is a college graduate who realized in the last year of his Economics degree that he actually hated the subject. Now he’s going back to school to become an Engineer. Writing and Engineering may seem a strange combination, but Ryan is an exceedingly strange person (though he tries to hide it most of the time). He also thinks writing about himself in the third person is kind of weird.