About Craig
Craig grew up in the small northern town of Milford, New Hampshire, USA. His parents and sister have always been very supportive of his many creative pursuits, and fostered in him a love of reading at an early age. His first fantasy books were the Narnia Chronicles, bought for him, one book at a time, by his grandparents while on vacation in York Beach, Maine. From that point on, he’s never looked back.
The influence of his grandparents, Leo and Ethel, on his development as a fan of all things fantastical continued when they got him the dreaded Red Box introductory set of Dungeons & Dragons. Craig immediately took to painting the heavy metal miniatures, sketching out wildly impractical dungeons across countless reams of graph paper, and planning diabolical plots in which to snare his friends.
For years, Craig filled notebooks with fictional histories and travelogues. In high school these little blurbs grew into longer and longer stories inspired by his friends and their real life adventures. Eventually, these stories took the form of a shared universe with one of his closest friends, Pete, with the main characters being cast from their circle of friends, teachers, and other people they met along the way. A senior class trip to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales with nearly all of his close friends reignited a love of the cultures, peoples, and places of the U.K. and Ireland, as well as an interest in travel and expanding his horizons beyond the familiar hills of New Hampshire.
Craig attended Norwich University, The Military College of Vermont, where he continued writing for friends and a creative writing class or two. After bouncing from job to job after graduation, he headed south to Tallahassee, Florida for graduate school at the Florida State University School of Theatre. At FSU Craig spent two years immersed in the vibrant, artistic atmosphere of the School of Theatre, focusing on production research, acting, and advanced stage combat and violence. His love of collaborative creative pursuits flourished.
It was during his time at FSU, when he was supposed to be working on his Master’s Thesis, Forward Through the Past: A Prescription for Contemporary American Theatre (if nothing else, his ability to come up with titles has improved), that Craig set out to write his first full-length novel, bringing all of the characters he and Pete had created to life again. In that academic year Craig wrote a play and saw it produced, acted in several productions himself, completed his course work with highest marks, completed, published, and successfully defended his thesis, and finished the novel By Virtue of the Blood, self-publishing it in time to give all of his friends copies that summer.
Ultimately, Craig returned north to begin a long and rewarding career passing on what he had learned about theatre production and history to generations of students in Milford. After his first year, he was brought in as an English teacher as well, and his two professional interests were combined wonderfully with his eagerness to teach through stories and practical example.
His time teaching at Milford provided Craig with other great opportunities as well, including a chance to travel all over the world helping his friend and mentor, Brad herd Milford students on amazing journeys across the globe. Always fascinated by other cultures and the great monuments of antiquity, Craig has walked along the Great Wall, climbed down into the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, walked among the redwoods of New Zealand, and hiked up the long trail to Machu Picchu. He has visited Italy countless times, rambled through the Louvre, and wandered aimlessly from Soho to the Tower Bridge. Craig soon proposed to his wife Karen, in Rome at the Trevi Fountain and honeymooned in Belize. His favorite memories of travel are always the time spent with the local people he met along the way, sharing their hopes, dreams, and stories.
Then, in 2010 Craig & Karen welcomed their son Rhys into the world, taming their life a bit. Rhys has since grown into a thoughtful, active young man who is funnier than he can generally be allowed to know, and with Craig's help has become an avid reader.
During that time Craig had also surrendered to his friends Russ and Raef as they bombarded him with stories of a new medium: podcasting. The D6 Generation was born, and for ten years the three friends published nearly four hours of content every other week almost constantly. The podcast was structured around their love of tabletop gaming but branched out into all aspects of ‘geek culture’ including movies, books, and video games. For more than a decade they interviewed nearly all of the top names in the gaming industry, forging friendships with many that continue to this day.
On the podcast Craig first spoke of his writing in public. He had continued to write short stories and narrative battle reports through the years. Neil Fawcett, owner of Spartan Games, offered Craig his first chance at professional writing. Craig started writing short stories and mission narratives for the Spartan website, moved into creating narrative faction backgrounds for most of the company’s games, and wrote an entire narrative campaign for their game Uncharted Seas.
Soon after he began to talk about this writing on the podcast, Ross Watson, then working for Fantasy Flight Games overseeing Warhammer 40,000 Roleplaying development, reached out and offered Craig the chance to write for him. Craig had been a fan of Games Workshop and their grim dark galaxy since the late 1980s; this was a dream come true. Soon, Craig was writing short stories, articles, rules, locations descriptions, and plot hooks in genres as diverse as high fantasy, steam-punk, hard sci-fi, gothic sci-fi, space opera, and the weird west. Working on the Star Wars roleplaying game, creating rules and narratives for several fan-loved species, was definitely a high point of Craig’s writing career to date.
Craig’s final work for Fantasy Flight Games, before turning to novels full time, was to write the foundational fiction and several short stories for their in-house fantasy world of Terrinoth, and a novella in that world that was later broken down into a series of short stories and journal entries that appeared across several products.
While working with Spartan and Fantasy Flight, Craig was approached by Romeo Filip, CEO of Battlefoam and a longtime friend of the D6 Generation, about a new project; Wild West Exodus. WWX, as it came to be called, was a miniatures game set in an alternative historical timeline in the old west, in which the history we know had been subverted by dark, mysterious forces manipulating mankind since the dawn of time. The game offered Craig the chance to write a series of novellas that would establish alternative versions of Jesse James, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln and others as well as a whole cast of fictional characters.
While working with Romeo and his newly-founded Outlaw Miniatures, Craig was given the opportunity to work with excellent comic artist Michael Nigro in creating a 6 issue arc, eventually published as a graphic novel. As the publishing efforts of Outlaw shifted towards industry veteran Vincent Rospond and his Winged Hussar Publishing, the WWX adventure moved into full-length novels.
Vincent, and later his son and editor Brandon, would become essential partners in the next phase of Craig’s development as a writer. Starting with some advice concerning writing novels being akin to eating elephants, they have guided Craig as he started first with the WWX novellas, and then into the novels. Over the next couple of years Craig wrote four novels for Wild West Exodus, each featuring several factions and playable characters from the game. After completing his fourth, Family Blood, Vincent approached Craig about creating his own worlds, and the real dream began.
Craig wrote Legacy of Shadow, his space opera novel, over the course of a single summer. Next, came his fantasy novel Crimson Sand, Crimson Snow. At the same time he was doing short stories for several other gaming companies who worked with Winged Hussar and their fiction imprint, Zmok Publishing.
The next phase of Craig’s writing career came when Vincent approached him with the idea of creating an independent alternative history world that could be established and shared among the authors working with Zmok. Over the course of several fascinating and exciting meetings, Craig, Vincent, Brandon and authors C.L. Werner and Robert E. Waters, the world of The Alchemist took form. Craig was given the task of creating a timeline, travelogue, and almanac for the world, and writing the introductory novels. The first book, Rise of the Alchemist, came out in April of 2021.
While Rise of the Alchemist was in its editing stages, Craig was offered the opportunity to write an adventure novel set in the dawn of the Golden Age of Piracy in conjunction with Mike Tuñez’s Firelock Games pirate masterpiece Blood and Plunder. For Jamaica is Craig’s first historical novel, but he hopes to revisit the characters and their world again in the future. For Jamaica should be out sometime in 2021.
Looking forward Craig can’t wait for the chance to expand and further explore the worlds of both Legacy of Shadow and Crimson Sand, Crimson Snow, as well as delving into the endless inspirations he finds around him for new stories and characters. He also looks forward to working more with C.L. Werner, R.W. Brandon, Vincent and hopefully many others to develop the Alchemist’s world into a vibrant, complex framework for countless new tales stretching into the future.