Me

Greetings! Stay awhile and read.

I am Ken, the proprietor and primary contributor of the Cybernook. I am an early thirties storyteller who writes prose and D&D adventures whenever I’m not working in the pixel mines as a professional software developer

Ever since I first watched the fifteen minute behind-the-scenes vignettes at the beginning of the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition VHS tapes, I have found storytelling, storytellers, and the processes by which those storytellers tell their stories endlessly fascinating. As a kid (and teenager), I always made up stories in my head, be they original fiction or fan-fiction. However, I never took the time nor spent the energy to develop the skills to transfer these stories to a storytelling medium, except for a few token efforts at writing prose during high school. I also never learned how to tell a story.

During my twenties—the early years spent trudging my way through college towards a Computer Science degree and the middle years spent settling into professional life—I stopped telling stories in my head. I no longer laid awake at night, trying in vain to fall asleep, all because I couldn’t help but see where this new story in my head went.

As age thirty began creeping up on me, I started feeling restless and spent many an evening in deep ennui wandering around my apartment. Something was missing from my life, a void I could no longer ignore. One night, staring up from my bed at the ceiling, a story idea formed, and I followed it for thirty minutes before succumbing to sleep. I woke up the following morning as if I’d found something important. I did.

Through 2018, I started telling stories in my head again, spent seven months learning some fundamentals of illustration in the hopes of one day telling stories in comic form, and then transitioned into writing prose—I am much better at typing than drawing. The time I spent writing in the latter half of 2018 was inconsistent. However, in January 2019, as a newly minted thirty-year-old, I stopped screwing around and committed myself to the craft. I have been striving to improve as a writer and storyteller ever since.