I’m J.P. Graves, and honestly, it still feels weird to say that.

I’m a metalhead, a sci-fi and fantasy nerd, a gym rat, and I’ve spent the past 14 years as a soldier. I’ve been all over the world, as you’ll see in the pictures below, and for a while I thought I knew exactly what I was doing and where I was going. Becoming an author, though, was never part of the plan.

To be completely honest I started writing on a whim. One night, while stuck on a twenty-four-hour duty, I started typing out an idea that had been bouncing around in my head. That turned into an eighteen-hour, caffeine, nicotine, and ADHD-fueled plunge into writing, and I never really looked back.

After that first stretch, I got hooked on building stories. I spent hours upon hours after work writing, throwing wild plot ideas at my wonderful, very supportive, and all around amazing wife, and trying to figure out what publishing might actually look like if I decided to take it seriously. In the end, self-publishing felt like the right path.

One thing you should know about me: I do not take “you can’t do that” very well. Plenty of people made it sound impossible to just start writing and actually publish a book. That only pushed me harder.

I finished Crimes of an Empire in about eight months and published it under the pen name J.P. Graves, mostly because almost nobody can pronounce my real last name. Trust me, it was the right call.

After that, I hit a strange point. I had done the thing I set out to do. I published the book. Then came the question: now what?

For a few months, I stepped away from writing. Then my wife and I took a trip to Japan, and while riding a bus to the Naruto Theme Park (which I highly recommend because it was awesome), I noticed a small building perched on a mountainside. It got me thinking about isolation, the kind that really gets under your skin. That thought eventually led me to fire watchtowers in the 1950s and, from there, to the idea that became In Darkest Dreams.

The story changed a lot along the way. At first, it leaned more into the fire watch aspect and involved some kind of fire demon. Eventually, it became something darker: a Lovecraftian-inspired horror centered around an entity with no clear motives and no easy explanation. I ended up writing and rewriting In Darkest Dreams three different times over about ten months before it became what it is now.

These days, I’m working on my next horror novel, Writer’s Block, while also building out a fantasy series called Flayed.

That is probably enough rambling for one bio, but if you’ve made it this far, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.