Long before I called myself an author, world-builder, or creator, I was simply a kid with an imagination that refused to turn off, even when I was asleep. As a child, I suffered from night terrors and incredibly vivid dreams. Some were frightening, some were strange, and others were so detailed that they felt less like dreams and more like places I had somehow visited. My grandmother found a way to turn something that frightened me into something I could create from. Whenever I woke from one of those dreams, she encouraged me to tell her about it, and eventually she gave me a piece of advice that would unknowingly shape the rest of my creative life: write the dreams down.
I began seriously writing around the age of twelve, which means storytelling has been part of my life for more than two decades. Back then, however, I wasn't sitting down with the intention of creating some massive fantasy universe. I was simply writing. I filled pages with the people I saw in my dreams, creatures that frightened or fascinated me, strange places, fragments of conversations, nightmares, and whatever pieces of those dreams managed to follow me into the waking world. Over time, writing became more than a way to preserve those dreams. It became the way I expressed my imagination, explored ideas, and created places that existed nowhere else but inside my head and across the pages in front of me.
As the years passed, those pages, notes, stories, and dreams accumulated. Eventually childhood moved on, life happened, and many of those early writings were packed away in a box. Then, one summer, I stumbled across that box again. I started reading through everything I had written when I was younger, expecting little more than a nostalgic trip through some very strange memories. Instead, I noticed something I had never understood before. The dreams connected. Characters from one dream seemed to belong in places I had described in another. Creatures appeared more than once.
Similar cultures, conflicts, landscapes, histories, and pieces of mythology surfaced across notes that had sometimes been written years apart. What I had always believed were unrelated dreams suddenly looked like scattered pieces of the same enormous puzzle.
That discovery became the foundation of Mythrendar™. I began deliberately connecting those fragments, developing them into histories, civilizations, bloodlines, religions, languages, kingdoms, worlds, and stories of their own. More than two decades of writing, imagining, revising, dreaming, and creating have helped shape Mythrendar™ into what it is today, and it is still growing. What began as childhood nightmares and handwritten notes has evolved into an interconnected universe filled with its own peoples, cultures, politics, magic, monsters, legends, deities, and, because apparently my imagination has absolutely no concept of moderation, a whole lot of dragons.
Today, I write under the name Nefarious J.R. Bane, but writing novels is only one part of how I bring my imagination to life. I am an author, ghostwriter, world-builder, animator, cartographer, lyricist, and manuscript formatter because I have never been satisfied with simply telling readers that a world exists. I want to build enough of it that you can believe it exists. I create the histories behind its kingdoms, the bloodlines behind its monarchs, the maps beneath its wars, the languages spoken by its people, the music tied to its cultures, and the creatures lurking in places sensible characters probably should not wander into. For me, world-building is not decoration around a story. It is part of the story.
Representation is also an important part of the worlds I create. I want to build expansive fantasy stories where people from many different backgrounds can find characters who look like them standing at the forefront of the adventure. They deserve to wield ancient magic, command armies, inherit crowns, fall hopelessly in love, make spectacularly terrible decisions, conquer kingdoms, become villains, become heroes, and occasionally climb onto the back of something enormous with wings and make everyone else's problems considerably worse.
Looking back after more than two decades of writing, it is incredible to realize how something so enormous began with something so simple. I was a frightened child waking from night terrors, and my grandmother was the person who taught me not to simply run away from what I saw. She encouraged me to talk about those dreams, remember them, and put them onto paper. Neither of us could have known that years later I would open an old box, read those pages again, and discover that somewhere among all those childhood dreams, nightmares, creatures, and half-remembered worlds, Mythrendar™ had already begun creating itself. What started with night terrors became writing, the writing became stories, the stories became worlds, and those worlds eventually became a universe. Now, after more than two decades of bringing that universe to life, I finally get to invite everyone else inside.