About Mark Veldon

Mark Veldon was born on a day it snowed outside Los Angeles in Upland, California (not gonna be many more of those going forward). He was the kid who always got blamed if something went wrong, even though he was only responsible 90% of the time (the outrage!).

As an adventurous daydreamer in a suburban world, he once convinced his middle-school friends to trek several miles through the storm-drain beneath Newport Avenue in North Tustin. He also developed a taste for board games, roleplaying games and video games, and may have seen The Matrix five times in the theater.

After taking a degree in creative writing from Long Beach State University, he moved up to the Bay Area, where he began a career as an advertising copywriter. At the same time, he may have written a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook as spec work for a job at Wizards of the Coast (they never called him back).

After almost ten years of freelance work in advertising, Mark decided to try his hand at teaching, eventually becoming an English teacher in Albany, California. He’d always wanted to get back into writing but never seemed to have the time . . . until the Covid-19 lockdown left him in a tiny studio apartment with nothing to do but watch movies, read and finally start writing.

A year and a half later he applied for a sabbatical to dedicate himself full time to writing, which is when he got around to completing the first novel draft of The Quartermastra. Two more years of teaching and revising went by before the novel was ready to be published. And here we are.