About Brad
Brad Greathouse was born in New Jersey in 1989 before moving to the bay area penninsula near San Jose, California at a young age.
Though he was only in elementary school, Brad fondly remembers his first attempt at becoming an author.
He used to fold up pieces of printer paper stolen from his parents and would write and illustrate his own stories.
The crayon art didn't end up being his best work, but the passion for writing has stuck with him ever since.
Brad credits his mother, the daughter of an English professor, for instilling the love of reading in him.
Communal reading time became a precious family tradition before bed, that often continued on by flashlight after lights out.
In middle school Brad discovered his love for fantasy stories, and proudly asked the local library for "all the books with dragons"!
He discovered and fell in love with authors like Phillip Pullman, Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Richard Adams, Jonathan Stroud, T.A. Barron, and Terry Pratchett.
In 2008 Brad returned to the east coast to attend Boston College for his undergraduate degree.
Initially, he wasn't sure what to study as he cycled through intro courses for departments like Economics, Psychology, Sociology, and English.
Eventually he settled on Communications, mostly due to its popularity among his friends, but he wasn't terribly excited about the subject matter.
An internship managing social media accounts for a small tech company after his sophomore year was enough to convince him he needed a change.
When he returned for his junior year, he met with his academic advisor to discuss switching to Computer Science.
He was told that there was no way he could graduate on time with such a late start to a major, but after overloading his senior year, he just managed to graduate with both degrees.
After graduation, Brad has been working as a software developer since 2013.
He started out in consulting for five years, travelling around the country to a number of distinct client projects across a wide variety of industries and applications.
Eventually, he settled in as an engineer at a tech company close to where he grew up, in Sunnyvale, California.
These days Brad has been devouring more books during his commute and free time, falling in love with the worlds of Brandon Sanderson, N.K. Jemisin, Scott Lynch, and Patrick Rothfuss.
Since graduating college, Brad had been writing casually, but in 2018 he decided to get serious about writing his first fantasy novel.
As his projects tend to go, what started as a single, unplanned book soon became a sprawling epic fantasy series called A Second Before the First.
In 2021, Brad completed his manuscript for the first entry in the series: Toric.
Brad is active on Twitter and regularly posts on his blog. He also sends out a newsletter detailing his latest projects a few times per year.