James D. Mills

James D. Mills is author of The Heretic's Reflection Duology and Ashen Rider. He founded The Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing in 2019 and established The Literary Fantasy Magazine in 2024 with Lee Patton.

Who is James?

James D. Mills was born and raised in the heat of California’s Central Valley. Now he resides in Bloomington, Indiana, where he and his partner, Eden, live a slow life of self-sufficiency with their growing family. He earned his Bachelors in Creative Writing and Psychology cum laude from Southern New Hampshire University and is currently enrolled in their Masters of Business Administration program.

His short fiction has been published by The Penmen Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Calliope, among others. He serves as Editor-in-Chief for The Literary Fantasy Magazine. He has contributed writing to several best-selling TTRPG products.

He writes fantasy and contemporary literature tackling the complexities of life through the lens of a whimsical world. After losing his mother to brain cancer, he hopes to identify the range of human emotion, depicting the healing that comes with love, care, and family. He continuously works on novels that will be available somehow, somewhere, some day.

Why He Writes Fantasy.

Having grown up with old tech and late-90's computer role-playing games, James is drawn to the fantasy genre because of its vast capacity to tell infinite stories in myriad realities. He seeks to capture those distant, dreamlike memories of wandering through eerie digital worlds, inhabited by strange people in stasis. He wants to free their stories from the digital coil by writing their words on paper.

Informed by dualistic lifestyle as an IT professional by day and an academic by night; he has attained a diverse professional background caught between vivid green pastures and luminescent green terminals. His special interests lie in the archaic, vintage, retro, and [insert synonym for OLD here].

How do computer programs mimic the inner workings of the human mind? Don't ask him unless you have a whole afternoon to waste.

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