Early YearsThe date is November 12th, 1964. Within the City of Panorama, an author is born. Eric Nylund spent his childhood within the spectacular pine forests of Truckee, California. As a teenager he grew up in the barren Mojave Desert with his parents. If it isn't apparent enough already, Nylund was constantly moving from place to place with his family. Later on in life, Nylund received his Bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara and then his Masters degree from the University of California at San Diego, and had later advanced to candidacy for his PhD. Nylund never thought himself to be an author. The most penmanship Nylund ever thought he would achieve was in scientific write-ups. He never dreamed he would ever write a novel. One day, however, he read a novel by a very well-known author he thought to be despicably terrible. He threw the book onto his table and spoke the fateful words: “How hard could this be?” So, over the next three months he spent most of his time within the UCSD library and read a plethora of ‘how-to-write’ books. He then wrote 40,000 words of a novel, only to later realize that it was just as bad as the one he threw down in disgust. He backed up, took a deep breath, started over, and once again tried to author a novel he could be proud of. Eventually, Nylund reached his goal, and published his first novel “Pawn’s Dream”. In 1994, Nylund went to the prestigious Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and decided to leave graduate school and leave behind his once stable career in science to become an author. Microsoft EmployeeFour more novels later and Nylund found himself becoming a successful author, but later learned that living the midlist author life was no longer as delightful as it had seemed in the years prior. Nylund knew he had to put his authoring skills to good use. He got a day job at Microsoft, first at their Encarta Encyclopedia division, and later at Microsoft’s still up-and-coming Game Studios. In the beginning, most writers working on video games had to be happy with writing game manuals and how-to instructions guides for video games. However, this later evolved into helping game developers write better scripts, which eventually led to the development of better games and the creation of huge story arcs to help build these billion-dollar game franchises. As a writer for Microsoft Game Studios, Nylund helped develop world-renowned game franchises such as Halo and Gears of War. Within this website I chose to focus more on the Halo novels Nylund had written for Microsoft. These three books ('Halo: Fall of Reach', 'Halo: First Strike', and 'Halo: Ghosts of Onyx') were not only a hit within the community that was built by the Halo games, but helped to establish much of the lore within the Halo universe that is now seen by many within the community as common knowledge. This lore was extremely essential to the Halo franchise. It spawned a trend of more Halo-related novels, and further expanded the lore within the video games. It opened the developers of the Halo games to a plethora of more opportunities as to what they could achieve and ultimately work into their video games. For example, within Nylund's first Halo Novel, he had introduced many new characters into the lore that had not yet been introduced within the first Halo game, Halo: Combat Evolved. Nearly 15 years later, these same characters were introduced within the new Halo game at the time, Halo 5: Guardians. He has also helped sculpt the intellectual property for some of the world’s best video game developers including Bioware and Epic Games. Later, Nylund moved to Amazon’s new game studios. Nylund now resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Syne Mitchell, and their son. Nylund's social media presence isn't very prominent. On Instagram, Nylund hasn't posted since January 15, 2019. However, from the little posts he has on there, he can be seen posting pictures promoting his new books, pictures of his cat Bengal, pictures of his wife also writing books, and even paintings he had made. His presence on Facebook is much of the same. He doesn't share often, but when he does it's about his books, his paintings, or his family.