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About Me

Welcome to the website of Bryan Young.

I'm Bryan Young.

I've been working in storytelling for a long time and this blog has been active in one form or another since 2005 or so.  The original mission of this site was to post a short piece of free fiction that I'd written once a month.  Since I've become a professional writer, I've started to revise and reedit the stories that were available here, publishing them in short story collections and in small digital packs.

I started my career as a storyteller in film and have co-directed (with Elias Pate) numerous shorts and two feature-length films.  Between us and on my own, I've been involved in writing almost 20 feature length screenplays.  I got into writing, assistant-direction, and producing of documentary films with This Divided State and carried on with twice as much responsibility on Killer at Large.  Both films won numerous awards and are currently available on DVD across the world from The Disinformation Company and are available on Netflix.

Since 2006, I've been a contributor to The Huffington Post where I've been writing about politics, comic books, and the intersections of the two.  In 2009, Lucas Ackley and I founded the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! where I am Editor-in-Chief.  I've also written close to 2400 articles for the site, and my primary beat is covering Star Wars. Now, I'm pleased to report that I'm doing a series on film and Star Wars for the official Star Wars website and contributing regularly to Star Wars Insider.

As far as my career as a prose writer, I published my first short story as a junior in high school in 1997. It was a science fiction short called "The Assassination of Hitler" and has since been (gratefully) lost to the sands of time.  I continued writing prose, though not for publication until 2005, when I began this site originally. I helped Derek Hunter write the first issue of Pirate Club, which eventually turned into two graphic novels at Slave Labor Graphics. After that, we collaborated on a story for the first Popgun Anthology for Image Comics. In October of 2010, I published my first novella called The Colossus.  I was invited by Mike Stackpole to write it as part of his Chain Story Project.  My first novel, Lost at the Con, came out in June 2011.  It was released alongside a collection of short fiction stories I wrote called Man Against the Future. Since then, I've released a sci-fi adventure novel called Operation: Montauk and a sci-fi western called The Serpent's Head.

My fourth novel, The Aeronaut, will be available soon.

If you'd like to contact me, you can email me at bryan (at) bigshinyrobot.com.

Current Projects:

Fall '15 
The Aeronaut - Steampunk World War I story
Escape Vector - a collection of space opera short stories

Summer '16 - My stories will appear in three different anthologies hitting this summer.

Throughout these dates I'll be publishing smaller projects, short story collections, and essays along the way.  Be sure to check back often.

Popular posts from this blog

The Way It Is

            The whistle signaling quitting time was always his favorite time.  It was the high water mark for the rest of the day, representing that first moment of freedom matched with the highest level of energy he’d have for the rest of the night.  He turned his dirty earth-moving machine off, ceasing the rumble in his seat and in the engine.  Quietly, he pulled the earplugs from his ears, and collected his gloves and cooler.  The cooler held remnants of his lunch which had consisted of two ham and cheese sandwiches, a dill pickle, a bag of chips, and an apple.             Each step back to his truck, parked four blocks away, ached down into his core.  Shifting his weight right, he could feel the burn on his ankle and knee.  Shifting his weight left provided the same effect on the other side.         ...

The Hope of Humanity

This is but a sample of this story.  The complete version is available in my print collection  Man Against the Future.   From there, you can order signed copies, or buy it for the Kindle or the Nook. The year was 2081 and so many of the social problems humans had faced over the last hundred years were still a pretty big problem. Most people were still poor, corporations still ran the government, and politicians were constantly caught with prostitutes of both sexes, living and dead. When politicians weren't blowing each other's personal lives completely out of proportion for political gain, they were starting wars with other countries. Sometimes, they would even start wars with people inside their own country, but those were usually ideological. Perhaps the biggest and worst change was that the polar ice caps had melted and much of the Mojave Desert was now prime beachfront property, and the air across the globe tasted like you were sucking on a tailpipe. As pressi...

The Scoop

So, I've decided to save the below "About Me" in amber, trapped in time, as it were and sort of start over from scratch since the mission of the site is a little different now. I'm making a go of earning money for all of my writing. I'm working to convert my body of work here into something that will provide me some means of income that will justify how much time I spend writing in a day. I would really appreciate if you'd consider buying some of my stories and spreading the word. So, enjoy the slightly outdated bio about myself below, I'll start a new one up in its entirety soon. 03/2010 Me, circa February 2009. I'm posting short stories up on this blog. At least once a month I'll do so. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I used to write short stories quite often, but my prose petered out after I became a screenwriter. This is my way of relearning prose. If I didn't publish it here I probably wouldn't publish it anywhere. If I didn't p...