Skip to main content

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  I continued writing prose, though not for publication until 2005, when I began this site originally.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

Salt Lake Comic Con 2017 Schedule

It's time for another year of Salt Lake Comic Con and another hectic schedule for me. But! that doesn't mean it's not a helluva lot of fun. I hope you're able to join me at any of these panels. Especially if you like Star Wars. And please, please, please come to my signing and visit. Get some books signed. I'd love that enormously. Here is my Thursday schedule: Everything here is a highlight. That first panel about behind the scenes of the prequels is with Pablo Hidalgo and I'll be asking him questions about what it was like to be there on set for most of the prequels. Then I'll be asking questions of Michael Biehn, who I've been a fan of since I was a little kid. Aliens and Terminator were favorites. If you want to ask him a question, please hit me up on Twitter with it. I will ask it at the panel. And you don't want to miss Fauxthentic History's Infinity Gauntlet live episode. It's going to be soooo good. Here is Friday:

The Missed Opportunities of Days Gone By

“Hello?” I said into the phone, accepting the call from a number I didn’t recognize. “Hey,” the feminine voice on the other replied, as though I should know the sound of her voice. At a loss, I said, “Can I help you?” “It’s Brooke.” Her name stopped me. It couldn’t possibly be her. We hadn’t spoken in years, a decade perhaps. “Brooke?” “Yeah, Brooke Baker. This is Mark, right?” Jesus Christ. It was her. “Yeah, it is Mark. Brooke. Wow. How are you? It’s been a long time since… well… since anything.” “I know.” “So, how are you doing?” “Okay, I suppose…” Her voice belied her words, though. Something was up. “I… It’s just been so long and I guess I wanted to hear your voice.” “I don’t think I had a number for you. Ever. I offered a couple of times, but…” “I was a brat back then.” And that’s how a random phone call turned into a two-and-a-half hour catch-up session. We spoke of everything under the sun: people we still knew, how different we were, h

The End of an Era and a New Beginning

It's been a long time coming, but I think an upgrade to my web presence was long overdue. I began this blog in 2005 and it's served me well over the last 13 years. My goal in those early days was to write a short story every month. Back then, that was the only writing I was doing. This website, then called "Bryan's Short Story Corner," got me into a regular writing habit. One that I still maintain today. I hoped it would help me get eyeballs on my words and, looking back at some of those early short stories, I shouldn't have wanted any of those eyeballs looking. Today, my Patreon fills that void. There is a dedicated group of supporters there that help subsidize my ability to write short stories on the regular. After I started publishing books, this blog morphed into a place to talk about my projects and writing and it worked well enough for that for a long time. But now I have Twitter and Medium for those functions and they have much cleaner and easi