About Robert

“The magnificently incredible brought to life.”

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Robert E. Balsley, Jr. (1954 -) was born in Sioux City, Iowa. At the age of four his parents moved their family to Cincinnati, Ohio. Upon graduation from high school in 1973, Robert joined the United States Air Force which sent him to Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. Upon his discharge in 1979, he found employment as a civil servant on Tinker until his retirement in 2014. In 2018 Robert and his wife picked up roots and moved from Oklahoma to Burlington, Kentucky, which is just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. 

 

In 1990 he played his first game of Dungeons and Dragons and was soon writing his own games. From this sprang the ideas which ultimately led to his love of writing and the creation of his current novels. Many of the main characters are based upon actual people who played Dungeons and Dragons with him all those years. This includes personalities, idiosyncrasies, and all those other traits that make friends so endearing… and fictional characters so alive!

 

Throughout his life he's been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy. Isaac Asimov, James Bliss, David Eddings, George R.R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, and Robert Heinlein are among his favorite authors. Robert's also a collector of figures and models such as Star Trek spaceships, WWII airplanes, Dungeons and Dragons miniatures, TV and movie monster figures (particularly Godzilla), and dragons to name a few. It’s in this world of mankind’s rich imagination that he develops his stories, plots, subplots, heroic and cowardly deeds, laughter, tears (and all the emotions in between) that make tales come alive for the reader… that makes the reader want to “turn the page”.