Hi! My name is A. M. Reynwood and, if you haven’t guessed yet, I like to write stories. Fantasy stories, for the most part. I find the genre vast and extremely versatile, not to mention bucket loads of fun to work with and explore.
To give you a bit of background, I was born and raised in rural(ish) Upstate, NY on a two acre plot of land. We had a nice backyard, piles of gravel in the weeds, and a deep ditch ─ all of which were fantastic places to play in. My brothers and I ran around the ‘mountains’ out back and played with plastic dinosaurs and rubber dollar store lizards and frogs.
I came into a love for reading a bit late, but I reveled in playing make-believe, and that burgeoned into a love for stories which I have fallen deeper and deeper into over the years. We moved in the spring of 2007 to a bigger house that had a tree to climb and woods to explore, and it was there that I discovered the magic of Narnia and Middle-Earth, graduating from fairies and unicorns to dragons and knights. I also began writing, and the autumn after graduating from high school I began working in earnest on a story I called The Journey Taken (for lack of a cooler title). The story and characters ran away with me, and to this day I treasure that as the best writing experience I’ve had so far. The first volume of the series was published a year later, and I still remember how surreal it was to hold a printed and bound manifestation of what had been going on inside my head for the past year ─ and then several more to come.
That story traveled with me to yet another new home, this time a wee farm in Arcadia, where I now spend my days canning tomatoes, stacking hay bales, and all manner of farmhouse-y type things (like making yogurt, beeswax candles, and sweeping cat hair). I also began a tiny bakery business called NovelTea Kitchen, which has allowed me to ply my love and fascination with cooking, baking, and preserving.
In 2019 I began broadening my horizons as far as writing, publishing a short story and submitting other works to anthologies and online magazines and publishers. The experience has been awesome, and I’ve learned a lot through it and am hoping to continue to do so. My goal is to always seek to grow and improve my craft for the glory of God, who gave me these talents to serve him and his people.
A couple hobbies of mine are cycling, cooking/food photography, and collecting old books, Nordicware Bundt pans, teacups, and artisan pottery.
A handful of authors that have inspired and influenced my writing are Wayne Thomas Batson, Stephen R. Lawhead, J. R. R. Tolkein, Megan Whalen Turner, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Andrew Peterson, and Diana Wynne Jones. This is by no means exhaustive, but the stories and writing styles of these authors have helped me along on this journey!
