About Me

Nathaniel J. Trepke was born in February 2001 in Victoria, British Columbia. He moved to Delta in 2008 and has lived there ever since. Writing became one of his favourite activities as soon as he learned how to do it. Around the same time, he also developed an appreciation for reading, his favourite childhood series being Erin Hunter’s Warriors. Though he enjoyed both activities, Nathaniel rarely read or wrote outside of school, preferring to spend his free time playing with LEGO and later playing video games. It was not until senior high school that he realised his love for fiction writing. He took a Creative Writing class to fulfil his English language requirement, in which he wrote short stories about fictional World War Two tank battles and another that would evolve into The Chronicles of Elaria. All received high marks and praise from teachers, encouraging him to keep exploring Creative Writing.

Nathaniel stopped writing when he entered Simon Fraser University to study Computer Science. Making video games had been his dream, so attending school and experimenting with the Unity game engine took over his time and attention. However, early in his schooling, Nathaniel realised that his primary motivation for making games was to tell stories. Since storytelling was far easier to do without level design, coding, and asset development slowing things down, he returned his attention to Microsoft Word. Nathaniel revived one of his high school short stories and expanded it with new lore and characters. After his first year of university, he had written his first book—a fantasy epic about a group of knights from a backwater town saving the world from an undead dark lord. Encouraging though it was to finish a book, Nathaniel was unhappy with the result. It was monstrously long, contained a dreadful mish-mash of historical settings, and was thematically shallow.

But Nathaniel did not give up. He knew from the start that his first book would be experimental and generally terrible, so he used it as a starting point for a more serious writing effort. Nathaniel studied examples of fantasy by Stephen R. Lawhead, Brandon Sanderson, and Michael J. Sullivan and gathered insight from book reviews, video essays, and writing tips on YouTube. Using his new skills, he split his first book into several and finished the first Chronicles of Elaria novel in 2022. Still unsatisfied and continuously improving, he rewrote it in the summer of 2023. Nathaniel deemed this book, The Dawn of Darkness, the first audience-ready story. After showing it to beta readers, he decided to self-publish it with the help of friends and family.

Nathaniel intends to keep writing for the foreseeable future while continuing his Computer Science and game development work.