Daniel M. Clark was born in 1975 in the biggest smallest state, Rhode Island. A reluctant reader as a child, he became enamored of novels at age 12 when he discovered Dragonlance and would go on to read most of that massive series. Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire and the further adventures of Luke Skywalker cemented his passion for optimistic sci-fi and fantasy adventure.

Writing wasn’t on Daniel’s radar until his early twenties. Living in South Florida in the 1990s, searching for direction, he wrote a novel. It came together through many late nights in the back of a Denny’s, scrawled longhand into half a dozen notebooks. It was terrible. Really, just godawful. Long-form fiction writing was put to the side for a while.

A lifelong gamer, Daniel turned his attention to video game development, earning a degree in Game Design & Development in 2003. While the programming was interesting, what he excelled at was designing the game worlds and their stories. The skills acquired earning that degree—world-building, plotting, characterization—became the foundation of his talent as a storyteller.

Through the 2000s, Daniel published three non-fiction books; two were print-on-demand, and the third, a book about podcasting, was his first paid freelance job. Though he had shelved the desire to write novels, Daniel wrote many short stories through the 2010s. A handful of them are in the library here at danielmclark.com.

At age 44, Daniel went back to school, majoring in English & Creative Writing. He balances his time between school, writing, reading, and gaming. He lives in the humidity of the Houston suburbs with his patient wife, two great kids, and three indifferent cats.