Joshua Unruh

Joshua has always been a person who had much to say and wanted to believe the vast majority of it was worth saying and, more importantly, worth hearing. Only recently has he become a person unafraid to say it. He is constantly looking for new ways and new places in which to do so, and in that regard the Consortium is a perfect home for him.

“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.” –Raymond Chandler

School of Focus:
Writing

Other Schools of Interest

  • Game Design
  • Music

Galleries

You can read all about Joshua below, but if you’d like to connect with him online or check out some samples of his work, you can find him at

Portrait of the Artist

Always a ravenous devourer of genre fiction in various media, it simply never occurred to Joshua to try writing any of it himself. Joshua spent most of high school using roleplaying games and being a wiseacre as the main outlets for his creative energies. The smart comments were rarely funny out of context (or in context, many would say) and why would he need to write any of the game stuff down if his players were going to go through it once and never look back? This trend continued into college and although Joshua often thought of a career in writing, he also dreamed of paying bills and eating food that wasn’t originally meant for pets. This dream led him to the Oklahoma State School of Journalism and Broadcasting.

The JB School definitely filled his need for writing many, many words and even helped Joshua hone his craft a bit, although not much in the direction of fiction (depending on one’s view of the news, anyway). Friends in the industry told him he should try his hand in advertising after college, and so he did. Once again, Joshua found himself writing a lot and that much of what he wrote was untrue, but it still wasn’t what one would call fiction in the purest sense. Leaving advertising for the wide world of outside sales continued Joshua on his twisty, curvy path towards a nontraditional mastery of lies and language. It also led to him learning to hate working for other people and, therefore, resolving not to do it anymore.

Joshua left outside sales to become a private investigator with his own agency and was somewhat successful at this new business venture, though it was derailed by the coming of his only son, Elijah. Joshua became a stay-at-home dad in a hilarious twist of events that left him almost entirely sure that his wife hadn’t manipulated him into the role. In order to fill the days when Elijah was brand new and basically a paperweight, Joshua finally and truly turned his hand back to writing. The many changes in jobs and years of writing and/or lying in various capacities had finally made him fearless enough to start writing fiction and, more importantly, letting other people read the stuff he wrote. In a not terribly shocking turn of events, this led to some work in the roleplaying game industry, which, along with nanowrimo, convinced Joshua he could write full-length novels. Somehow, he has also hoodwinked the good people at the Consortium into believing this. Joshua is sure his background in sales didn’t have anything to do with it.

Now Joshua can’t get the thought of lots and lots of people reading his work out of his head, although this also fills him with the desire to make what these theoretical people read GOOD. He’s still working on that. Joshua’s major influences are hardboiled detective fiction, the over-the-top pulp of the 20s and 30s, vast swathes of super hero comic books, creating innumerable worlds out of dice and imagination, and way more hip hop music than any white kid from Oklahoma should listen to.