Thomas K. Carpenter

Thomas K. Carpenter

Thomas K. Carpenter is a writer who wrote the Star Citizen short story The First Run for Cloud Imperium Games.

Other Works

He took his first job after graduation at an iron foundry.

He went to work at a Toyota plant and in the late 90 he finished his first book. The early 2000s were a blur of work and raising children with no time for writing.  It wasn’t until after Tom completed an MBA that his wife encouraged him to spend the time he had used for studying to write.  He wrote several books those first few years.

After shopping the books around unsuccessfully, he decided to try self-publishing and put out his first book, The Digital Sea, in 2010.  In the next 10 years he continued to get hundreds of rejections from traditional publishing for both books and short stories.  But he also had multiple stories published in various magazines such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as self-published over 30 books.

In 2021, after 25 years of working for Toyota and writing virtually every evening and weekend, Tom was finally able to quit the corporate job and focus solely on writing.

He writes YA dystopia, post-cyberpunk sci-fi, steampunk, dark fantasy, and alternate reality historical mystery. He wrote among others the Hundred Halls series, the Alexandrian Saga.

Early Life

His mother was a voracious reader of all science fiction and fantasy, and taught him the joy of reading. He always loved writing and dreamt of one day being an author, but didn’t think he could make a career out of it.  So instead, he went to the Missouri University of Science and Technology to become a metallurgical engineer, where he began writing his first book.  Although he finished the novel after graduating, as with most first projects, nothing became of it.

External Links

• Official website