Hey, welcome to my page. I write under my full name, Jered Daniel Fitzgerald-but you can call me Fitz. I’m a writer of science fiction and fantasy with aspirations of being a full time time novelist. To give you an idea of what I am aiming for, my favorite authors are Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, and Robert Jordan. Lately, I have been really into Blake Crouch. His sci-fi mystery thrillers are amazing. Richard K. Morgan is also great. The Altered Carbon books conversely fascinate and utterly horrify me. If I make any typos while writing this, I’m too lazy to spell check it very hard, so please just ignore it. Thanks.

I’ve always been a storyteller. When I was young I would go to my friend’s house with two paper grocery bags filled with action figures. We would spend all night playing with them, coming up with characters and story lines, always trying to outdo the other over who had the most powerful characters. I remember I once used my allowance to buy a female action figure, a Spawn character I believe. It was almost a doll, really, with hair and everything. When I brought this over to my friend’s house, I was teased mercilessly by my friend, his brothers, and even his dad. I didn’t understand what the difference was. All I wanted to do was expand the types of storylines I could create by adding female characters. I look back at that memory now with a smile, knowing that was one of the first times my little brain started thinking about stories from the perspective of characterization.

I’ve read science fiction and fantasy solidly since I was very young, eight I believe, starting with Animorphs and the Diadem series. I would get so engrossed into these books that it would take a shout or a good shake of the shoulder to get me out of them. Then my life changed in middle school when I discovered Terry Brooks and proper fantasy. I moved from Terry Brooks to R. A. Salvatore, Raymond E. Feist, and finally to Robert Jordan. I spent an entire summer reading The Wheel of Time, from when I would wake up at two in the afternoon until eight in the morning, with some movie playing in the background on mute and repeating all night.

But it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I realized I wanted to be a writer. I never even considered it an option. I’ve struggled with depression and low self-esteem my entire life, a fact I believe contributed to my crisis of identity. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had a vague desire to make video games but no confidence in my ability to learn how to code. Truthfully, I plainly just thought of myself as stupid. Then Mrs. Minks, my senior year creative writing teacher changed everything for me. She told me she loved my writing and that I could be a novelist. The exact words written on the front sheet of my short story were, “You have novelist written all over  you.”

Even with these words of encouragement, it wasn’t until 2020 that I started taking my writing seriously. Between graduating high school in 2007 and 2020, I had lived what would be several lifetimes for most people. I’ve worked every job one could think of, from Marine to video store manager to home contractor to wind turbine technician. I currently work as a manager in the aerospace industry. I’ve had my heart broken and I’ve probably broken some hearts myself. I know what it means to feel broken inside. I know what true love is. I know that under the surface there are miles of layers, miles of stories within every person, and that what you think you know is only a tiny piece. This is what I hope to capture in my stories. The human element. Plunging the human element into the fantastic and surreal is what gets my heart beating faster and hopefully the hearts of my readers as well.

In any case, I live in the Cedar Rapids area of eastern Iowa. I share a house with my wife and a gang of unruly clones. One of them looks like me, and the rest look like her mixed with some other thing that I don’t talk to very much. A big fluffy Australian Shepherd named Duke lives here, too, but he mostly just makes weird faces and yells at me when I haven’t fed him. A mysterious golden liquid made of happiness named Zoey also recently came to live with us. Her favorite thing is to bring us trash, and if it looks delicious she may try to eat it.