Jonny Nexus is an English writer and accidental Monopoly expert on the radio who lives near Manchester with his wife, their daughter, their dog, and an array of chew toys that the dog invariably leaves on the top-most step but one.

Jonny’s long been of the opinion that authors who present biographies written in the third person risk looking pretentious if their current level of career success suggests that their biographies were in fact written by themselves, rather than by one of their “people”.

Jonny does not have people and has in fact created this entire website himself (with the help of all the very cool people who created WordPress, of course). So perhaps he’d better stop talking in the third person. Let’s start again.

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Hi!

My name’s Jonny Nexus, and this is my website. This is the point at which convention compels me to declare that I’m a writer who lives near Manchester with my wife, our daughter and our dog, except that to do so would be inaccurate: I’m actually a business analysis (a.k.a. a computer programmer who’s gone to the dark side) who does some writing on the side. But my wife and I do have a daughter and a dog and we do live somewhere a bit near Manchester.

I describe myself as a fantasy writer from a roleplaying background. My journey¹ to fantasy didn’t take me through Middle-Earth, or Narnia, of the Hyborian Age of Conan. I got here through Dungeons & Dragons, followed by Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and I think this shows in the style in which I write and the stories I chose to tell.

I’m probably best known for two things: for writing the ENnie nominated fantasy humour novel, Game Night; and for being the editor and lead writer of the cult roleplaying humour webzine Critical Miss. (That’s if you don’t count a throwaway article about Monopoly that I wrote in 2005 but which went viral in 2013, resulting in it being mentioned in several national newspapers, and me being interviewed by four separate radio stations).

In addition to Game Night and Critical Miss, I’ve written roleplaying columns for the quarterly magazine Valkyrie, and the monthly magazine Signs & Portents, and wrote the parody Slayers Guide to Games Masters for leading UK roleplaying publisher, Mongoose Publishing. I also had a short story published in Stone Skin Press‘s pulp anthology The New Hero Volume I, alongside (amongst others) multiple New York Times Bestselling novelist and Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood. (Yes, I am dropping names! Wouldn’t you?)

I published my second novel, If Pigs Could Fly, the first in an urban fantasy series featuring an offbeat, paranormal detective, in 2015 through my own imprint Wild Jester Press (through which I’ve also published an updated version of Game Night). My third novel, the Sleeping Dragon, was released in 2019, followed the next year by Sticks and Stones, the sequel to If Pigs Could Fly.

¹I should point out that I read hugely as a teenager, and have continued to do so. But the literature that fired my imagination as a younger man was all SF: Asimov’s Foundation series, Harry Harrison’s Stainless Street Rat, and then my all-time favourite favourite work of literature, Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide books.