About

Ren Cummins is an author and musician, a husband and father, and an avid student of broken or corrupted history, when not spending his time as a professional analogist. He is the author of six published steampunk novels and a full-length ambient/adult contemporary music album, all of which are available on line, though such fine retail outlets such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, SmashWords, and the like.

As a self-diagnosed anachronologist, Ren has enjoyed a long and fruitful hobby of observing the elegant paradoxes found so easily in society and in nature (or in the nature of society), committing them to paper or music; he includes among his seemingly random influences as Sting, Dr Seuss, Kahlil Gibran, and Warren Ellis.

He hopes one day to learn to speak Japanese, visit Scotland and discover a healthy alternative to white chocolate mocha frappuccinos.

Born and raised in California, Ren has lived the nomadic life across several states in the US, also traveling for a time across Canada and Mexico. Eventually, he made his way with his wife, Elizabeth, to the Pacific Northwest, there to make their home and, in time, a daughter as well.

They live there still with two potentially ferocious dogs and a cat far too reminiscent of a feranzanthum (only missing the wings and the horns), in a delicate homage to the average middle class American family.

Ren attended college at the University of Utah, majoring in English until his counselor pointed out that being an author didn’t necessarily require a degree in, well, anything. He went on to support himself with jobs in hotel management and technical support, only later discovering that the literally thousands of people these professions paraded before him were part of the Universe’s mad plan to show him the patterns and divergences of the human spirit. Unfortunately, it also threatened to assure him that many people should not be trusted with complex mechanical devices of any kind, but in the end optimism won out.

Ren also spent a large majority of his life in the study of religion and philosophy; although these observations and lessons offer a faint seasoning for his books and music, he has found that “too much pepper spoils the stew”, and prefers instead to let the works be observations of the nature of man and life and less about dictating a path to be followed.

Hence his favorite motto: “life is less about the destination and more about the journey.”