Author Bio
The Short Version
Jak Koke writes and edits from Seattle, where he lives with his two daughters and his partner, Karawynn Long. His most recent novel is The Edge of Chaos, a Forgotten Realms fantasy. He is most well-known for his bestselling Shadowrun trilogy, the Dragon Heart Saga — Stranger Souls, Clockwork Asylum, and Beyond the Pale.
The Long Version
Jak Koke grew up in a series of university towns all across North America. As the new kid, Jak was constantly picked on, and honed his impressive diplomatic skills during lunch hour and recess fights, most of which he lost.
The son of a biology professor, Jak excelled at science and math. He didn’t see the appeal in capital-L “Literature”; he was busy devouring classic works from the ghetto: Tolkien, Donaldson, Heinlein, McCaffrey, LeGuin.
As a high-school senior, Jak earned a spot as a Rotary Exchange Student to France. A year immersed in another language and a different culture reformatted his brain in such a profound way that when he enrolled in college after his year abroad, he found himself taking courses in History and “Literature”… and enjoying them!
Jak went on to get a double degree in Biology and English, and wrote short stories for his honors thesis. Fiction writing was the hardest thing he’d ever worked at; his early stories were generously labeled ‘pedestrian’ and ‘melodramatic’.
Jak persevered and studied and never stopped improving his writing. He joined the Pulphouse Gang, a local Clarion-style workshop of professional writers. In 1992 he made his first short fiction sale (to Amazing Stories) and then went on to sell his first novel, Liferock, in 1995. That led to Jak’s trilogy of Shadowrun novels, The Dragon Heart Saga — each of which became a Locus magazine number-one bestseller.
In 1999, Jak decided to leap out of shared-world, work-for-hire novels and write a mainstream science thriller. His book Creation’s Daughter was met with a broad array of wildly enthusiastic rejections from both New York and Hollywood. The next year Jak started an editing and ghostwriting company, Thriller Doctor, and spent several years helping would-be published authors improve their manuscripts.
In 2003, Jak and his partner Karawynn Long founded Per Aspera Press, a small publisher of original speculative fiction novels. Idealistically, they hoped to create a line of beautiful hardcovers from talented but unknown authors passed over by the big New York houses.
With dedicated marketing work on the part of both publishers and author, Singularity by Bill DeSmedt garnered impressive blurbs, outstanding reviews, and several awards. Next came Steel Sky by Andrew C. Murphy, another impressive first novel that sadly didn’t attract the attention Per Aspera thought it deserved. Sales figures were low, and in 2005 Jak and Karawynn were forced to stop publishing and return to day jobs to pay off their debt.
Jak lives in Seattle with Karawynn and his two daughters. He splits his time between his job as a Content Manager for the world’s largest B2B web portal, writing as much as he can, and editing select projects.