Thomas Alton writes fantasy from a house outside Chicago, about as far from the sea as a person can reasonably get.
That distance may be the point. He grew up nowhere near the water and has never made his living on it — which has left the sea in his head as something enormous and unfinished, more foreboding than fond, the kind of thing you imagine rather than know. The Brine Reaches came out of that longing.
He was handed a set of dice as a kid and never entirely recovered. What followed were the long years of Jordan and Brooks and Martin — the doorstop novels with the maps in the front — and, alongside them, a whole shelf of his own books started and abandoned. He worked in IT consulting and spent those years on airplanes, always spinning a story, never quite finishing one.
Then, in 2020, the world stopped flying. The travel that had eaten his life simply ended, and what was left in its place was time. The Tell of the Tide was written in that time — in the hours between client meetings, at a desk in a house that had stopped being just a house.
He lives there still, with his wife and a very good dog named Lola.
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