R3nf Rites

R3nf — Random Ramblings of the Three Named Fool.

R3nf was born online, in a forum that no longer exists, over twenty years ago. While he has never existed in the physical world he has walked with Luke this entire time. More than a simple handle, he skips the worrying that the man behind him has never quite managed to.

He’s the one who posts. He’s the one who says the thing. Mostly rambling, occasionally useful, often braver than the fool holding the pen.

Luke

Hay, I’m Luke. The fool holding the pen (and hitting the keys).

I live my life across pages, pixels, and dice rolls, collecting unexpected paths the way other people collect dice. My workspace is an organised chaos of miniatures, notebooks, and scribbles that definitely made sense to somebody at some point.

I grew up in a small town with a stack of Horrible Histories, a shelf of Redwall, and borrowing a pile of my friends’ comics. Later it was Robin Hobb, Forgotten Realms novels, White Dwarf and every scrap of Warhammer I could get my hands on. Then manga and anime; Akira rewired something the moment I saw it.

I’ve been running tabletop rpgs since I was fourteen and I still run them now, which is exactly how I learned to write: badly, in front of an audience, with people asking questions I hadn’t planned for. So obviously now I’m a plotter…

Those influences pull in two directions. A lot of what shaped me imagined the world going very wrong indeed. I’d rather write towards it going better; not easily, not without cost, but better. My books are about people who don’t fit the box others put them in and have to work out what to do about that. Growth comes in unexpected ways, mostly because I’ve always done better when I take the unexpected route.

R3nf has been my name online for over twenty years, from back when I first wrote things and let strangers read them. He’s the version of me that turns up when I’m too far inside my own head to speak; which is most of the time, if I’m honest. Nearly everything I’ve managed to post, he hit enter while I was second guessing. The three-named fool bit is literal, by the way: a priest at my christening didn’t quite keep up, my surname became a middle name, and I’ve been carrying the spare about ever since.

I’m around. I’m chattier than the decades of lurking suggest.