Hi, I’m Ashley Quinn, indie romance author and all-around geek. This is my story.
Origin Story
I’ve been writing stories since I was in preschool… or at least, that’s when I used to carry a tape recorder around the house telling stories until I could actually write them down!
My mom and dad always encouraged my writing, for which I am so grateful. I spent many hours hogging our family’s desktop computer in the bonus room, and no one ever complained.
I also have a little sister with an imagination as big as mine. A favorite game we played was “invisible” friends (not imaginary, just invisible, okay?). We also created full-on soap operas about the lives of our horse figurings. All of this fed into my love of stories.
Fast forward to middle school, when I wrote my first 300-page novel. It was historical fiction — and yes, there was a romance! Even though I’d never experienced romance myself in my 12 years on earth, I was already hooked on Christian romances from my school library, so I was a sucker for a good love story.
In high school, I became an avid reader and even bigger writer. Between reading Lord of the Rings, Dune, and the occasional no-spice romance novel, I managed to write several more books, lots of (terrible) poetry, and even a screenplay because why not?
Writing was therapy for me too, especially after my dad unexpectedly passed away. I started keeping a diary at age six and continued through college, as a way of documenting my life and processing my feelings. I was incredibly shy and awkward as a teen; I still remember the wave of panic over having no one to sit with on the bus, day after painful day. My diary helped me through that.
And don’t worry. College got better.
Finding My Party
Being a bit of a dreamer, I fell in love with London on a family trip when I was 17. So, I moved there to attend college for three years. (Goldsmiths College represent!)
After struggling through high school, starting school in a new country was like respawning into a new life.
In London, I made friends from all over the world, who were just as quirky and nerdy as I was. As an English and history major, I passed many an afternoon in the college library — my happy place. I got cheap Ryanair flights around Europe to explore the world while I was over there.
It was magical for me. I unlocked something in myself. Yes, I made friends there, but I also finally befriended myself. London will always have a special place in my heart for that.
But all good things must come to an end.
And when college was over, I faced my first boss battle: finding a job.
The Grind (and Not the Good Kind)
The trouble with a degree in English and history is that those things leave you very under-leveled for a real job. Because reading books all day isn’t really a job — or at least not an attainable one for a 22-year-old with no experience.
And while I wanted to write books, being a novelist seemed even more far-fetched than reading books for a living.
So I started hustling. First I tried freelance writing… for almost no pay. Then I added part-time nanny work to cover rent. (Bonus points that it got me out of the house around other humans — something many writers struggle with — and I loved working with kids.)
But I couldn’t seem to level up.
I was 25 years old, patching together a living and not really succeeding at it. I felt like I was stuck grinding through a dungeon without making any progress.
That’s when I discovered a little video game called Dragon Age: Origins.
The Game That Changed Everything
I don’t remember when I first stumbled on Dragon Age — only that I saw a woman fighting a dragon and had to get in on that. Live inside a fantasy novel? Sign me up!
I started playing the game on my birthday and fell in love. Not just with Alistair, and not just with Dragon Age — with gaming. All of it. The quests and the characters and the joy of living in another world for a spell. I fell in love with the adventure, and the idea of being anyone I wanted to be.
Sweating after a lousy job interview? I could slay dragons in Skyrim. Feeling lonely on a Saturday night? My Mass Effect crew was waiting for me on the Normandy.
This might sound weird, but gamers will understand. It’s not that I stopped living my real life. I was out there, figuring things out. But during that stormy time in life, video games were an anchor for me. I felt a little safer knowing that, whatever happened in the big wide world, at the end of the day I could come home to a familiar fictional place, with predictable rules, playing a character who would always triumph.
Gaming was an escape, but it also gave me a new kind of confidence.
Main Quest Unlocked
I felt so strongly about gaming that I took on a new personal quest: land a job in video games.
I reverse-engineered a resume for myself and started filling in the gaps, starting with a gaming blog called Robo💜beat. I wrote freelance for a couple of gaming sites before taking an internship writing video game instruction manuals.
The next year, they hired me back full-time.
Soon I was upgraded to other writing and editing projects — including flying to Poland to play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt before release, which was a dream come true!
I also got to attend E3 (back when that was a thing), write the manual for Dragon Age Inquisition, and play Just Dance in front of all my coworkers for work purposes. (Just kidding — I got to the office at 7am so they wouldn’t have to witness my dance moves. True story.)
Side Quest: Meeting My Co-Op Partner
While working at that job, I met the man who would become my husband.
We were placed on the same team — he was the coder, I was the writer. Sparks flew. For a while, we were an international, interracial couple with a secret workplace romance where he fell first AND it was her first love. (Yes, we embraced all the tropes.)
Then we moved in together, played Destiny for entire weekends at a time without leaving the apartment, and ended up getting hitched. We got our HEA. And he’s still the best co-op partner ever.
Okay, back to the main quest!
After branching into web design work, I ended up at PlayStation for three years, putting together pretty webpages for games like Spider-Man and God of War. It was a dream job, and I loved every minute there.
But there was another dream collecting dust in my inventory, and I couldn’t ignore it forever.
I still wanted to write books. I wanted to be published.
Unlocking a New Class: Author
As wonderful as work was, I wasn’t interested in the corporate skill tree. It’s great — just not for me.
All this time, I’d been penning various books, from sci-fi adventures to historical romances and everything in between. I’d create entire fantasy worlds, fill notebooks with character sketches, attend fiction writing workshops, and even send out the occasional query letter.
As I got older, I wanted more time to write books.
So I left PlayStation. I tried teaching for a time, but it wasn’t for me. I ended up between jobs, struggling to start a family with my husband, unsure of what my next move would be. It felt like my whole life was stuck on a loading screen.
That’s when I had a story idea.
It actually came during the plague-that-shall-not-be-named in 2020, when my husband worked from home and we watched The Vikings every day while eating lunch on our couch together. I wanted to write a story about three Viking sisters: a shieldmaiden, a seer, and a queen.
So I wrote that book. It came to be in a burst of inspiration, and four months after writing the first words, I self-published it.
That book is Song of the Shieldmaiden, and it launched my author career.
But there was something else about to spawn that would change my life forever…
New Game+
Three days after publishing my first book, I found out I was pregnant.
My husband and I had wanted a child for a long time, so we were thrilled. Marrying the love of my life, publishing a book, and now having a son — I was leveling up in life and happier than I’d ever been.
But being a parent is also like playing life on hard mode. There are a lot of fetch quests (for baby bottles and diapers and toy trucks that got wedged under the couch again) and not a lot of free time for your own quests. (Remember just… going to the movies? The good old days!)
I was loving this New Game Plus — but I needed to reconnect with myself too.
Soon, I found myself missing video games. I missed the fun of role-playing, the power of play, the joy in immersing myself in another world for awhile.
So I picked up the controller and started posting on my gaming blog again. It brought so much color back to my life. I had hobbies again! I felt like myself again — just leveled up now, with much cooler gear.
And I realized I wanted to write about this: the feeling of falling in love with games, yes — but also how games make us fall in love with life.
That’s when I started writing my first gamer romance novel.
The Quest Continues
Maybe you’re here for the gamer romance, but you got lost meandering down a very long and windy author bio. Thanks for being here and reading this far!
I hope there’s something you connected with in my story. Perhaps it’s the social awkwardness. The love of video games. The secret romance novel you wrote in middle school. (We all have one of those, don’t we?)
Whatever brought you here, I’m so glad you made it past the loading screen.
I write gamer romance novels now because I wish these books already existed. These are the stories where my shy, geeky self feels truly seen and understood. Where adventure can be nerdy, and nerds can have adventures. Where romance is always part of the quest, and every quest ends in a happily ever after.
💜 Ashley