I'M MARSHAL HUNTER, and like you, i'm a big dreamer.
My primary passion is writing sci-fi and fantasy novels, but I’m also a filmmaker and game developer. I’m a big fan of Star Wars, playing Horizon Zero Dawn, and making costumes for cons. In short, I spend a lot of time thinking about new worlds.
My love for World Building and telling stories started with roleplaying games as a teenager and seeing Star Wars when I was thirteen. Watching Star Wars literally changed everything for me. It sparked my ambition to create, to tell stories and build worlds.
After four years in the Navy, I went to community college for engineering. There I learned that engineering was not my path. It wasn’t for lack of trying. My engineering counselor commended my stubbornness saying that “Most people don’t beat their heads against the wall for over two years before giving up”. From there I went to the University of Washington to study anthropology/archeology. That lasted one quarter.
As much as I loved living in a tent for 3-months at archeology field school, after surviving the rigid discipline of the Navy and then trying to hammer myself into a mold that clearly didn’t fit, I needed something to change. And that wasn’t going to happen if all I was doing was learning a new way to classify things and put them into little boxes. I wanted to break out of the linear way of thinking I’d always known. I wanted to learn to think organically. So, I shifted to art. I majored in sculpture because it gave me the freedom to experiment. I could work in any medium I wanted, from casting and smithing metal, to making ceramics or doing fiber art. Art school changed how I saw the world. I thought more holistically, what later went on my corporate employee reviews as “outside the box thinking”.
It was in art school that the concept of an Inner World crystallized for me. I watched people create amazing, wonderful things from nothing. It didn’t matter what medium or genre they worked in, there was this place inside all of us where this crazy creativity came from. And I’ve always found it strange that this Inner World is something no one talks about, even though we all know it’s there. I want to talk about it.
World Building and this connection to our Inner World are what light me up. I want to explore them and encourage you to do the same, to strengthen that connection to the voice inside. I want to help stoke the fires that turn ideas into ecstatic, heart-wrenching narratives, and punch-you-in-the-guts stories.
1. I am a trained commercial hard hat diver. Yup, I know how to weld underwater. It’s actually pretty cool. FYI - You have to cut holes in the shoulders of your coveralls or the gasses from welding fill them up and you float away… Whee!
2. I have a sword scar across the top of my head from doing live steel sparring with a friend when we were drunk. Who could’ve predicted that?
3. I was an extra in the Kurt Russell movie “Used Cars”. I spent an afternoon in a car driving across the desert with Terry Leonard, the stuntman who did the under the truck stunt in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
Three Fun Facts about me!
