About Me

Hi there. My name is Carl Cota-Robles.  I’m an epic fantasy author and science fiction dabbler from Portland, OR. I love Blazer basketball, cats and dogs, and tacos. As a kid, I enjoyed reading Eragon, Harry Potter, and the Pendragon series (D.J. MacHale). What follows is some autobiographical stuff about me.

My first published book was The Time Twins (2019). My first published fantasy novel was Sand and Smoke. I’m an alum of NYU Tisch and following graduation I spent a year writing about nocturnal animals at a tiny company you probably haven’t heard of. In addition to fiction, I write TV scripts and my work has placed as a quarter and semi-finalist in a few contests. In 2018, I made the decision to found my own self publishing business which is still running and growing steadily. All of my books are self published.

I have always had a love for fantasy ever since I was a kid. I gobbled up the Inheritance series by Paolini and I loved exploring the worlds in D.J. MacHale’s Pendragon series and the land of Narnia. On television, I was addicted to Digimon, Yugioh, and when Avatar came out I took to it with excitement. As I grew older, I moved onto new worlds like Westeros and Brandon Sanderson’s land of Roshar. High fantasy and epic fantasy in particular excite me.

My first reader was my grandfather, Eugene Cota-Robles. I still remember with fondness how he would read my fantasy stories that I wrote as a kid. I was heavily inspired by Eragon in those days. I used to write to him, emailing him a chapter every week, and although the stories often were full of plot holes, he always read the whole thing and sent me thoughtful feedback and questions. One of my grandfather’s legacies is the Cota-Robles fellowship, which aims to support minorities as they pursue higher education. In my writing, I aim to leave a similar legacy. I strive to write stories with diverse characters, to promote a more inclusive world. At the same time, I tackle issues that I believe are important for the younger generation to consider, thinks like prejudice, inequality, and also teamwork and confidence in oneself.

In addition to living in Portland and New York (while I attended NYU), I have also lived in Los Angeles. Specifically, I lived in Burbank for a year, and while there I worked on several film sets as a production assistant and as a script reader for the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and intern for Wise Entertainment. In Burbank, I lived half a block up from Starburns studios, where they make Rick & Morty, another favorite fantasy of mine. In my spare time, I wrote fantasy and sci-fi scripts on spec, both TV pilots and features. One of those projects was Middle School Robots, then called Ordinary Robots. It was a TV pilot first, and I adapted it into a book in 2019.

We are living in some tough times right now, but I believe wholeheartedly that every person is still the master of his/her/their own destiny. There is always more than one way to do something, and success is just a matter of finding out which way works best for you.

If you like fantasy or science fiction, I invite you to check out my books using the menu bar above.