Epic Fantasy
that hurts & heals.

Xavier Schwindt

Xavier Schwindt writes epic fantasy that goes into the dark places most stories step around. But never to wallow there. He writes stories that border on Grimdark and sit closer to Nobledark, because that’s where a small light shows up best.

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”Theodore Roethke

If you read Brandon Sanderson for the cost of heroism, Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence for the hard edges, James Islington for the long game, or Orson Scott Card for the ache underneath the spectacle, Xavier’s writing is for you.

What started as love for what books could do to his own insides became something he simply can’t put down. There’s a moral weather to his stories — a sense that hope has to be paid for and light has to be earned — and he’ll follow that thread through the grimmest chapter without flinching. You don’t have to share his convictions to feel it. You just have to want the dark to mean something.

His first book took years. He finished it, read it, and realized it was bad. Genuinely, memorably, horribly bad. But he read it aloud to a few friends during a retreat, braced for pity, and — nobody’s quite sure how — got encouragement instead. They saw the storyteller under the clumsy sentences and told him to keep going, that good stories could come even from “the worst writer ever.” More than ten books later, he’ll concede his writing has gotten “just a tad better.”

These days he trains for the craft like Rocky — though, alas, without the epic montages: reading constantly through audiobooks (he’s a firm believer that they count, whatever that means) and showing up whether or not he feels like it. He’s traveled widely, and every place he’s been tends to become a setting he can drop his characters into and make suffer.

When Xavier isn’t torturing fictional people, he’s taking unremarkable photographs, keeping company with his border collie Sadie, or adding to a growing drawer of souvenir spoons from around the world.

His most persistent supervillain is himself: the doubt, the perfectionism, the talent for getting in his own way. That fight ends up in every character he writes — every hero who has to beat their own fear before they can beat anything else. His stories hurt because life hurts, and they hold onto hope for the same reason.

He lives happily with his family on the sunny plains of Colorado. At fifteen (“too early,” he now admits) he founded Crownling Entertainment to make the stories he wants to make. He also hosts The Zero to Hero Author podcast, interviewing authors about the craft and business he hopes to one day take up full time.

His bucket list runs from learning a dead language and hiding secret messages in his books all the way down to earning an on-screen death in someone’s film.

For Xavier, writing was never about escaping the dark. It’s about walking through it to reach whatever waits on the other side.