I was born on March 11, 1976 in Pittsburgh, PA and moved to a small town outside Boston, MA when I was seven. It was there I started writing stories about a large spaceship hidden in a cavern under my yard that later became the premise for the Onyx Sun stories.

I moved to Chicago when I was eighteen to attend Northwestern University. During my college years, I founded one of the Internet's first online used textbook exchanges, called Your Used Publications (YUP) Online. The company became quickly profitable and I sold it in 1998. I then moved to Colorado to continue my work in technology, as well as to soak up the fresh mountain air! While I was there, I contributed to articles in Matrix: the magazine for Denver Mensa, published a poem in the anthology Summer Shade, and wrote a number of editorials.

Following the "dot com crash", I left Colorado to attend Babson College's F. W. Olin Graduate School of Business, where I was fortunate to win the prestigous Price-Babson Fellowship for academic and entrepreneurial achievement. It was during this time I started the initial outline for The Incredible Origins of the Onyx Sun. I also launched Pariah Publishing - a publishing and marketing company dedicated to finding quality, new voices in fiction - and received hundreds of submissions for the writing contest the company sponsored.

However, it was only after graduation, when I moved to San Francisco and started working for Houghton Mifflin/Riverdeep, that I started to realize what the Onyx Sun series could contribute to young readers. After interviewing hundreds of teachers and parents as the senior product manager in charge of the successful Edmark House Series, Destination Math, and Destination Science products, I noticed a growing crisis in math and science education in the United States. It was then that I realized the Onyx Sun could be a fun story for young readers as well as a catalyst to encourage them to engage in these subjects where the US lags the rest of the developed world.

After three years of writing, editing, and searching for an agent, I returned to my entreprenurial roots and self-published the first Onyx Sun book. I am currently expanding its original vision to include lesson plans that link scenes from the book to real-world math and science problems. As well, the book will soon include an integrated web site where kids can edit the entire text of the story. For the first time on the Internet, middle-graders and other readers will be able to create their own Onyx Sun stories, share these stories with friends/teachers/parents, and allow their social network to comment on their changes. More on this soon!

I live in San Francisco, where I work for the popular virtual world Second Life and am writing the sequel to the first Onyx Sun book, The Wicked Adversaries of the Onyx Sun. I have been interviewed by the New York Times and travel frequently to Europe and Asia to evangelize the future of virtual worlds.

Thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoy the book!

Kalamazoo!

Christopher Mahoney