Professional Note About Brendan Carroll:Brendan Carroll spent his first fourteen years running free through the deep woods of the East Texas Pine Forests. During the early part of his life, he had the great fortune to live next door to his grandparents on a small family subsistence farm where he learned about nature, farming and story-telling from his grandfather. Throughout his childhood and early schooling, his first love was reading and after he learned to write, he found a new love… writing. Growing up in the late fifties and sixties, he watched the rock and roll and sexual revolution unfold all around him with a sense of something profoundly precious being thrown down by the onslaught of progress and plastic.After high school, Brendan joined the Navy to see the world; unfortunately, the world he saw was confined to the Southeastern United States and his short but interesting military career carried him no further than Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. But his limitless curiosity about everything and anything took him straight from the Navy into college where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in teaching, graduating with honors, hoping to make a secure place for himself in Middle Class America. This dream did not play out as expected when he found himself employed as a Middle School Science teacher in a very small Texas town. Of his 140 or so students, he found only three actually interested in learning anything other than how to annoy each other, the faculty and still play football on Friday night in spite of failing grades. The former, they excelled in and the latter, they accomplished by convincing their parents that their failing grade was a completely the fault of the teacher. After one year of teaching, Brendan changed careers from teacher to Correctional Officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice where he knew he would be safe from irate parents.Eventually, he worked his way up to an administrative position with the State of Texas and spent twenty-three years serving as a public servant. In early 2010, he retired and took up writing full-time.Brendan Carroll has been an avid reader and student of such subjects as mythology, quantum physics, environmental science, geology, archaeology, paleontology and astronomy. He has taken courses in astrology, numerology and other arcane subjects including alchemy, tarot and dream interpretation. His interests have taken him from the sterile labs of absolute science to the dusty attics of conspiracy theorists. Always seeking to learn more and more, his varying interests and curiosity took him on a odyssey through religion as well. As a young boy, he attended a Pentecostal church. From there, he became a Baptist. Dissatisfied with those two, he studied with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons and eventually took catechism classes, intending to convert to Catholicism. When the conversion failed to take, Carroll had to look elsewhere. Naturally, Catholicism, or rather, the history of Catholicism drew his attention next and he began to study the religions of those persecuted and pushed into oblivion by the Church of Rome: the Cathars, the Egyptian Coptic Christians and the practitioners of the so-called Black Arts. Eventually, Brendan discovered the amazing history of the Crusades and, in particular, the mythos and legends surrounding the Knights Templar. After devouring every documentary and book available on the subject of the poor Knights. Brendan Carroll currently has twenty-nine books published through non-traditional channels at Amazon.com for Kindle, Smashwords.com for various other eReaders and through Amazon’s print on demand paperback program. The Assassin Chronicles series is drawing to a close with twenty-six of the thirty projected novels published. The series falls into the epic fantasy genre and details the adventures of the members of the Order of the Red Cross of Gold, poor Knights of Solomon’s Temple. The series starts off with a relatively non-mystical, non-fantasy story of an Assassin/Alchemist warrior monk, who just happens to be around 800 years old. He loves the quiet life, working on turning base metals to gold providing the financial wherewithal for the Order, but his Assassin missions take him out of his comfort zone and into trouble. When he runs afoul of a woman bent on extracting the key of immortality from him, he loses his memory just long enough to fall from grace and bring on the wrath of his own Brothers of the Order. Tempo Rubato ~ Stolen Time is a stand alone adventure novel with touches of Sci-Fi, Romance and Humor and was written before the Assassin Chronicles. The novel is a tribute to Mr. Carroll’s favorite classical composer, Wolfgang Mozart. The Hounds of Oblivion, another stand alone novel is a venture into the horror genre pitting a small town constable and a murder/mystery writer against the supernatural perpetrators of a string of gruesome murders while they are both under suspicion by the FBI. They must work together to find the murderers, solve the crime and clear themselves before the loves of their lives are killed or worse.Personal Note About Brendan: Brendan Carroll is probably the most eclectic person I know, having been his invisible friend for the past thirty years. He can never be relied upon to do the same thing twice simply because he can never remember what he did the first time. I call this the “Goose Syndrome”. It is a common ailment found in humans with short attention spans, loose morals and infinitesimally small short-term memory banks. Everyday, he wakes up in a new world and has a great deal of trouble remembering where the coffee pot is, but if you were to ask him a question about, oh, say black holes or quasars, he could talk long and hard about them whilst he searched the kitchen for coffee filters. Ask him a question including a date such as an anniversary or a birthday and this terrible look of “Duh?” comes over his face. After scrounging for his date book and calendar or looking on-line for a few hours, he might come up with the answer. I said “might” because if he gets on the computer, he will immediately forget what he went there for and soon be surfing the web like a professional geek. This is… not good since he is certainly not a geek and has learned everything he knows about the computer from friends, relatives and incarcerated felons. So much for personality.Brendan asked me to write these articles for his “About” page because he couldn’t remember what he was “About” half the time. He explained that his “About” is normally defined by what others think he is “About”. He has often expressed confusion and aggravation because friends, acquaintances, co-workers, family members and pets often make assumptions “About” him based on some random utterance and applied them to his overall Profile. This he finds highly amusing, yet sometimes disturbing and ofttimes troubling. I would venture to say that Brendan is all “About” writing and entertaining his readers. He is NOT “About” worrying with details such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, flow, plot, French words designed to impress, continuation, etcetera, etcetera. He is all “About” the story, not about those bothersome little details. He leaves those entirely to his critics, reviewers and random comments left by drive-by, would-be editors looking for poor, grammatically undernourished fledgling authors just trying to get along in this dark, dark world… but I digress!What is he “About”? He’s about making people smile (both inside and outside his books). He’s about making people laugh and making people cry (but only when necessary… I mean really, his main character or protagonist for all you literary perfectionists, is after all the Chevalier du Morte, Assassin and Alchemist for the Order of the Red Cross of Gold, poor Knight of Solomon’s Temple.) If you have an assassin as a hero, then there is necessarily assassinations in the offing. Of course, Brendan’s hero is sometimes a little less heroic than one might generally expect a hero to be. He is in fact, a bit grumpy, lacks a well-developed sense of humor, dresses mainly in black and carries a wicked broadsword along with a couple or three knives, discreetly placed of course and has a penchant for finding trouble at odd hours of the night. He also believes in faeries, much like Brendan in that respect and blames them for any number of noisome caprices. These are simply natural occurrences in my humble opinion, but I’ve never been able to convince Brendan or his precious Knight of Death otherwise.Brendan loves nature as long as it is on the other side of the glass or fence or bars as the individual case may warrant. He loves zoos, for instance, where the larger and/or more or less friendly animals might be confined for closer viewing. He likes aquariums and he especially likes botanical gardens with indigenous life forms enclosed inside glass buildings such as the flora and fauna at Moody Gardens in Galveston, Texas. This is a fine place in his opinion to get to know the dangers and trials and tribulations associated with trekking through the rain forests. He loves the beach. He likes looking at it through tinted glass windows with the AC on high from behind dark sunshades. (He is allergic to sand.) He loves whales, porpoises, seals, walruses, penguins, eels, nudibranchs, jellyfish, coral reefs, sharks and sunfish and is extremely glad that they all have a nice place to live… in the ocean where they belong.