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"If creation is my craft, I choose the written page is my canvas."

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As long as I can remember, I've loved to create.

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As a kid, this manifested in physical builds. Numerous "Jonathan Stories" would pop up week by week from our Brauer household, so much so that they became hilariously infamous throughout the family. Often times, our basements and bedrooms would become battlegrounds for my imagination, and my musings would manifest in ways literally impossible to ignore. Literally. You couldn't walk through the rooms without navigating an obstacle course that was different every time. It was both tragic and legendary.

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In my teenage years, my friends from school and soccer got me into Xbox, and, luckily for my parents, it introduced me to a new, less intrusive form of creativity, the creation of environments and mini-games inside of sandbox platforms various games offered. I grew a passion for digital media, making and editing videos, designing experiences story-driven, open world, and mechanical for people to enjoy.

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Entering college, I was unsure of what profession I wanted to pursue. I knew I wanted to create, but I didn't know what. In my time at Joliet Junior College, and later, at DePaul University, I grew an additional passion for project organization and planning.

 

In the end, I decided to pursue a Bachelors in game development, dual focusing in design and project management to hit the widgets of both of my interests. In my project work, during my tenure at DePaul, I wrote for level and UI design, character dialogue, and cinematic story narratives, aiming to grow a diverse understanding of project pipelines and the disciplines that go into them.

 

Whenever I could, I went great lengths to go the extra mile, volunteering for design and management positions on projects where I could, honing my expertise in writing, formatting, and project management by throwing myself into the fire, a trend I continued during my internship and later contract work beyond. Simultaneously, this was also the period that I discovered my blazing passion for story writing through a medium of books, and began tutoring under my Grandma, Susan Brauer, a former DeVry University dean, Argonne National Laboratories engineer, and self-published author, in addition to college.

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From January, 2023, to the Summer of '24, throughout my collegiate senior year, I interned at MonogramGroup, a world-class branding agency in Chicago, Illinois, where I was trusted early on to manage the creation of several case study pages for their company website. After my internship, I was hired on as a research analyst and entrusted to undergo the process of walking the untraveled ground of an experimental new-business effort, researching and tracking national companies' relevant mergers and acquisitions to capitalize on.

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I found enjoyment and purpose in the gaming and digital media projects I was a part of throughout college and my initial post-college work, but something felt... missing, like an itch I couldn't scratch, something yet to be ventured. After thinking on it introspectively over a period of months, I diagnosed the itch as a desire to do more, and a desire, simply, to tell stories... to be more intimately involved in the process aiding others to make their ideas, and dreams, a reality. That said, I made the decision to leverage my skills in design, writing, and management in a field different than that of game development.

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 Ironically, I despised reading as a kid... I didn't have the patience to read, and seldom was exposed to the notion of writing. As birthdays passed, however, I found my perspective beginning to change. Today, I find reading to be profound, and do it all the time. I can't help myself. I love it. And I find writing, in its many forms, to be relaxing and rewarding.
 

I enjoyed helping telling stories through the interactions of a controller and a screen, yes. But through the medium of verbiage on a piece of parchment, there's a magic within the mechanisms at work within the mind of a reader. As a creator, I find that incredibly alluring. 

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So when I have time to myself... I like to write, be it personally, or professionally. And in my search for a job to get a foot in the door, attempting to take a new first step in the earlies my career, unlike my years before, through college, and even in the year after, I know I'm making the right choice pursuing position in the field of publishing. (Autumn, 2025)