Hey! So Glad You're Here.
My name is T. M. Quillopo Jr., and if there is one thing I have learned about myself, it is that I have never been particularly good at standing still.
I am a father first. I am also an Army veteran, cybersecurity professional, author, marathon runner in training, creator, traveler, occasional gamer, amateur e-bike mechanic by necessity, and a man with far more ideas written in notebooks than there will ever be hours in the day to finish them.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to fit all of those things into separate boxes.
They are all me.
I spent a significant part of my life serving in the United States Army, eventually leaving the military as a senior noncommissioned officer. That experience shaped much of the person I became: discipline, responsibility, leadership, resilience, and the belief that when something needs to be done, you find a way to do it.
Today, that part of my life continues in a different form. By day, I work in cybersecurity, protecting systems, solving problems, managing risk, and navigating a world that seems to reinvent itself every six months. Technology fascinates me because there is always another problem to solve, another system to understand, and another question hiding behind the answer you thought you already had.
But technology was never my only world.
I have always had stories in me.
For years, those stories accumulated in notebooks, documents, unfinished drafts, and ideas scribbled down because I was afraid I would forget them. Eventually I realized that there was never going to be a magical moment when life became quiet enough for me to become a writer.
So I stopped waiting.
I wrote anyway.
That decision became books.
My writing doesn't stay comfortably inside one genre because neither does my imagination. One Last Ride explores life, relationships, regret, and the roads we take when we're trying to figure out where we belong. help me. ventures somewhere much darker, into psychological horror and the uncomfortable corners of the human mind. The Girl Who Broke My Heart turns heartbreak into an interactive puzzle.
Then there is The Hollowkin Chronicles, beginning with The Hollow Oak Oath, a fantasy world that has grown into something far larger than I originally imagined.
And waiting farther down the tracks is The Princess of Pineapple Road, a mystery and adventure rooted in Hawaiʻi, history, family, culture, and a place that will always be part of who I am.
There are more.
There are always more.
That creative curiosity doesn't stop with books, either. I'm building and experimenting with other projects, including NexusPulls, my Pokémon trading card and YouTube project, and QueTube AI, where my interest in artificial intelligence, technology, automation, and digital creation gets to collide with my tendency to ask, “Okay, but what if we tried this?”
I've explored podcasting. I'm getting back into video. I'm interested in AI and what it can enable ordinary creators to build. Some projects will grow. Some will probably fail spectacularly. Others may turn into something I haven't even imagined yet.
I'm okay with that.
Creation requires being willing to make things before you know whether they'll work.
Outside of all that, I'm raising three kids, and they remain the most important work I will ever do. These days that can mean throwing a football with one daughter, singing karaoke with another, teaching my son to drive, fixing whichever e-bike has decided to break this week, or simply trying to be present while they're still young enough to want Dad around.
That last part matters more to me with every passing year.
I'm also training for my first marathon, 26.2 miles through Las Vegas in October 2026. Running has become its own kind of teacher. There is something wonderfully simple about it. You cannot negotiate with the miles. You cannot talk your way around them. You put one foot in front of the other and discover how much farther you're capable of going than you thought.
Maybe that's why it fits this chapter of my life so well.
I want to travel more. See more of Las Vegas instead of simply living here. Spend time in Northern California. Get back to Hawaiʻi. Take the trips I've spent years saying I'll take “someday.” See more of the world. Finish some of those video games patiently waiting for me. Read more. Write more. Laugh more. Make mistakes. Learn something from them.
And occasionally, perhaps, sleep.
I'm still working on that one.
This website exists because I wanted one place where all of those versions of me could exist together.
LinkedIn gets the cybersecurity professional. Amazon gets the author. YouTube gets the creator.
Social media gets fragments of everything else.
Here, I don't have to choose.
This is where you'll find the books I've written and the ones I'm still fighting with. You'll find my professional work, creative projects, experiments, videos, old and new ideas, and Train of Thought, my blog about whatever life happens to be teaching me at the moment.
Somewhere underneath all of it is a lesson my mother gave me a long time ago:
“If you're tired, then do it tired.”
I've carried that philosophy farther than I probably realized.
Life hasn't always gone according to plan. There have been successes and failures, beginnings and endings, things I've built and things I've had to rebuild. I've learned that growth isn't usually some dramatic moment where everything suddenly makes sense. More often, it's getting up the next morning and deciding to keep moving.
Write another page.
Run another mile.
Fix another problem.
Raise good kids.
Build something.
Go somewhere.
Try again.
At 43, I don't feel like I'm winding anything down.
Quite the opposite.
I feel like I'm finally reaching the part where all those seemingly unrelated roads are beginning to meet.
There are still stories to tell, places to see, things to build, people to love, miles to run, lessons to learn, and an unreasonable number of notebooks waiting for me.
The train isn't stopping anytime soon.
I'm just getting started.
— T. M. Quillopo Jr.