I am John Pacey: teacher, Army veteran, father, husband, writer, tinkerer, and the guy who usually ends up saying, “I just work here,” right before doing the thing nobody else wanted to do.
Agent Brosef (this website) started as a joke, or at least that is what I tell myself because most serious things in my life have arrived wearing a dumb hat. It is part author site, part creative workshop, part home base for the stories I have been carrying around for years. Eventually, this is where my book will live. Not just as a product page or a clean little author bio, but as the place where the whole strange machine comes together: fiction, memory, dark humor, systems, survival, and the stubborn belief that people can break the cycles they were born into.
I was born in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 1987, but I grew up in several different lives before I ever became an adult. Texas, California, back to Texas. Trailer parks, overcrowded apartments, unstable adults, hard resets, and enough chaos to make a normal childhood feel like a rumor other people got to experience. I was a gifted kid on paper, the kind of kid who could test well, read early, beat video games before the adults could figure out the controller, and still have absolutely no clue how to exist safely in the world around him.
That disconnect shaped me. I learned early that being smart does not protect you from instability. Talent does not parent you. Potential does not tuck you in at night. You can be told you are gifted while the lights are off, the adults are unraveling, and everyone is pretending the floor is not on fire.
The person who changed that trajectory was my step-grandfather, Don Byrnes.
Don was not loud about goodness. He was not the kind of man who needed speeches or applause. He had grown up poor, served as a Marine in Korea, worked for the FBI, then in law enforcement, and carried himself like a man who understood that duty was not a slogan. It was what you did after everyone else got tired.
When I was fourteen, I asked if I could stay with him and my grandmother. He said yes. No grand performance. No dramatic rescue music. Just yes.
That yes saved my life.
Don had a phrase: “I just work here.”
That was his answer to gratitude, pressure, responsibility, inconvenience, and probably half the emotional complexity in the known universe. It sounds simple until you realize it is an entire philosophy. Show up. Do the job. Do not make people feel like a burden for needing you. Do not ask for applause. Do not complain loud enough that the person you are helping feels guilty for being helped.
That phrase became the quiet center of my life.
I did not follow a clean path. I dropped out of high school, got my GED, worked fast food jobs, made bad decisions, made better decisions, and eventually joined the Army in 2006. On the surface, I enlisted because friends were doing it. Underneath that, I think I wanted to become someone Don could be proud of while he was still alive to see it.
The Army gave me structure, skill, and a new kind of chaos. I became a radar repairer, served with 4th Infantry Division, deployed to Iraq from 2008 to 2009, and spent a lot of time around counterbattery radar systems, indirect fire, dust, bad coffee, worse sleep, and the kind of humor people use when things are too heavy to carry straight. Later, after leaving the Army, I worked as a civilian contractor in Afghanistan, supporting rapid equipping efforts and fielding technology meant to help soldiers survive.
I do not write about the military like a recruitment poster. I write about it like someone who was there: sometimes absurd, sometimes boring, sometimes terrifying, sometimes funny in a way that makes you question whether the human brain should be allowed to process stress unsupervised. The military gave me competence and scars. It gave me friends, grief, stories, and a lifelong suspicion of anyone who says, “This should be easy.”
After the Army and contracting, life changed again. I became a husband. Then a father.
My son changed the math.
Before him, I had survived a lot, but survival by itself is not the same thing as purpose. Having a child forced me to think beyond endurance. It made me ask what kind of man I was going to be when nobody was grading me, promoting me, deploying me, or ordering me to stand somewhere. It made me realize that breaking a cycle is not a speech. It is a thousand small choices made when you are tired.
Eventually, that led me into education.
Today, I work as a middle school intervention specialist in Cincinnati. That title sounds clinical, but the actual job is human. I work with students who are often carrying more than they know how to name. Some are behind academically. Some are angry. Some are funny enough to derail an entire lesson with one sentence. Some need structure. Some need patience. Some need someone to notice they are not lazy, stupid, or broken; they are overwhelmed, under-supported, and still reachable.
Teaching middle school is not for people who require constant dignity. It is part academic support, part crisis management, part detective work, part stand-up comedy in a room where the audience has chromebooks and undeveloped frontal lobes. But it matters. Especially in special education, the work matters because the kid in front of you is never just a data point. They are somebody’s whole world, even when the world has not done a great job proving that to them.
That is where my past and present meet.
The combat veteran and the intervention specialist are not as different as they sound. Both jobs require you to stay calm when things get loud. Both require you to read the room quickly. Both require you to fix broken systems with limited tools while someone nearby insists the plan was definitely fine when it left the meeting. Both require you to care about the person in front of you more than your own comfort.
That same instinct is what drives my fiction.
I write LitRPG and progression fantasy because I love systems: levels, stats, builds, mechanics, broken rules, strange powers, and the question every gamer secretly loves most: “Okay, but how can we abuse this responsibly?” Or irresponsibly. Depends on the patch notes.
But the heart of the story is not the stat screen. It is the person reading it.
My main character, Pacey, is built from a lot of my own wiring: the dry humor, the 2000s slang that should probably have been retired with MySpace, the veteran brain, the teacher patience, the father panic, the instinct to protect kids first and ask philosophical questions later. He is not a memoir version of me. He is a fictional character standing in a fictional apocalypse, dealing with monsters, systems, and survival mechanics. But underneath the fiction is something real.
A man who grew up in chaos.
A man saved by one steady adult.
A man who went to war.
A man who came home and became the adult he once needed.
That is the emotional engine.
My stories are dark, technical, sarcastic, and usually a little unreasonably specific. I like characters who solve problems under pressure. I like broken people who are still useful. I like humor that shows up at the worst possible time because that is often when humor is most honest. I like systems that feel crunchy enough to matter, but not so sterile that the human being disappears behind the math.
I am also a maker and tinkerer, which means I am almost always building something I absolutely could have made easier on myself. Home servers, AI tools, 3D prints, network gear, gaming setups, half-finished projects, weird little experiments that begin with “this should only take an hour” and end sometime around midnight with me holding a cable I no longer trust. Agent Brosef is part of that same impulse. It is a workshop as much as a website.
At the center of all of it is the same idea Don modeled for me:
- Show up.
- Do the work.
- Do not make people feel like a burden.
- Keep your people safe.
- Tell the truth, but use a joke when the truth is being dramatic.
I am not interested in pretending my life has been clean or inspirational in the greeting-card sense. It has been messy, strange, painful, funny, and occasionally stupid in ways that deserve documentation. But I do believe in redemption through action. Not the movie version. The daily version. The version where you become dependable one choice at a time.
That is what I write toward.
That is what Agent Brosef is for.
A place for the book.
A place for the work.
A place for the weird little machines.
A place for the stories that survived long enough to become useful.
I just work here.