Author Dennis Riley should have been mortal enemies—with himself.
Let me explain. “Dennis Riley” is the pen name for two Amarillo-based authors who’ve been best friends since high school: Eric Dennis, a sixth-grade language arts teacher and Amarillo Independent School District Secondary Teacher of the Year in 2025, and James Riley, who works in the utilities department for the City of Amarillo. Eric went to Tascosa High School, and James to Amarillo High.
But soon after they met in 1979, they started playing tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, helping them discover their love of fantasy realms and leading to their now-lifelong friendship.
In August, the duo released Fortune’s Triumph, Mercy’s Regret, the conclusion to their urban fantasy trilogy Fortune & Mercy. We spoke a few days before the official release about how their abiding love of gaming has paid off, how they decided to start writing together after 40 years of friendship, and who wins when they have an argument. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
Chip Chandler: What was it about Dungeons & Dragons that solidified your friendship?
Eric Dennis: Dungeons & Dragons is like playing cowboys and Indians when you’re kids, only you’re sitting at a table with dice and there are actually rules. It’s really fun, collaborative storytelling, but there’s also a competitive element to it. I think we were both drawn to those kinds of things.
James Riley: We have a shared love of the fantasy realm, so that helped fuel our imagination. I ended up really early on as the Game Master, the guy who has to create the story and runs the game, so to speak, even though it’s a collaboration. That got me interested in storytelling. I love creating a big, expansive world. And that eventually led, much later than it should, into writing.
ED: It was like Stranger Things, even though James and I and our friends never encountered any world-destroying monsters in Amarillo, that camaraderie is pretty much what we experienced when we sat down at the table from week to week.
CC: Are you still playing?
JR: I run a game pretty often, but lately, I’ve been taking a break because I want to play every once in a while.
CC: Whose idea was it to start writing together?
JR: There was a point around 2020 when Eric said he’d love to do a collaborative project. I said, “Let’s write.” A few years prior to that, Eric ran a game and I took really detailed notes. I started adding things to it, and it turned into a story. I should have kept at it, but I didn’t. But around 2020, we started writing a short story just to see if we could, then it turned into a novella, then into a novel, then into a long novel that we split into a trilogy.
ED: James won’t say it, but the guy has a natural talent for writing. I’ve been trying to get him to write since the 1990s, but I could never seem to convince him. Around October of 2020, I asked him to coffee and asked him to do something together so we could hold each other accountable, and thank goodness, he did bite on that.
JR: I’m very grateful he focused me on writing. It’s been a lot of fun.
CC: What’s the cowriting process like?
ED: We both have full-time jobs, so time is the difficult part. I don’t know if we had a process in the beginning, did we, James?
JR: Not really. It was just, “Do you want to take a chapter?”
ED: The way the process has evolved is that we meet at a coffee shop every Sunday for 2 ½ hours and look at what we’ve written or outlined over the week. We divvy up the responsibilities for scenes or chapters. I have a routine where I try to write a little bit before I head to school and carve out a couple of hours on Saturdays. Once we have the big-picture stuff mapped out, we individually write the chapters.
JR: Writers often fall into two categories—plotters or “pantsers,” where you plot everything out or you fly by the seat of your pants. We’re mostly plotters, but at some point, we become pantsers.
ED: It ends up being really fun. We’ll come to the table on Sunday mornings with a chapter for each of us to read. Sometimes, I’ll read what James has written, and it really surprises me in a good way, almost like I’m a fresh reader myself. Other times, I come when I’m bouncing on the inside and can’t wait for him to see what I’ve done.
CC: Have you ever written yourselves into a corner?
ED: Many times. But that’s what’s so great about having a coauthor. James can look at things from an objective point of view, whereas I’m mired in it. He can say something on a Sunday morning that might hurt at first, but he’s usually right.
CC: Who wins arguments between the two of you?
ED: James and I have known each other for a long time. We’re best friends. Both of us love reading, love talking, love creating and we love debating. Sometimes, it ends up being a mini-debate trying to make your case with the other author, and in the end, it’s down to who has the most persuasive skill and the most evidence.
JR: I can think of plenty of times where we each say we like what we’re doing and decide to let the reader decide.
ED: I’ve conditioned myself at this point that when I hear him saying something like that, I just drop it. It’s obviously something important to him, or he wouldn’t use that kind of comeback.
CC: Tell me about the series and the new novel.
JR: It’s the final chapter of the trilogy. It’s been a long journey for our main character, Ulric Darktalon, a street thief/con artist by trade who has gone to the big city, the capital of an ancient republic that’s similar to Rome. The gods are very real. He thought he was on the fast track to fame and fortune, but he’s had to learn the hard way that you have to pay your dues. Nothing comes easy without sacrifice.
ED: Our series is Fortune & Mercy, and Ulric worships the goddess of fortune and luck, and Persius Julia worships the goddess of mercy. Those two themes run throughout the whole trilogy. Sometimes they work great together. Sometimes they’re at odds with each other.
CC: Are you working on anything now?
ED: We can’t give anything away yet, but we already know what we’re going to be writing next. Once we get [Fortune’s Triumph, Mercy’s Regret] out into the world, we’ll start outlining and planning our next novel.
JR: Our next two novels. Are you OK with saying that?
ED: Uh-oh.
JR: We’re still going to collaborate, but we’re going to let each other write a kickoff to a new series each. We’ll still work as each other’s beta readers, bouncing things off each other.
ED: They’ll both still be released under the Dennis Riley pen name.
CC: Could you ever have imagined, sitting around that D&D table in high school, that fantasy would become so mainstream in 2026?
JR: That’s a topic that’s very close to our hearts.
ED: We imagined it a million times. We hoped and wished for it a million times when we were kids, teens and young adults. But we never imagined it would be like this. There were some swords-and-sorcery movies in the ’80s; they were a little cheesy, but we took what we could get. But from the Lord of the Rings [film trilogy] on, it’s been much greater than we could ever imagine.
JR: I always thought it would stay on the fringes, but Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter changed everything. You have to be careful what you wish for. When something becomes very popular, the hard, exotic edges get rubbed off. I want to try to bring that back. At least that’s the goal. I’ll leave it for readers to decide.
