In late 1997, Paramount Pictures released James Cameron’s “Titanic,” an epic romance starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as star-crossed lovers aboard the doomed ocean liner. A week later, Buena Vista Pictures released “An American Werewolf in Paris,” starring Tom Everett Scott and Julie Delpy. One movie went on to great acclaim and multiple Academy Awards. The other…did not.

But it gave me the opportunity, in early 1998, to enjoy my own private Barbenheimer. “An American Werewolf on the Titanic,” I suppose, was inevitable under those circumstances; I went home and knocked out a 10,000 word short story over the course of a few days. At the time, I’d built a website called “The Half-Million,” which served pretty much the same purpose as the Patreon: a repository of stories well-written but difficult to market.