Oct 12 2025

Past Patreon: Cave of the Bear Clan / In the Cave

“In the Cave” was written as a college assignment in the early 1990s. To be honest (rub back of neck, nervous glance about the room) I didn’t get much out of college writing classes. I never received anything but the most ebullient praise in them, which is nice, but one doesn’t learn much from it. I would have been better served with lessons in an absorbing opening, rising action, building suspense, characterization, and a memorable climax. Instead, it was a circle of a dozen students reading their prose and clapping each other on the back for their genius. The professor might as well have gone out for coffee.

Later, I rewrote “In the Cave” into “Cave of the Bear Clan.” There’s not much resemblance between the two stories, and I bet you can guess which one has bear-people in it. They’re both about troubled college students exploring a cave and discovering how the past and present can redeem each other.

I don’t know much about spelunking myself, as I’ve seen enough YouTube videos to horrify me out of ever visiting any cave that doesn’t have a tour guide and a gift shop. (Seriously, what are you people doing?) So the caves in these stories are big and roomy and atmospheric instead of the tight little cracks in the rock that seem to attract every claustrophile with a selfie stick looking for a granite hug. Honesty, props to the mission, but it’s not for me.

Oct 5 2025

Precarious Patreon: Baggage

This week brings a horror story suggested by Stephen King himself.

Not directly, I hasten to add. I never met the man and would probably be too gobsmacked to say anything if I did. The story comes from a writing prompt in his book “On Writing,” a must-have for any writer that fits very neatly on the shelf next to Strunk and White and the most recent Writer’s Marketplace.

The prompt is a little dated, so the story is a little dated; I doubt I wouldn’t have made the antagonist quite so cartoonishly evil if I’d written it today. The Internet being what it is, there’s always the possibility of unintended interpretations. That’s the gamble you take.

Ask Stephen King.

Oct 1 2025

Hustler Patreon: A Pocketful of Stars – Part Two

Rollo Darrin is the Apocalypse’s field man. It’s his job to make use of his extensive gray-market contacts to keep the battleship in business. It can be difficult to knock him off his stride. In this chapter, however, he hardly spends a moment on his feet. Surfing the brutal reputation of the Velincian Irregulars, Rollo spends days traveling from grubby outpost to gorgeous resort, grabbing whatever benefits he can scam along the way.

It’s hard to say without a completed story, but I’m not sure I would have kept this sequence in the novel. It might work better as one of the short stories in “Repairing Armageddon,” since it’s eleven thousand words of Darrin running pillar to post to make a phone call. I was being pushed at the time to make my stories longer, longer, longer, after decades of being told to Strunk and White the hell out of them, so there was really nothing to spare for the scrap heap. However, apart from two or three of the more annoying typos, this is entirely first-draft material.

Sep 28 2025

Political Patreon: You Can’t Win The Mall

There’s two sides to every story, and while it might seem a little odd to come down on the side of the corporate suit in a tale about community activism, it’s just as important to meet people where they are. Time and experience have shown the flaws in Duman’s protest technique.

The version of this story that I included in “Six-Pack” had a much flakier Duman and a much more harassed Esterbrook. Had I written this 2014 story either ten years earlier or ten years later, Esterbrook and Duman would have skipped off into the forest arm-in-arm, either through a vindication of youthful perceived moral superiority or a middle-aged daydream desire to flee the grind.

Sep 21 2025

Personable Patreon: Wet / This Thing that I’ve Become

I think I wrote “Wet” in 2014, when the idea of being able to escape the pressures of American life by turning into a fish and swimming away would have had a certain appeal. I was wondering whether this story had some Jonathan Livingston Seagull influence when I re-read it. It’s specifically set in Scarborough Marsh, a tidal saltwater wildlife preserve in Maine.

There’s no paywall on “This Thing that I’ve Become,” a Kilimanjaro Rising story written around 1993 or 1994. I don’t know whether its guilt-ridden protagonist chose to become a werewolf or whether it was something that just happened, but dealing with the reality of it has complicated his life, and now he’s on the run. This would have been a very different story if I’d written it thirty years later, but I like its isolated intimacy.

Sep 14 2025

Perceptive Patreon: Citywolf / In the Soup

Two Patreon stories again this week, and one of them has no paywall.

I first wrote “Citywolf” in 1993. The Citywolf is probably my most unreliable narrator and is certainly my most delusional, convincing himself that a simple trip to the library to drop off some books is an adventure only he can see through a wasteland only he can accept. However, a lot happens on this simple trip to the library – more than might happen if he was truly delusional…

I wrote “In the Soup” a couple of months ago. I started thinking about the old and frankly racist trope of the two explorers sitting in the cookpot surrounded by cannibals waiting for dinner, a trope made famous in Warner Bros. cartoons, New Yorker pages, and Mad Magazine articles. My brain started begging for a subversion. The result was this story of two human explorers, one experienced and one naive, finding themselves in a similar position, with one explorer completely misinterpreting the situation.

Sep 7 2025

Prehistoric Patreon – Sure as Kilimanjaro Rises

This was the first werewolf story I ever wrote.

I spent a lot of the summer of 1992 in the woods out back; sometime in August I wrote this story about nature as escape. The story went through extensive rewrites to be Patreon-ready; the original was full of speculative monologues and inside baseball, and I felt it would be poorly understood. It was one of the easiest rewrites I’ve ever done.

The title comes from Toto’s “Africa,” one of my favorite songs. My favorite interpretation of the song is that it’s about yearning for a place you’ve never been. The deuteragonist of this story is someone who can’t understand why he’s obsessing over a co-worker; the antagonist is someone who’s pretty much given up.

I wrote a number of stories with the same theme throughout the 1990s and gathered them under the group title “Kilimanjaro Rising.” I’ve been leafing through some of them. Maybe I can show them off soon.

Sep 1 2025

Premier Patreon: A Pocketful of Stars – Part One

This should be fun.

I was stunned to find the manuscript for “A Pocketful of Stars” as I was rummaging through old hard drives looking for content.

This is the unpublished and incomplete sequel to “Found: One Apocalypse,” a sequel that reached 96,000 words before it went into the ditch. After writing “Repairing Armageddon,” I didn’t bother keeping backups of this one, which was a mistake. You’re not supposed to laugh at your own jokes or pat yourself on the back for your own cleverness, so I read it mostly with gritted teeth, hoping no one could see me rocking back and forth.

Wish I’d finished it. This stuff is gold.

So I’m posting seventeen thousand words of it to the “alternate takes and unfinished works” tier, because it is both. I do it with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. Hope you get a kick out of it, too.

Aug 31 2025

Hostile Patreon: Swamp Monster

I have a few stories about people who desperately want to be werewolves, but are unwilling to put in the legwork. For these wannabes, there are always unscrupulous shamans willing to take shortcuts for a quick buck, but a werewolf needs guidance before and after transformation to deal with the sensory inrush and explosion of hormones and new strength and speed. For the first several weeks, a new werewolf is susceptible to mood swings capable of doing a lot of damage, both to himself and to others.

Clive used to specialize in edge cases. Now he enjoys a peaceful retirement in the Louisiana bayou. But every once in a while a moron shows up at the door.

This story is a companion piece to “Roadhouse Boys,” a novel about a werewolf’s journey from neophyte to mentor. It hasn’t been published yet, but the overall theme is: These boys play rough.

Aug 24 2025

Peaceful Patreon: Young Murrett Takes the Bait

One of the few novels I actually managed to get traditionally published was a science fiction comedy called “Found: One Apocalypse.” (Sounds like an anime title. Never really grew on me.) The story is about a war hero with PTSD who fled the accolades and became a junk dealer, who finds a derelict spaceship lumbered with experimental weaponry and decides to keep it. Iorgi Murrett kept himself sane by focusing on his work. In this story, we see that that focus is cultural.

I wrote several stories about Iorgi Murrett and gathered them in an anthology called “Repairing Armageddon.” (A much better title.) In this one, a young Iorgi Murrett, recently returned from the war, decides to go on a fishing trip on his home planet, Isbjornheim, in the Borean Empire. But Boreans never do anything small.