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This is the unpublished and incomplete sequel to “Found: One Apocalypse,” a sequel that reached 96,000 words before it went into the ditch.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.

Aug 17 2025

Playful Patreon: Hot Dog / Fair

Two more stories this week, both from 2014. In “Hot Dog,” werewolves move to Central Park; in “Fair,” they’re running a dunk tank at a county carnival. In both stories, they pass themselves off as benign innocents, the better to get closer to humans and learn more about them.

With “Werewolves on a Waterslide,” that’s three stories now about werewolves making themselves “safe” to get closer to humans, but in these two stories, they’re doing it to fulfill an agenda. A common theme in my werewolf stories is that the monsters mean no harm to humans, but it’s getting hard to hide. Sooner or later, they have to interact, and the monsters would rather that interaction be peaceful.

“Hot Dog,” “The Long Black Ride, “and “To Market” all appeared in the anthology “Six-Pack.“

Aug 10 2025

Pedantic Patreon: Werewolves on a Waterslide / Trash Men

This week’s a double-header because they’re kind of short. Also, one of them is free-to-read.

“Werewolves on a Waterslide” is the newest story in the pile, written just this last week. The title crossed my mind and wouldn’t go away, but I ended up debating with myself for a while about posting it, since I wasn’t sure that now was the best time for a story about compliance in a repressive environment.

I had a long talk with myself about the sort of bargains we strike to survive in society, about what freedoms we’re willing to sell, hoping that selling them will grant us privileges. An indolent society of peaceful forest denizens isn’t going to have to compromise with humans very much. I decided to go ahead with the story when I realized that compliance can be its own form of dissent if the privilege earned grants access to the tools to change or overturn the system.

Or maybe a bunch of werewolves just wanted to play on the waterslides.

The other story this week is “Trash Men,” the only story I ever wrote about the pandemic, during the pandemic. It’s set in the same universe as the “Akela” novels, where people are haunted by the specter of some great, unnamed cataclysm about to befall the world. A form of bird flu with a 23% fatality rate has put the world on lockdown, but Ambimorphs have relative immunity. Two Raccoon-Men (Procyons) have taken jobs as sanitation workers in a very quiet Manhattan, and grow closer together as the rest of the world falls apart.

Aug 3 2025

Road-weary Patreon: The Long Black Ride

I’ve been asking myself: Am I really putting my best on Patreon every week? I mean, I should be, right? Every story ready to post should be the absolute shiniest, most polished, most magnificent narrative I’ve ever concocted, capable of making the angels weep and the deserts bloom, a tour-de-force of heart-wrenching drama.

Which is kind of silly, because if I were to do that, you’d be reading my stories in perpetual descending order of quality, from the treasure to the trash. Give it a few years and you’d be saying, “Man, this guy used to make the deserts bloom and the angels weep; what happened?”

I can promise you that every week contains my favorite story of that week. Select a story that’s the right length and spend a little time with it getting it ready for the spotlight, and I always find the parts that make it shine. Posting it is like being a proud papa sending a fledgling off to Kindergarten. This week’s favorite is “The Long Black Ride,” and I can promise you, hand to heart, that it is ready.

Jul 27 2025

Pastoral Patreon: “To Market”

I have a soft spot for stories that can be engaging without having overweening life-or-death stakes. A famous writer once gave me hell at an event for awkwardly asking if every story had to start with a bang, but as I get older, my stories are more and more about lazy, indolent werewolves hanging out in the woods trying to avoid excitement.

Werewolves show up a lot in my fiction, and you’ll see plenty of them if you stick around. But I have no patience for the horror movie cliche of the mindless slasher, so my werewolf stories are mostly about the gentle friction between affable monsters and suspicious humans. In “To Market,” a hungry werewolf pack sends one of its own to steal food from a new rural supermarket.

Jul 20 2025

Old Forgotten Words and Ancient Melodies

So, I set out a tip jar…

I didn’t think I could manage a Patreon. I’d want to run such a thing like a subscription magazine – a fixed amount of shiny new content every week. I didn’t think I had the capacity for that; I hate deadlines. I had a Patreon, of course; I’d created an account some time ago, but I never had any ideas for it, and I’ve never been any good at marketing.

After a trip to Anthrocon, I returned home to sort through some old stories to see if there was anything I could spruce up and sell, to pay off the rampaging credit card bill. What began as a simple creative audit turned into a deep-dive of long-forgotten stories stretching back forty years.

This was it. This was the content. I could post five thousand words a week for seven years without running out of material.

So I blew a foot of dust off the Patreon account, smartened it up a bit, set up two tiers, and launched.

The five-dollar tier is a basic subscription; it buys between four and six thousand words a week, posted every Sunday. I also added a ten-dollar tier, probably just because it seemed to want more than one tier, for incomplete stories and alternate takes, the sort of work-in-progress material that gets pushed aside when the story goes in a different direction. The WordPress blog, right here, will keep readers up to date on the behind-the-scenes material. None of these stories were written in a vacuum. Which is good; I need to breathe.

Nice to see some of these stories in the light of day. Hope to see you there.

Dec 2 2023

December 2023

I did not indulge myself in NaNoWriMo this year for a few reasons. I’m doing some non-writing things that take up a fair chunk of time, and I don’t think I’ve ever produced anything worth reading during those “just git it done” sessions. That’s not my process. I know people are like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, long as you wrote a novel,” but I’m my own first customer. I’m the first person I need to sell the idea to, and I need to believe in what I’m doing if I’m going to make real progress at it. I need the luxury of crossing out yesterday’s progress if necessary and still being able to make deadline. I need to be able to go five days without progress so that I can find a solution that’s going to put five thousand words on the page on day six.

I’ve also written a lot this year. For the longest time, I’ve been looking for something that I can write in the “serial adventure” format. I seem to work best in the 25,000 word range, which is a challenging sale. Most serial adventures seem to be geared toward young adults, as well, and I wanted to work blue.

I got the idea for “A Wolf In Time” after reading about fifty Doctor Who novelizations in a row, which I suppose makes it one of my more shameless pastiches. Fear not, though; this is no fanfiction. Bartholomew is a werewolf from a future where time travel has basically ruined civilization, whose job it is to set things right. He can’t go back in time and stop other time travelers from doing nefarious things, so his missions involve bending a damaged timeline back to its original shape. Leon Oates is a bewildered human passenger basically brought along as ballast.

I’ve been thinking about how to present unpublished work, and brainstorming ways to use my current social media platform to put these stories in front of an audience. Hopefully by January I’ll have something productive to show off.

Jun 1 2022

June 2022: Unfinished Business

It probably doesn’t look good for any writer to head to the monthly blog space to announce that he has several projects he’s nearly finished with, but polished, developed stories do not flow from disorganized minds any more than healthy, satisfying meals emerge from kitchens that look like disaster zones. My old, gray-haired father, the wacky inventor, occasionally creates the most clever constructs, but they emerge from a basement that looks like a landfill.

Notable events that happened in May largely happened out of my hands. Khaki put the cheerful catastrophe story “Weasels of the Apocalypse” on “The Voice of Dog,” hitting all the right notes. The story landed in two parts, and involved a suspicious melon and an exciting potato.

The undisciplined mind goes where it’s comfortable. If the writing hits a wall, why distress myself by trying to tear down the wall when I could just go write something else and be comfortable again? May’s result: four stories begun, none finished. Of course, it could just mean the story isn’t working, but it’s too early in development to tell. Generally, I haven’t put in the hard work yet; that’s the true test.

And for some reason there are books all over the house with bookmarks on or near page 107 that I never get around to finishing.

I’m going to try to dedicate June to just jotting the occasional impulse onto a whiteboard and trying to harvest the seeds planted in May. But first, I have to finish this idea I had for “Roadhouse Boys.” And then I should look at that short story I was writing the other day. But there’s that video I need to post to my YouTube channel. And should I start using that Patreon for something…?