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…?

May 1 2022

Newsletter: May 2022

Just dusting off some of my social media.

About a month ago, I posted a story to my moribund and long-neglected Tumblr account called “Weasels of the Apocalypse,” about a handful of urban explorers taking a young thief into their confidence. I cited the story on Twitter and showed it off to some friends on Telegram – no editors, no pressure to publish, no waiting by the mailbox for a two-line rejection letter, just writing and posting a story to make a few friends happy.

It looks like I’ll be making a few more people happy with the story, since my dear friend Khaki Doggy has asked if he can use it for The Voice of Dog podcast. Being insecure, my response was, “Uhhhhhh…sure!” Then I grabbed it back from him, ran back to my lair, edited it six or seven times, and ran back out, hoping he hadn’t noticed my absence, which he had.

Editing a story isn’t just about making sure you don’t have any misspaellings. It’s about putting aside the mindset of the writer to get into the headspace of the reader. You know how sometimes something can sound funny in your head but the joke falls flat in the air? Like that, but with every sentence of a 6,000 word story. In a weird way, it’s actually a kind of marketing. You’re making sure you can peddle the ideas you’re presenting – competently and intuitively.

So I took “Weasels of the Apocalypse” out for a walk and it slipped the lead and scampered off into the neighbor’s yard. Man, I love this profession. Plant a cucumber seed, get a whole garden.

The first part of the story is landing on “The Voice of Dog” on May 2. Many props to Khaki Doggy for his flawless reading.

Jan 20 2019

AKELA: Coming February 21 from Goal Publications

The humans have taken his friends and family. He’d do anything to get them back.

It’s said that when the first humans evolved, the Ambimorphs were already there, to teach us to hunt and fish and light fires to chase away the cold. For millennia, through rivalry and cooperation, they’ve shared this world with us, keeping their own councils and building their own societies, while always offering friendship to ours.

For years, Ambimorph leader Akela has worked to strengthen a community that would build bridges with the inscrutable Humans. As the keeper of a prophecy foretelling the decline and fall of the human race, it’s his privilege to devote himself to forestalling or preventing the inevitable.

Then a deal with the devil goes wrong, costing Akela three years of his life. In his absence, his family is taken, his community sundered. Desperate to correct his mistake, he’s offered a fatal bargain: to reclaim his family and community at the expense of his heritage, and lose all that his ancestors have worked centuries to save.

But if he loses the prophecy, humanity falls as well…