Tag Archives: Forest

Mar 29 2026

The Wrong Albert

Werewolf pelts go for up to ten thousand dollars a pop, so werewolf hunting, though illegal, is lucrative. And if a human kills a werewolf, there’s no guarantee that the Pack will get any justice. But werewolves can’t kill humans, so their own justice won’t fit, either. The answer is to forcibly transform the human into a werewolf. As a werewolf, the killer must respect the orders of the beast that created him. As a killer, the werewolf is immediately exiled from the Pack’s grounds. So the killer is trapped in a body he despises and bound to never harm another werewolf. Many hunters subjected to this treatment don’t survive. Unable to live among humans or werewolves, some hunters choose the easy way out. But some eventually learn to live with themselves.

Albert is captured in Carver Gore hunting one of their most beloved and accomplished members, and is easily run down and transformed by Gabriel’s friends. Now he’s lost in the woods and taunted by a tween pup with a smart phone and a smart mouth, his only guide in this bizarre new world, and unable to return to his own. As Duncan leads him to his inevitable exile, Albert starts to suspect that something else is going on – something worse than being stuffed into the wrong body.

Jan 26 2026

Portly Patreon – The Heavy Hunter

As a werewolf, Gabriel Blaine is a formidable attorney who has done great things to secure the future of his people. But the robust appetite of a werewolf fares poorly when tempted by the plentiful food of humans. At 385 pounds (174 kg), Gabriel’s weight is starting to affect his robust lycanthropic health, leaving him with no choice but to take a sabbatical and rejoin the Carver Gore Pack for the summer, where the food is considerably harder to catch. His return to his people is marked with high celebration.

But, at his weight and nearly sixty years old, Gabriel finds keeping up with the pack impossible, and the judgment of his companion uncomfortable. With long hot days turning into unexpected struggles, Gabriel is torn between returning to Ashton Mills in ignominious failure, or steeling himself against his own weaknesses and proving his continued value to his people.

Jan 19 2026

Progress Patreon: Thou Shalt Not… / The Way I Lived, Out Here With You

The three-part “Thou Shalt Not…” comes to an end, dependent on whether Harris Baker can let go of his vendetta. Astute readers might notice that the timeframe is a bit compressed; the events of the story really wouldn’t happen that quickly, but Baker’s bad decisions seem to hustle things along. Meanwhile, Simon is well on his way to discovering who he really is, and finding a family strong enough for him.

“The Way I Lived, Out Here With You” is this week’s free story, about a werewolf struggling to end a difficult period of mourning for the sake of a loved one. How do you move on without feeling like you’re abandoning those you’ve lost?

Jan 11 2026

Obstructive Patreon – Thou Shalt Not… Part 2

One of the things I found interesting in my re-read of this older story is that nothing Harris does inconveniences the Tribe in the slightest. Konac Namaroc isn’t part of the legal team defending his property, so this existential battle is going on entirely in the background. His people just live their lives as Harris throws money at the lawsuit.

But Harris was right about one thing. It isn’t safe for Simon among the Namaroc, and he will get hurt. Not through any fault of the Tribe, and not in the way anyone expects, but there are dangers the Pack hasn’t found – dangers that eventually find Simon.

Jan 5 2026

Obsessive Patreon: Thou Shalt Not…Part 1

“Thou Shalt Not…” was one of two stories I wrote for an anthology.

The story was supposed to center on Harris Baker’s obsession and jealousy with his neighbors, and how that obsession cost him everything. Instead, Simon’s gentler coming-of-age story turned out to be a much more pleasant place to be. The result is reflected in the story, with Harris’s scenes curt, abrupt, and hurried, while Simon’s scenes are lavish and detailed. Which would you rather do – spend an idle summer swimming in secluded rivers, or trying to steal your neighbor’s house?

Dec 21 2025

Parched Patreon: Hot

I wrote “Hot” in the dead of winter, coldest day of the year, with the wind howling outside the windows and the thermometer reading 8F. I was thinking about how my earlier complaining about the snow and cold would soon give way to complaining about the suffocating summer heat, giving the impression that one could never be truly satisfied with the weather.

The story went a long way toward cementing the Tribe as a running series; after writing it, I edited older stories to match its setting. The town of Ashton, Maine, a former mill village with a population of around 9,600, puts in its first appearance, 24 miles from Carver Cabin in Carver Gore, the territory of the Tribe and the 152 werewolves who call its dozen or so square miles of unincorporated land their home. The Tribe’s leader, called simply “The Master,” is a young visionary celebrated throughout the Pack for his problem-solving skills, though the people remain largely ungoverned. The Pack’s freedom is partly due to the legal maneuvering of Gabriel Blaine, a member of the Pack who passed the bar and created a non-profit trust granting the Pack stewardship of Carver Gore.

The werewolves of the Tribe are an indolent, goofy lot, though they do have the ability to lock-in when one of their own is in danger, and they have little tolerance for hostile humans. “Hot” asks a lot of its two protagonists: what do you do next when you’ve achieved your greatest dream? When does ennui turn into depression? How do you encourage someone else to take the reins of your life? And is the problem really just the heat, or is it something deeper? As Breakwater and Patrick stumble out of the woods on their fool’s quest to briefly join civilization, they’re confronted by their neglect of a part of themselves as beautiful as any beast.

Nov 30 2025

Post-Apocalyptic Patreon: Path of the Hunters, Part One

I was going over this story for about the third time before posting it to Patreon when a random neuron fired and I suddenly remembered a story I first read in high school called “By the Waters of Babylon,” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Suddenly, scenes from it sprang fully-formed in my mind, images I haven’t thought of in nearly forty years.

I’ve written a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction that uses an urban environment being crushed by encroaching nature, and in the abstract, “Path of the Hunters” is just another in the conga line. None of it was written with “By the Waters of Babylon” in mind, at least not consciously, but this story probably falls closest to it on the scale.

Nov 2 2025

Protective Patreon: The Protectors / Judaism and the Art of Model-T Maintenance

When I went over “The Protectors” to decide if it was fit for Patreon, I was a little surprised at how old it was. It reads like a proto-“Tribe” story, with Chorou as an early version of Gabriel. The story is date-stamped 1996, but it could have been written any time in the last twenty years. I’m no longer a fan of characters talking like barbarian kings, but I wanted the werewolves in this story to be alienating to the human characters so they’d have to temper their unease. The two rivals clinking champagne glasses at the end is also something more likely to show up in a later story. Looking back, I’m surprised I never tried to get it published.

“Judaism and the Art of Model-T Maintenance” was written for a college writing class, probably in 1992. I learned a lot in college writing classes: I learned that they were an easy A, I learned that I’d never get an honest critique in them, and I learned that writing professors eat up this sort of derivative literary pretension with a spoon. I also learned that I’d much rather write genre fiction than literary fiction and that I do not write to order well. I did write some good stories as homework, but that just wasn’t the path I wanted to take.

Oct 19 2025

Predatory Patreon: Predator

Werewolves can’t kill humans. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen once in a while, usually by accident or in self-defense, but it does open an interesting question: what to do when a human hunts a werewolf.

Werewolf pelts are a much-sought symbol of masculinity among certain groups of people. Pretty sure Matt Walsh has one up on his wall in this world. It’s illegal, but the law is inconsistent on the subject and inconsistently enforced. And werewolves can’t kill humans – so, unwilling to turn a murderous human over to the authorities, and unable to punish them appropriately themselves, what does a werewolf do with a werewolf-hunter?