Tag Archives: Furry

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 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 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 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.

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…