Tag Archives: Patreon

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.

Dec 8 2025

Post-pubescent Patreon: Path of the Hunters, Part Two

I feel like I want to come back to this world at some point. Two mighty tribes have been at war so long that there hasn’t been a battle in centuries, and their conflict has evolved into a rigid slate of rules and courtesies designed to prevent violence from flaring up and involving both tribes. Two fierce warriors of these opposing tribes meet in the ruins of an ancient city, and cautiously dance around each other, trading insults and shaking weapons to cement their antagonism. Waltz of the frenemies.

Torvik continues to struggle with growing up; he thinks it’s a stupid idea and doesn’t want to do it, not that he has a choice. His body has been making some bad decisions for him lately, and he’s feeling churlish and short. His easygoing Kahjah opponent pities him somewhat, which outrages him further, and he’s picked a fight he hasn’t a prayer of winning…

Dec 3 2025

Penalty Patreon: A Pocketful of Stars – Entrance of the Gladiators, Part 1

“Say, whatever happened to Chancellor Damon and Emperor Kellin after the Battle of the Caldera in ‘Found: One Apocalypse?'” said literally no one. But the original plot to the story that became this behemoth series was the entire Galaxy and all its various factions targeting the broken-down battleship for their own purposes, so it was time to wheel in another faction.

They’re pronounced “ZAY-tuss,” and that’s singular and plural. I suppose they’re a response to all the honor-before-reason barbarian species cooked up to keep science fiction moving. They look like seven-foot-tall anthropomorphic dragons, and they have a little gland at the base of their skulls that creates a hormone that makes them brutally competitive. Put two Zatus in a room together and they’ll beat each other up as soon as they get bored.

It doesn’t take long for Damon to realize that this civilization of death-before-dishonor barbarian lords is all hat and no cattle, and that when your civilization is death-before-dishonor, you end up generating a society of rules lawyers and backstabbers. Everyone aboard the Silver Star has great talent and abilities, none of which are valued by a society of skull-thumpers. So Damon is left to navigate this culture as best as he can. At least they’re honest with him.

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.

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.