Tag Archives: Patreon

Sep 7 2025

Prehistoric Patreon – Sure as Kilimanjaro Rises

This was the first werewolf story I ever wrote.

I spent a lot of the summer of 1992 in the woods out back; sometime in August I wrote this story about nature as escape. The story went through extensive rewrites to be Patreon-ready; the original was full of speculative monologues and inside baseball, and I felt it would be poorly understood. It was one of the easiest rewrites I’ve ever done.

The title comes from Toto’s “Africa,” one of my favorite songs. My favorite interpretation of the song is that it’s about yearning for a place you’ve never been. The deuteragonist of this story is someone who can’t understand why he’s obsessing over a co-worker; the antagonist is someone who’s pretty much given up.

I wrote a number of stories with the same theme throughout the 1990s and gathered them under the group title “Kilimanjaro Rising.” I’ve been leafing through some of them. Maybe I can show them off soon.

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This is the unpublished and incomplete sequel to “Found: One Apocalypse,” a sequel that reached 96,000 words before it went into the ditch.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