Tag Archives: Written: 2010s

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.

Nov 24 2025

Procrastinating Patreon: Solitary Company / Wanderers in the Dark

It’s interesting to rub these two stories together and see how werewolves have evolved over thirty years; “Solitary Company” would have been written in the early 1990s, while “Wanderers in the Dark” was written just a few years ago. Banning Deerblood is a heavyset, leather-wearing biker who owns a dive bar on a decrepit back road; Garrebor and Tarrock are ascetic scouts for a secluded tribe of New England werewolves. Banning is shy and timid, keeping his dual nature under his hat for discretion, while Garrebor and Tarrock are loud and fulsome about their circumstances.

But the one that caught my eye is that Banning Deerblood can shapeshift, and Garrebor and Tarrock cannot.

The elimination of shapeshifting was an odd turn for my writing to take. It’s pretty much what werewolves are famous for. In fact, a lot of my characters would have a much easier time of it if they could shapeshift. But in my current work, becoming a werewolf involves finding a Pack that will have you, and undergoing a grueling initiation and painful transformation. Nobody gets randomly bit during a hike in the gloaming. And the transformation is one-way. There’s no going back.

Nov 10 2025

Partial Patreon: Junkyard Dog, Part One

Didn’t take long for me to post all the low-hanging fruit I had in storage; stories that hit between four and six thousand words that were in good enough shape to show the world. From here on in, I guess I have to work for a living.

I created Junkyard Dog in the 1990s when I was creating anthropomorphic characters left and right; he was the sane half of a duo living in the New York underground with a grubby, impulsive idiot named Packrat. It took a long time for him to find a story, but he eventually ended up in this tale about an unpleasant, anti-social anthropomorphic Wolf protecting a mountain of metal junk from avaricious merchants who want to use it to suppress neighboring tribes.

I’ve got some notes indicating that this story is set in the White Crusade universe. This was also the second time after “Found: One Apocalypse” that I wrote a story featuring elemental smelting; in my defense, I don’t know much about metallurgy.

Nov 1 2025

Pocketful Patreon – A Pocketful of Stars, Part Three

The first of November brings us the third part of A Pocketful of Stars, the incomplete rough-draft sequel to “Found: One Apocalypse.” In this installment, war veteran Iorgi Murrett must confront his past, and possibly have sex with it.

I tortured myself trying to think of what the Velincian Irregulars would find at the end of the trail; when I realized that these were a pair of criminal organizations each trying to bluff the other to death, the colony started to take shape. “We’ve tried everything else, so we’re just going to scare the galaxy into leaving us alone” seems like a fair place to land.

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 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.