Tag Archives: Written 2020s

Feb 15 2026

Predictive Patreon: An American Werewolf on the Titanic – April 12, 1912

I found the backup of the Half Million on an old hard drive when doing a creative audit a few months ago, and for some reason “An American Werewolf on the Titanic,” which I hadn’t read in 25 years, got under my skin. It was well-written for something I knocked out over a few days when I was 26, but it was also more or less what it said on the tin: a wealthy American werewolf travels on the Titanic with his faithful companion, and when disaster strikes they’re forced to resort to extreme measures to survive. There was no exploration of class, culture, or morals, and the research amounted to “The writer watched ‘Titanic’ once.”

It was definitely time for a rewrite. Trouble is, the movie made everyone an expert, and many of them were fans. I once spent two hours trying to determine if a kid in western Tennessee would have been able to watch “The Lone Ranger” on TV in 1955. I spent the next three months with 26 open browser tabs, exploring everything from the layout to the clothing to the slang, as well as biographies of all the major figures. I read restaurant menus, discovered how much the swimming pool cost to use, and counted the number of available toilets. If I didn’t get all this stuff right, I was going to get letters…

Feb 8 2026

Historic Patreon: An American Werewolf on the Titanic – April 11, 1912

In late 1997, Paramount Pictures released James Cameron’s “Titanic,” an epic romance starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as star-crossed lovers aboard the doomed ocean liner. A week later, Buena Vista Pictures released “An American Werewolf in Paris,” starring Tom Everett Scott and Julie Delpy. One movie went on to great acclaim and multiple Academy Awards. The other…did not.

But it gave me the opportunity, in early 1998, to enjoy my own private Barbenheimer. “An American Werewolf on the Titanic,” I suppose, was inevitable under those circumstances; I went home and knocked out a 10,000 word short story over the course of a few days. At the time, I’d built a website called “The Half-Million,” which served pretty much the same purpose as the Patreon: a repository of stories well-written but difficult to market.

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.