Tag Archives: Written 2020s

Apr 6 2026

Poverty Patreon: Rats in the Cellar

Terrified and on the run, Clarence Lowe flees his privileged life for Konalepti Spaceport. Rather than a clean getaway, he finds himself naked, abandoned, and friendless in Anthro-Town, the city’s destitute underground, among its population of inscrutable and suspicious animal-men. But rather than a wretched slum filled with desperate, struggling creatures, he finds a thriving and distinct culture built upon the rubble and refuse of his own. Clarence struggles to adapt to this new society, while staying one step ahead of his past.

This story runs as a three-parter, and had an interesting twist in its writing. In the middle of writing it, I went off to do something else for a while, and when I got back to it, I realized I couldn’t remember the ending I’d had in mind. This tasked me with basically having to solve a mystery I’d written. I don’t think there was ever a moment when the light dawned and I thought, “Ah, yes, that’s what I was going to write.” So I ended up writing the ending I was most likely to write.

Mar 29 2026

The Wrong Albert

Werewolf pelts go for up to ten thousand dollars a pop, so werewolf hunting, though illegal, is lucrative. And if a human kills a werewolf, there’s no guarantee that the Pack will get any justice. But werewolves can’t kill humans, so their own justice won’t fit, either. The answer is to forcibly transform the human into a werewolf. As a werewolf, the killer must respect the orders of the beast that created him. As a killer, the werewolf is immediately exiled from the Pack’s grounds. So the killer is trapped in a body he despises and bound to never harm another werewolf. Many hunters subjected to this treatment don’t survive. Unable to live among humans or werewolves, some hunters choose the easy way out. But some eventually learn to live with themselves.

Albert is captured in Carver Gore hunting one of their most beloved and accomplished members, and is easily run down and transformed by Gabriel’s friends. Now he’s lost in the woods and taunted by a tween pup with a smart phone and a smart mouth, his only guide in this bizarre new world, and unable to return to his own. As Duncan leads him to his inevitable exile, Albert starts to suspect that something else is going on – something worse than being stuffed into the wrong body.

Jan 26 2026

Portly Patreon – The Heavy Hunter

As a werewolf, Gabriel Blaine is a formidable attorney who has done great things to secure the future of his people. But the robust appetite of a werewolf fares poorly when tempted by the plentiful food of humans. At 385 pounds (174 kg), Gabriel’s weight is starting to affect his robust lycanthropic health, leaving him with no choice but to take a sabbatical and rejoin the Carver Gore Pack for the summer, where the food is considerably harder to catch. His return to his people is marked with high celebration.

But, at his weight and nearly sixty years old, Gabriel finds keeping up with the pack impossible, and the judgment of his companion uncomfortable. With long hot days turning into unexpected struggles, Gabriel is torn between returning to Ashton Mills in ignominious failure, or steeling himself against his own weaknesses and proving his continued value to his people.

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.

Oct 19 2025

Predatory Patreon: Predator

Werewolves can’t kill humans. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen once in a while, usually by accident or in self-defense, but it does open an interesting question: what to do when a human hunts a werewolf.

Werewolf pelts are a much-sought symbol of masculinity among certain groups of people. Pretty sure Matt Walsh has one up on his wall in this world. It’s illegal, but the law is inconsistent on the subject and inconsistently enforced. And werewolves can’t kill humans – so, unwilling to turn a murderous human over to the authorities, and unable to punish them appropriately themselves, what does a werewolf do with a werewolf-hunter?