Category Archives: Writing

Sobriety and Monsters?

Jan
08
2023
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My family’s history with alcohol is complicated. Actually, it’s my history with alcohol that is complicated. It is pretty straightforward with my family. Alcoholism bores deep into the old family tree and runs its veins through all the branches with the same frequency as men with big noses. And there’s a lot of dudes with big noses in my family, self included.

Do you drink? If you do, do you recall the first time you tried alcohol? I do. I was probably four years old. My dad’s parents were visiting, and I adored my Grandpa Lickman. His hands were these powerful, gnarled cudgels that held my attention because he’d lost one of his fingers to a table saw. When he laughed it filled the halls of our home with joy. And he always seemed to have a beer in his hand. One evening during this visit I was looking up at grandpa as he cracked open another can. My curiosity got the best of me.

“Grandpa, can I try your beer?”

Goddamn, how he laughed at that. “You want to try my beer?” (I can still hear the charming, Yooper tilt of his accent. ) “Sure!” And he pressed the cold can into my hands.

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I Reckon That’s One For the Bucket List

Oct
18
2020
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A common refrain I hear among writers is that they fell in love with the written word at a very early age. That ‘twern’t me. Television, Movies, and, to a lesser extent, radio were the tools I used to stuff my imagination. As my 1st and 2nd grade teachers could attest, words on page failed to hold my attention for long. But I can pinpoint exactly when that disinclination towards reading started to change.

I must have been about eight that night I spied my older brother and his friends playing Dungeons & Dragons. Of course at the time I had no idea what it was. “Were they playing a game?” I wondered. They were rolling dice, but there was no board. Instead stacks of books and sheets of graph paper covered the table. I couldn’t follow the action but one thing was clear to me. My brother and his friends were having fun. A lot of fun. Being the inquisitive younger brother it was not long before I was shooed away from the table. Continue reading →

My Hero Died Two Deaths

Jul
02
2018

Harlan Ellison died this week. If you’re visiting this page because I’m a writer, then hopefully I don’t have to tell you who Harlan Ellison was. But, just in case, Google him. You’ll see a wealth of obituaries that will inform you that Harlan Ellison wrote over 1800 stories in his lifetime, that he won pretty much every award a writer could earn (some of them multiple times), that we wrote the most famous episode of the original Star Trek (“The City on the Edge of Forever”), and a thesaurus’s worth of synonyms for the word, “angry”.

A few of those write-ups will even include that he was a prominent voice in the New Wave science fiction movement, a group of writers that blended experimental techniques with a strong emphasis on stories that dealt with the civil rights movement. You might read that Harlan Ellison burned with passion over civil rights, that he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and visited inmates in prison. You may find a mention or two that he acted as a mentor to other ground-breaking writers, such as Octavia Butler. He was the proto-SJW. Note: I mean that as a compliment.

But what you won’t find in these official articles is what a huge, god-damn influence he was to many writers and the writing craft, and just how difficult he made it to reconcile that fact during the last decade of his life.  Continue reading →

John W. Campbell Award Eligibility!

Mar
15
2017
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The publication of my story, “A Bird, a Broad, and a Mess of Kyodatsu” in the January 2016 issue of Mothership Zeta has made me eligible for the John W. Campbell award for new writers. This is a great honor and major milestone in my writing career (I can call it a career, right?). The thought of it is exciting yet it brings with it some sadness as well.  Continue reading →

Still Here. Still Maintaining.

Sep
05
2016
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Just a quick note to let people know I’m still writing. 2016 has not been kind to me. The publication of my story in Mothership Zeta has been the high point of the year by far. Since then my writing career and personal life have taken a bit of tumble.

But I have not given up.

Holy Cats! I’ve Been Professionally Published!

Feb
03
2016
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Hi. It’s been awhile, but I haven’t been entirely slacking. Back in August I got some crazy news, news I never thought I’d get. I’d made a professional writing sale. My story, “A Bird, a Broad, and a Mess of Kyodatsu,” was sold to Mothership Zeta, the new online magazine by Escape Artists, Inc. This is a story I put a lot of research and time into. It combines elements from several things I love: dieselpunk, Japanese folklore, noir, and history. And I’ve been a fan of Mur Lafferty for years. To have her not just read my story, but think it was good enough to publish. . . well, I kinda freaked out the night I got the acceptance letter.

My first instinct was to blast the news everywhere, but then fear grabbed a hold of me. The story had been rejected before. What if the acceptance letter was a mistake? I had actual nightmares of receiving apologies in the mail and of Escape Artists cancelling the magazine. I fussed over what the professional thing to do was. So I sat on the news. Only my wife and closest friends knew. Several weeks later after the contract was signed I let my parents and the other writers in my critique group know. And now that the story has been published, I’m letting you  know.

If you haven’t already, please check out Mothership Zeta. And I hope you enjoy the story.

 

Good Riddance

Jan
01
2015
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There’s no other way to say it. 2014 was terrible for me. I lost Chaos, who was my best friend outside of my wife, to cancer. My wife had to have surgery on her foot. Despite our health insurance, this resulted in a flood of medical bills that taxed our finances after paying for Chaos’s treatment. And then, thanks to the policies of my wife’s employer, all the work done by the surgery was reversed because my wife was faced with the choice of either going back to work too soon or be unemployed. Our year in health finished out by me learning that someone very near and dear to my heart has a terminal illness they have been hiding from everyone. Continue reading →

Fan Art!?

Nov
28
2014
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OK, maybe calling it “fan art” is a bit of stretch, but my friend, artist and web designer, Pete Vasquez drew the following portrait of Friedrich Von Krieger from my story, “The Pro Turned Weird.”

If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it over at the Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE.

I’d worked on the story for a good number of years, and Pete lived with me with during some of that time. I think he was just as happy as I was to see the story get a good home. Thanks, Pete!