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 →

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.

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.