These are stories that I have written. I have resisted putting my fiction on this site, but some of my friends and readers have asked and I do have a few dozen that have made the rounds or that I will not submit for various reasons. I hope you enjoy these. I will list where they have been submitted and rejected if I can find the paperwork on them. If they were never submitted I will mention that too. Keep an eye out. I will be adding new ones as time goes on!
Stories
Isick of Things: This is the tale of Isick, a doughty if lonely little homunculi that lives out the labor of his days in service to the ungrateful master that gave it life. Set in a world where magic and science have no sufficient borders and good and evil are qualities represented equally in human and machine. Submitted to: Apex, Andromeda Spaceways…, Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Interzone, MF&SF, Shimmer, and many many more.
The Stone Flowers: A story about a young girl flourishing and an alien intellect being taught to become a god. Set in a remote tropical archipelago (somewhere between Sumatra and Australia) during the last ice age, I tried to tinker with the whole “octopus headed elder god/astronaut” Lovecraft thing and see if I could make you want to cuddle Cthulu. I don’t know if I succeeded, though this story has gotten more “holds” than any other story I’ve written- including holds at Andromeda Spaceways and Intergalactic Medicine show among others. It has made the major rounds which is depressing as if there ever was a story I had a feeling would place, it was this one.
Pet: This was a story that followed on my reading of a couple of papers by British computer and AI pioneer Alan Turing, from whence we get the name of the first test for AI. I was beginning to try my hand at regions of the genre outside of space opera and horror that had been my focus until that time. The story is about a time when computers have become quite smart, but the perception of them, at least by people that had been born in the PC era, is that they are a type of dog that can do all your banking, cook dinner and tuck your kids in at night. If something goes wrong, you have it put down and get a new one. To the kids getting raised by these machines the AI are members of the family. I loved this story, though it was rejected by every one of the forty markets it got sent to. I do see, in retrospect, weaknesses and perhaps opportunities in the story I did not explore that now, with three+ years of hard work behind me, I would not have missed. Still, I often go back to this story so it has had staying power, at least for me.
Necropolitain: I got the idea of this story from reading the titular word in a seventies National Geographic that had an article about the tunnels under Paris. There is an area where the walls are made of human bones and they referred to it as a “necropolitain.” I wrote this story, too quickly perhaps, and wondered what to do with it. I didn’t write stories about mutants and undead and the apocalypse, certainly never all together and certainly not at just under 10k words. It was an unpublishable if ever there was one. It was sent to one small press on a lark that seemed to run fast and loose with word limits, and the press agreed to put it in an anthology. They folded before they got the book out. Or they better have. They sent me a copy back that was edited more poorly than my original, which never bodes well. Anyway, I made no effort to fix this thing really, so read it if you are needing more post-apocalyptic zombie mutants in your life. If you are put off by questionable grammar, one of the other stories might be more for you.
