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Showing posts from 2018

Sale and a Kickstarter - A Punk Rock Future Anthology

Hey all, some exciting news. I've had a story accepted to the A Punk Rock Future  anthology , which just launched a kickstarter  for pre-orders. My story is called Wailsong  and I'll be sharing a table of contents with a bunch of incredible writers (whom I would normally name-drop here, but instead you can click through and check it out for yourself). Super excited, y'all, ]{p

On Getting Laser Eyes

Last week I got Lasik. I was looking forward to not having to deal with glasses getting smudged by my kids or slipping off my face. I figured that not needing them would be pretty convenient. However, the words I heard over and over from other people who'd already done it were: "life-changing." That seemed to be overstating a bit. Convenient, yes, but life-changing? I didn't get it. I get it now. I've had some kind of vision correction, either glasses or contacts, for the last thirty-odd years, which is nearly as far back as I can remember. And what I hadn't realized was the extent to which this had become part of my identity. It's not that I thought glasses were cool because I wore them--although I did and they are. It's that the ability to see was, for me, artificial and temporary. And my vision was pretty bad, so my natural state was one of... not so much "blindness" as "isolation." There was a layer of vagueness that sat bet

New Fiction: 'Papa Bear' and 'The Toastmaster'

I've got a couple new flash stories out now. First, a sad one, Papa Bear in Nature Magazine's "Futures" section--also available in the print version of issue 559. Ask me if I'm excited about that! (spoiler: I am) Second, a light-hearted one called The Toastmaster which won the Escape Pod Flash Fiction contest . The linked episode has the top four stories, and the others are excellent as well--by Karen Osborne, Maria Haskins, and Paul R. Hardy. So don't stop listening after mine is over. ]{p

Some Thoughts On Inspiration

In what was a first for me, a reader reached out to me through my website to tell me that he was a fan and to ask where I got my inspiration from. I wrote back with an answer, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked my answer, so I've decided to reproduce it here. Inspiration... So, to my way of thinking, storytelling is a marriage of three elements: you need a good character, you need a plot/setting to place that character in, and you need some kind of external conflict that mirrors the character's internal conflict. Characters are usually inspired by people I know or by characters in other media--I'll take a handful traits from different individuals and mix them together. I usually will have a guiding philosophy in mind for this person. It won't be obvious in the story, but it helps the writing to be able to say fundamentally, quirks aside, this individual is a humanist/hedonist/narcissist/etc. Story/setting are the weird ideas that occur to you a dozen time