Projects, experiments, and essays
A few years ago I realized that my voice as a writer is one of poetic narrative. Writing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham was an incredibly fun experience, and one that I wanted to repeat after struggling to bring my prose up to a level I was happy with. It turns out my brain really needs the distraction of formal verse so I can follow Ray Bradbury's rule, "Don't think!" while actively in the midst of creating.
I'd also long wanted to tackle something Shakespearean, and have always thought Romeo and Juliet was, well, a bit silly. As the saying goes, it's not a great love story, it's about a three day relationship that kills six people. So I asked myself, "What if it was a love story? Hey, what if it was, say, three love stories? One straight, one kinky, one queer?" OK, I didn't really ask myself that: it's what I discovered while exploring the possibility.
Capuleft and Montaright is a sword-and-cell-phone fantasy set in a world where one's handedness is the most important thing, and Juliet of Capuleft falls in love with Romeo of Montaright. Their cousins Ben, Ty and Rosalyn, along with their friend Merk, have to navigate the complexities of prejudice and desire in order to bring the lovers together and sort out their own platonic and romantic entanglements with a minimum of projectile vomiting.
My goal is to put up a free reader's PDF in the week of July 14th, 2024, and have it ready to ship by mid-to-late August. Stay tuned!
The Inner Islands Trilogy is an illustrated story of friendship and adventure in the world where long about humans did something to make many animal species intelligent, and went away.
In Cedar Island Dreams, Anforth the raccon and his friends Flutsam the otter and Crow the crow find a human-made sailboat, which is also being sought after by a gang of pirate wolves. They face danger, hardship, and fear, meet a friendly sea-wolf named Rufus, and cross the Outer Channel to the mainland as the wolves chase them!
The story continues in A Knock at the Door, in which Anforth and his friends explore the Drowned City and travel north in search of what the humans might have left behind. But there is more going on behind the scenes than the realize!
The final book in the trilogy, Where the Humans Went is came out in the spring of 2021, and was soon followed by the Complete Inner Islands Trilogy in one volume!
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham is a long poem inspired by one of the strangest Medieval romances. It's got romance, magic, sex (very nearly!), violence, and adventure! And pigs!
When Birnam Wood is a slim volume of sixteen precisely 1600 word stories, with each story divided into four precisely 400 word parts, following a roughly "2.5 act structure". It's mostly an experiment in form, but the stories range from Western to fantasy to hard-SF.