Algae, my story about love, art, and iron mining on the frigidly cold planet Diamanta, was recently accepted to the Distant Worlds anthology of novella-length science fiction (to be published by The Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy Press). This will be my second published story, and my first story to appear in print format (there will be an ebook version as well). Needless to say, I couldn’t be more stoked! The Distant Worlds anthology also contains novellas by Patty Jansen, A.L. Sirois, Michael C. Pennington, and Aleksandar Žiljak.

What I’m working on

Right now I’m writing the first draft of a novel, Sweet Heart Catalyst. My main character is one of a series of twenty-six identical clones who were genetically engineered to have telepathic and empathic abilities as well as unusual physical strength and resilience. So theoretically, he should be awesome at everything, right? Well… maybe not so much. He’s also young, and insecure, and so desperate to prove himself in his chosen field of law enforcement, that he ends up making a major mistake: he violates the rights of a suspect in custody. In doing so, he not only breaks the law, but his own personal code of ethics, and the biological software inside his head. Suddenly everything becomes a colossal mess, and he has to fix it–or else governments will fall, peace treaties will fail, bullets will fly, and a kidnapped little girl will die. How does he put everything right? I’m working on that

In case anybody’s wondering what happened to my other novel project, The Outerlands, it’s on the back burner right now.

Rebirth of this blog

This blog has been quiet for a while, mainly because I found the effort of posting here too daunting. See, I got too caught up in feeling like any public posts I made had to be “worthy” of some standard. I was always reading things about how writers need to blog in order to generate more interest in their work, and draw more potential readers to their site, and “build their brand”, and so forth. Which are all great things. But I found that whenever I sat down, with those goals in mind, to write some sort of well thought-out, articulate, intelligent, writing-related article, it would (1) take me forever, and (2) leave me feeling tapped out, like I’d shot my wad writing about writing… instead of, you know, WRITING!

There are people out there who are doing amazing things with their blogs: discussing the exciting and challenging aspects of the writing craft, creating communities of mutual interest while getting their own names out there, and all the while managing to write and create and submit and publish. However (*giant light bulb*), I am not one of those people. Therefore I’ve decided that from now on, my main focus will be on the types of posts that come more naturally to me: progress on my WIPs, character art, neato things I found while doing research for stories, plus occasional tweets of a sentence from a WIP. Things that are probably not terribly exciting to anyone else, but that help energize and sustain my creative process. If this somehow peripherally results in one or two more people becoming interested in what I’m doing, why then, that’d be swell too. But for me to worry too much about “building my brand” seems a bit premature. Maybe when I finish story #3