I write stories–lots of stories.

Most of them are novels. That seems to be the length I prefer, but I’ve written some that qualify as flash fiction, and every length in between.

As I publish various stories, I will have notes about them here, and each story series may spin off into its own blog. Most of the novels I write are intended as part of a longer series.

So far, I have either published or written (but haven’t yet published) the following story series.

Protector. This series begins with I Will Love You Forever, which was a Compton Crook Finalist in 2016, and is available in paper and eBook formats on Amazon and many other places. This series is about an alien artificial intelligence probe which comes to Earth and is forced to merge with a human woman to keep her alive. I have only written the first novel in this series, but I have three more planned.

I am currently writing Devil’s Paradise, the novel that begins The Redemption Cycle, a series about time travel and finding completion. Devil’s Paradise is the story of a man who builds a time machine and travels to the future. The future world is a perfect paradise, but humanity is about to become extinct, and it is his fault. I think this may be my favorite story so far, although I am still struggling with how to get the main story launched more quickly. (Just this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to take the entire first quarter of the book and split it off to be a prequel story at some point, so I have more rewriting to do on it.) I’ve planned four more stories in The Redemption Cycle, if I include the prequel story.

Seed of Destiny. This series begins with two hard SF short stories I am still shopping around to magazines, but is about early human interstellar colonization, with evolutionary implications. I love the concepts in this series, but none of it has been published yet. So far, I have written three novels and six shorts in this series.

The Jumper. This is a novelette which was featured on Wattpad, and is also available in paper and eBook. The Jumper is a story about a police detective who investigates a very strange suicide, only to discover…well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. One spin-off series has started from this, called The First Jumper, about an ice-age human who encounters an alien traveler. While The Jumper and The First Jumper are for sale on Amazon and elsewhere, I have written two other novels in the series that follows The First Jumper, and one novel in the series that follows The Jumper. None of them are ready for publication yet.

The Possum’s Curse is a completed novel from several years back. It needs a rewrite before it is ready for publication. I have written something between six and fourteen novels in this series, depending on how the stories are divided. It’s been fun to write, but this entire series may not see the light of day, unless I have a lot more time to write than I do now.

Unnatural Conflict is a short fantasy story about a woman who is a werecat, and encounters a man who is a werewolf. I have written two entire and one partial prequel novels to this story, and planned out several sequel stories. I love the story concept, but may not have time to get back to this one, either.

“Bigfoot” is a short story that I’m currently trying to shop to magazines. It is a story of three alien grad students, similar to eight-foot-tall ferrets, who start having fun messing with the monkeys of Earth, and meet their match in a tomcat. I actually think it’s hysterical, so I’m hoping to find an editor who will agree. I have multiple other stories in this series planned, but haven’t had time to write them yet. The series will be called Ferrets on Furlough.

In addition to the above series, I’ve written about a dozen unconnected short stories, which may eventually find their way into publication. Some of them are humor. They make me laugh, anyway.

It’s a lot of stories that haven’t been published, I know. I want to finish them all, and I intend to. But I’m going from sixteen to twenty hours a day, most days, and it’s hard to stop that habit. I’d love to write full time, but then my family would starve.

On the other hand, if the stories in any of these series start to sell well, I will immediately bump the priority of that series to the top. So if you’d like to see more of these come to life, hop over to Amazon or Smashwords or CreateSpace or Kobo or 24 Symbols or Barnes and Noble or InkTera or any of the other online stores that have them, and buy a copy. Even better than buying a copy is writing a review, on Amazon or elsewhere. Every four or five star review makes a huge difference, in the early part of an author’s career. It is the single biggest thing you can do to help any author.

Poetry is passion, by form constrained

To find in words what minds disdain,

To seek the hearts raw depths restrained,

And pierce, to flow again

I was listening to a good, but overly-technical lecture on poetry, and realized that I didn’t really have a good definition of what poetry was. Then I started thinking about just what is it that makes poetry great (or awful, depending.)

For me, it’s passion — deep feelings, powerfully expressed. The structure of the words constrains the passion in such a way that the mind is engaged in comprehending the form just enough for the raw feelings of the heart to be both expressed and felt.

So I see the passion-given-structure as a way to break the dams built around our hidden, deeper selves, allowing feelings to flow as they should.

Anyway, that is why I so love to read and write poetry. It lets me find (both in the writing and in the reading) a deeper honesty of feeling than my mind will otherwise allow.

It has since occurred to me that this works for any art just as well.  For me, anyway, this is the central definition of art: to express deep and true emotion in such a way that the mind’s defenses are bypassed, allowing direct communication with the heart.

Without the expression of deep and true emotion, it is merely intellectual exercise at best.  Without the bypassing of the mind’s defenses, it is merely the statement of feeling, which may or may not be art.