Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m proud to announce the publication of Mario Writes a Poem a Day for a Year and So Can You. This project turned out to be my pandemic baby. I started it before the pandemic, but much of it was … Continue reading →

Green Snake Publishing just released my latest short story as a nifty little ebook. In it I take an excursion to the disturbing side of monastic life, revealing some dark doings in the history of a certain Pacific Northwest monastery. … Continue reading →

My latest short story just came out in the November/December 2020 issue of Analog. “Ashes” is a short speculation on just what it might take for humans to achieve immortality.

Actually, I’ve already started. I wrote the first one on October 28 and have produced a new one every day since. I intend to do this for a year, then publish a book with commentary about each one. I’m going … Continue reading →

Back in the early ’70s (yup, that long ago) I was a kid besotted with science fiction. I loved the stories and novels of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula LeGuin, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, and many … Continue reading →

My latest short story, “The Hitchhiker’s Tale,” was published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Mgazine. It’s the story of  a guy with gold fever who hitches a ride from Portland to Idaho in search of his fortune, but who ends up encountering … Continue reading →

Green Snake Publishing just released my latest collection of short stories and I couldn’t be more pleased. The book has brand new stories that have never been published anywhere, as well some favorites reprinted from places like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery … Continue reading →

My latest short story was just published by the fine folks at Daily Science Fiction. “The Last Kiss” concerns the relationship between an Earth-bound human and an Earth-trapped alien.

Award winning editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch published an anthology in WGM’s Fiction River series of anthologies titled Hidden in Crime. It’s filled with stories about crimes of the past. Things that were illegal way back when, but aren’t illegal now. … Continue reading →

The good people at Bundle Rabbit have put together an amazing collection of novels about teen super heroes, and they’ve included Kyle’s War, my gripping tale of a dystopian future America and one teen’s fight for justice and peace. Grab … Continue reading →

In honor of Labor Day, I’ve discounted the ebook editions of my collection of flash fiction, Labor Days, to $2.99 for a week. Labor Days tells the tales of a hundred different workers in 100 short short stories. The tales … Continue reading →

Recently I contracted with a very talented narrator, Caroline Miller, to do an audio edition of my book Terrastina and Mazolli: A Novel in 99-Word Episodes. T & M is a very dear book to me. I love the characters … Continue reading →

The good folks at PodCastle have done a podcast of my short story “Ray.” You can listen to it here.

Not even sure that’s a word, it doesn’t matter. The good folks at Escape Pod have produced a podcast of my story “Parallel Moons.” You can read the story and listen to the reading by Bill Bowman here.

Green Snake Publishing has just released my latest short story “The Burning Artist” in both paper and ebook formats. In this story I find a way to connect Franz Kafka to the wreck of the Hindenburg. Here’s the description from … Continue reading →

I found a picture of dice on dreamstime.com that I really liked. I immediately thought of a woman who uses the dice to help her make decisions in her life and the title came to me at the same time. … Continue reading →

Like a lot of writers, I have a lot of false starts: stories I began, got a few pages into, then abandoned. In the old days I would keep these starts in file folders and store them in a filing … Continue reading →

My short story collection, Miniatures, has just been published by Green Snake Publishing. Here’s a look at the minimalist cover: Miniatures collects 41 of my best short short stories. Nothing in the book is over 2500 words long, and there … Continue reading →

My latest challenge story has lizards, a snow storm, marital strife, and lots of broken crockery. It takes a look at what happens to a couple when one of the partners “wakes up” from being kept under a mask. I … Continue reading →

I’ve heard about parents billing their children for their upbringing. I thought that might be an interesting subject for a short story, so I invented a twelve-year-old who gets such a bill. He is in debt to his parents for … Continue reading →

This one came from a picture of Kim’s. We were at the labyrinth at The Grotto in Portland and saw a snail crawling on the bricks. Kim took a few pictures of it and one of those pictures inspired this … Continue reading →

Like Susan Sarandon’s character in Bull Durham, I have always believed in the church of baseball. But on this Super Bowl Sunday I understand that particular faith needs to take a back pew to football. So, in honor of the … Continue reading →

This week’s challenge story is a little early because I’m going to be on the road on the day I usually write them. No matter. I got up at 5 this morning and dove into this piece about a sentient … Continue reading →

The first stories that really moved me when I was a kid were science fiction tales, those futuristic flights of fancy that came out of the pulp tradition. The stories were vivid, strange, and thrilling. They were filled with action … Continue reading →

When I was a math major, I enjoyed the paradoxes dealing with infinity. The ones where you can prove mathematically that Achilles can never catch up to that tortoise. Or the one that proved that motion was impossible. That sort … Continue reading →

Claypot Dreamstance first came to me almost six years ago when I was doing my Conditional Reality blog. Here’s a few samples of what he said to me then. Since ending my old blog, Claypot’s voice kept coming back to … Continue reading →

This week’s story began with a picture that Kim took when we were at The Grotto in Portland, Oregon. While there, we saw a pair of beautiful marble angels on either side of a trail. Like a lot of marble … Continue reading →

Most of us get bumps and bruises in our lives and most of us get over them and go on with living. But what if a trauma decides to lodge in your body and never leave? This week’s story concerns … Continue reading →

The March issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine is just out and it’s got a short story by me in it called “Property Lines” which concerns a couple of nice old ladies who find a way to hate each other … Continue reading →

Most likely no one will ever go to the stars, despite decades of science fiction stories that say we will. Also, we probably aren’t going to beat death. Immortality is a dream at best. And I don’t think we’ll ever … Continue reading →

Not much to say about this week’s story. I’ve always been interested in the last meals that condemned prisoners ask for. This story is about someone who makes one of those last meals. Started the piece around 9 this morning. … Continue reading →

Most towns have people who live on the edge. They are poor, or have peculiar (to other people) ideas about how the world works, or are hermits, or don’t like most people, or, well, who knows. They’re just seen as … Continue reading →

This one grew out of an image I found on Dreamstime. The picture of the puppet’s eye caught my attention and I sat down about noon today and started typing. I let whatever was in my brain come out on … Continue reading →

This week’s story began with an article by Andrew Marantz in the current Harper’s which details the imminent demise of Tuvalu, an ultra low-altitude island nation in the Pacific that is slowly being drowned by rising sea levels. I read … Continue reading →

The good folks at Green Snake Publishing just released my novel The Coma Monologues. I’m very fond of this book. In it, a man, Gary Hawken, gets smacked by a truck and falls into a coma. His doctor says he … Continue reading →

The title of this one came first. I thought it up as I was falling asleep Saturday night. I liked the sound of it and how it evoked an image of caustic dreams. Got up Sunday morning and just plunged … Continue reading →

Got up about 7 and spent the morning with Kim before she went to Portland for a workshop for the day. After she left I muddled around with some ideas, but nothing much was coming to me. I had no … Continue reading →

This is a catch-up post on my challenge to myself. A few weeks ago I decided I would write and publish a short story a week for a year. I began on 9 October 2011 with the 3700 word short … Continue reading →

I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before that often the best way to learn to do something is to do it, even before you know how. That’s the way I learned to write poetry. I wrote a poem a … Continue reading →

The Red Market looks at the global market in human tissue. Carney uncovers a class system in which the products of poor human bodies migrate to the bodies of rich humans. From a section of the book in which he … Continue reading →

Ekaterina Sedia is a terrific writer and an accomplished editor and anthologist. She’s just published her anthology Bewere the Night: Tales of Shapeshifters and Werecreatures, which is brimming with marvelous stories about werewolves and suchlike creatures. It even includes one … Continue reading →

I just finished this book after reading nothing else for the past three or four days. It’s riveting and spellbinding, an epic story about an epic disease. Mukherjee is an oncologist himself and his inside knowledge, not to mention his … Continue reading →

I was putting together a dish for a potluck, but I was away from my home library, and the book with the recipe for the potato salad I wanted, Recipes For a Small Planet, was not at any local bookstore, … Continue reading →

The internet has changed the definition of a magazine. For example, Daily Science Fiction is an online magazine that delivers its content to subscribers by e-mail. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, DSF sends out a short story to everyone … Continue reading →

I sometimes do story time for preschool children at the library where I work. Often the books I choose to read leave the kids distinctly underwhelmed. I’m always on the look out for good stories that don’t bore them to … Continue reading →

I’ve jumped into the e-book revolution. Click on the stories tab at the top of the page and take a look at my first e-book short story. More coming soon.

Breaking Waves, a benefit anthology to help people affected by the recent oil gusher disaster in the Gulf, has just been released. Official press release here: Book View Café Publishes Benefit Anthology for Gulf Relief Book View Café has launched … Continue reading →

FictionDaily posts links to three stories every day from around the web. Today they’re featuring my recent tale “28 Ways to Look at Illness.“

Most of us at some point have to contend with failures in our health. It’s not a pleasant subject to contemplate, but unpleasant subjects are often doorways to literature. A while ago I explored the subject off illness and how … Continue reading →

qarrtsiluni is a nifty little online magazine which has been very friendly to my work. They’ve published three of my pieces so far. The latest, which went live today, is “Moleskin,” part of the current theme, New Classics, which asked … Continue reading →