Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to tell stories. I started out writing fiction, and it's still my favorite type of writing. I've posted here synopses of some of my old works and current works-in-progress. If you ask nicely, I might e-mail you a copy in exchange for some constructive feedback.
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| Novels | |
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I first started jotting down notes for Bones of the Angel in 1998, and I finally sat down to write it in earnest as a part of National Novel Writing Month in 2002. Four years later I wrapped it up. Basic premise: when what appears to be the fossilized skeleton of an angel is unearthed in a small town, three young locals find themselves lured into a bizarre search for the truth. (And yes, I know a similar plot was done on The Simpsons, which I found out about after I started working on the book.) By turns funny, sad, scary and bizarre, Bones of the Angel is one part The X-Files and one part The Da Vinci Code, like a Hollywood action film smushed together with an art house flick. I'm now shopping around for an agent and a publisher.
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The Kingdom is the story of two brothers living on the West Coast. After the kid brother is duped into helping a gang break into a museum in Seattle, he flees the law and heads north to Seattle to hide with his brother, and the gang (and the people that put the gang up to it) follow him. The result is a part-Lynchian, part-Pynchonian circus. |
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NeverJack NeverJack was one of those projects that I wrote in 48 hours, and then obsessed over it for half a decade. NeverJack is the story of Jack Walker, a young man from the real world who finds himself chasing after a girl in the land where the stories come from. A common plot idea, but this one had the jokes coming fast and furious. For the curious, yes, Bones of the Angel is a kinda-sorta-not-really sequel to NeverJack.
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Savage Technology Typical teenage-author, sci-fi first novel. Intended to be one in a series about a team of post-apocalyptic cyber-cops who help rebuild the world, Savage Technology followed the flying cop and the Wolverine-ripoff cop to South America, where they set about bringing order to a domed city being terrorized by monsters in the jungle that may or may not once have been human. Not bad for an 18-year-old, but not Hemingway by a long shot.
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| Short stories and novellas | |
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Auld Lang Syne The story of two old friends (as in elderly) who finally hook up over dinner on New Year's Eve. More of a dialogue study than anything else, but a good example of the kind of sweet, sad stories I like to tell when I'm not telling crazy sci-fi ones.
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Hammers The story of what happens when the ghost of Albert Einstein joins the earth-wandering cranky god Thor on a park bench in London, and the two of them begin a pissing contest. My friend William R. Coughlan recently adapted it into a screenplay, and we're talking about how to get it made.
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The Love of the Library This was a short story I wrote for Valentine's Day about a romance author and the secret way that books procreate. I slipped it into Inkblots in the spring of 2001.
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Fear Soup The story of a college girl who finds herself subjected to visions of how anything around her could kill her, and how she overcomes them. The premise sounds strange, but I actually went through this when I was in high school. It sucked, believe me.
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The Slow Sweet Coda of Walter Kincaid The Slow Sweet Coda of Walter Kincaid tells the story of two old men who try and bury the axe between them after the woman that divided them passes away. Of course, they try to kill each other.
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Green Yet another ideal candidate for an episode of The Twilight Zone, this is the story of two doctors who believe that their God-given mission is to find an organic replacement for synthetic limbs. When one of them stumbles across the a chameleon-like plant in the mountains, chaos ensues. Again, they of course try to kill each other.
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The Taste of Song Creepy but oddly touching, The Taste of Song follows the youngest son in a family of musicians that eat songbirds alive in order to channel their music. Sort of a story of the current generation being uncomfortable with 'old world' traditions, but with some really disturbing imagery.
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Dead Les A very short story about a boy whose family tries to involve his comatose uncle in Christmas. Weirdness ensues.
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Luna Another of the slow, sad variety, Luna is the story of an old man who is baptized in a bar right before he shuffles off to die alone. Primarily a character sketch, and me getting a feeling for the melancholy tone.
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The Clockmaker A warning to any woman who forces her husband to go and find a replacement alarm clock at 3 o'clock in the morning. This one was published in an APA called Gothik that I was involved with back in high school.
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The Lego God I loved playing with Legos when I was a kid. This was an extremely short story about a guy with a megalomaniacal streak who locks himself in his apartment, builds an entire world out of Legos and then spends his time flipping the light switch on and off to make their days go by. I should mention I was reading a lot of Neil Gaiman at this point. Oh, and what happened between 1993 and 1995? Lots of little things. I founded Inkblots, for starters, wrote a bunch of bad poetry, and attended several creative writing summer camps. My writing from those days exists, but I haven't found it in my archives yet. I'm not sure what all's in there.
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The Sleeping Sphinx Gang: World Tour The last in the four-part Sleeping Sphinx series, written for the Young Authors' Conference in 8th grade. This was the only Young Authors' story that my English teacher at the time, Mr. Brenner, had ever awarded a perfect score. I'm still proud of that. Oh, the story? The same three kids, Mastermind, Jammer and Jinx, have to go around the world to collect some ancient items or something in order to save their parents from the space pirates the kids had ticked off in the previous story. Again, it was one of two winners from my class, and was published as my school's entry in the local anthology. Some of my friends still haven't forgiven me for monopolizing that contest every year. No joke.
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Spaced Out Continuing in the "Out" vein, this third book in the Sleeping Sphinx series found the three kids exploring outer space in Mastermind's makeshift spaceship and falling into the clutches of the dread space pirates. Oh, yes, it was thrilling. Again, it was one of two winners from my class, and was published as my school's entry in the local anthology. By this time, the people responsible for retyping the stories for the local anthology were starting to hate me: while most kids turned in 16, 20, or 30 pages, I was turning in 75-page monstrosities set in single-spaced 10-point font. I was taking this contest seriously.
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Time Out Well, the last one worked, so why not try it again? I revisited the three kids in a longer story the next year, this time dealing with their adventures when the Mastermind invented a time machine. Pretty stock story in retrospect, but not bad for a 13-year-old. Again, I was one of the winners, and the story was published in the local anthology. By this time, I was starting to get the sense that this was something I really, really wanted to do.
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The Mystery of the Sleeping Sphinx I grew up reading The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators, so when I really got serious about my writing in 1989 for the Ohio Young Author's Competition, I followed a similar formula. Three friends, going by the codenames Mastermind, Jammer and Jinx, discovered a giant cavern beneath Mastermind's house, and inside of it was an ancient stone sphinx. When they woke it up, the kids were forced to prove that the human race deserved to survive by passing three tests. Very Indiana Jones, but it was one of two winners from my class and was published as my school's entry in the local anthology.
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Pre-1989
I wrote a lot when I was a kid, primarily dealing with ghosts, monsters, high technology and the adventures of the kids who found them. These were stories with titles like The Glass Bulldog Mystery and The Roulette Wheel of Doom, et cetera, and were usually only a couple of pages long. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to go into them here. I think the synopses above are embarassing enough, don't you?
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