Fiction

Info on all of my fiction, published and otherwise, gathered into one place!

Image of a face made up of bits

I now have two draft novels, which I’m trying to sell to publishers. The first is Ada’s Children, a post-post-apocalyptic novel involving a rogue AI bent on saving humanity from itself. The story is told in two interwoven timelines, near future and far future. The near-future timeline focuses on Carol, a climate emergency activist and soon-to-be-redundant professor of English. We watch through her eyes as both nature and society fall apart and an artificial intelligence  arises to solve everything. In the far future, humans have once again become hunter-gatherers. Yet some clues remain about the civilization that nearly destroyed the Earth, and an adventurous young couple sets out to discover who the Ancient Ones were and how they met their end. You can read more about it here.

My second draft novel is a satire on conspiracy theories and science denial titled Ship of Fools. It focuses mainly on the idea that Earth is not a globe but a flat disk, and also includes moon landing deniers, anti-vaxxers, Creationists, as well as a space mogul and Nazi-fighting philosopher-cowboys. You can read more about it here.

 

Daring and Decorum book coverMy first novel, Daring and Decorum: A Highwayman Novel, was published in 2017 by Supposed Crimes, a small publisher focusing on f/f romance. It’s a mashup of Jane Austen, Ellen Kushner, Alfred Noyes’ poem The Highwayman, and Robin Hood. I got the idea for it when I was listening to Loreena McKennitt’s wonderful musical rendition of The Highwayman and then the thought crossed my mind, “Hm, what if the highwayman were a woman?” More details available here, as well as a short excerpt featuring a trip to the theatre here. I’ve also been posting a series of pieces on the background material that went into the novel: the music, the swords and sword fighting styles, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Info on how to purchase is here.

Desert Trilogy: a self-published ebook of three short stories set in the California Desert. And it’s free right now (except on Amazon, for some reason)! Details here, blurbs for each story below. (Cover photo by Steve Berardi, used by permission.)

Chill Out: Is now the right time for Brad and Amy to have kids? Brad wants to start a family right away, but Amy wants to focus on her writing career. Will a drive in the desert help them settle the argument? Think of it as Jane Austen meets Mary Austin in the Twilight Zone.

Glass: Derek can’t understand why his two hiking companions don’t want him wearing his Google Glass. But alienating his friends isn’t the only danger of his obsession with Augmented Reality.

What I Did for Love: Dave is a journeyman carpenter. Now he needs to drill a hole in his girlfriend’s head. Does he have the nerve to finish the job?

Deirdre bookcover copyThe Song of Deirdre is my novelization (fanfiction) of the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim. If you like epic fantasy, dragons, and strong female characters, you might enjoy it. Plus, it’s free! The best place to start is with Chapter 1, or you can view the Table of Contents here. It’s also available for download to e-readers at An Archive of Our Own.

Of more recent origin, The Khajiit Murders is  an entirely original novella set in the same world, with many of the same characters. As Deirdre, now High Queen of Skyrim, contemplates the next steps for the newly independent realm, a series of random, brutal murders spreads across the land. The obvious clues point to one or more Khajiits, the cat-people of Elsweyr, but the signs Deirdre and her companions are following point in an entirely different direction. Can they prove the murders are a plot to frame the Khajiits before the unruly jarls commit an atrocity against innocents? You can read an excerpt and some background here or the whole thing over on FanFiction.

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