Celebrate with me! More Than Electric Sheep is now online. In May 2023, Uncharted Magazine announced their AI Flash Challenge. The rules of the contest were straightforward. Write a story in any genre about how we interact with AIs. Stories could not exceed 1000 words and had to be submitted within a one week deadline. You read that right—one week. AIs are sort of my thing. I’d been brainstorming a novel-length work about AIs, and premises and characters were already compiling in my cranium. All I had to do was load them into a story and execute. The bits and bytes of the rough draft assembled ..read more

Between acting, podcasting, and photography, I have know idea how Amy Amantea has time to put together her weekly Access Radio show, which broadcasts on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio. Each week, Access Radio features an hour-long interview with disabled persons working in the creative arts. When Amy heard that my flash fiction piece, More Than Electric Sheep, won the Uncharted Magazine AI Flash Challenge contest, she invited me to be her guest on an upcoming broadcast, read my winning story, and chat about writing as a blind author. Considering I have zero experience being interviewed, I don’t think ..read more

I’ve been consuming short story podcasts by the dozens, and that has cut into my novel-reading time. I’m nowhere near the three or four a month I’ve managed in the past. Here’s sixteen, still not too shabby for nine months. The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, 2012. The Earth’s rotation slows, and Julia’s life changes in many ways. A beautifully written debut novel. Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn, 2017. In this post-apocalyptic world, you have to prove you’re responsible and capable before you have a baby. Can society rebuild, or will storms, greed, and murder reign? Winner of the Phili ..read more

As a kid growing up on Asimov, Bradbury, Burroughs, Clarke, and Verne, somehow James Graham (J.G.) Ballard flew under my radar. Ballard would probably appreciate that analogy. His work frequently highlights civilization’s dependence on dysfunctional technology. But when web searches for climate fiction repeatedly turned up The Drowned World, I could no longer ignore this dystopian master. Title: Concrete Island Author: J.G. Ballard Published: 1974 For my first taste of Ballard, I chose Concrete Island. An accident lands Robert Maitland in an island formed by the intersection of multiple hi ..read more

Image credit: From the Mark Talbot-Butler collection on pota.goatley.com. The sun sags in its low October arc, eclipsed now and then by the Douglas Firs that line the rural two-lane highway in Washington’s Snohomish Valley. Our destination: Bob’s Corn, a working farm that annually transforms into a fall-themed amusement park. Hundreds of cars park haphazardly in a gravel lot. When I open the car door, the dizzying aromas of autumn’s harvest tease my senses. Corn and hay, apples and pumpkins, hot cider rich as syrup. In this ultra-safe era of face masks and helicopter parents, it’s refreshing t ..read more

Books are like windows. Open a book and breathe in the fresh air, or close a book and suffocate. Here’s what I’ve been breathing lately. Climate Fiction has been calling me, enough to read the gargantuan Overstory—three times the length of most books I read, and well worth it. Along with that, I recently read a healthy serving of Becky Chambers—yes, because she wins awards, but also because my daughter recommended her. The Calculating Stars was a pick for my neighborhood book club (more on that in a separate post). One of these things is not like the others, and it’s the Led Zeppelin biography ..read more

Fresh off the North Pole workshop assembly line: Thirteen Christmas-themed sci fi flash fiction stories, just in time to stuff the stockings of the sci fi fan in your life. The reindeer scientists at Blitzen Genetics Laboratory have discovered why noses turn red, and they present their research in my very short story, Mutations of the RUDL gene in rangifer tarandus: Analysis and methods, by Blitzen et al. Every flash fiction story in Joy to the Worlds is limited to 1000 words. Inspired by this challenging format, the contributors crafted concise and creative tales that will leave you entertain ..read more

The three end-of-year holidays I remember from my youth—Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—are upon us in the usual frenzied blur. But early writing deadlines have added a unique twist to this festive season. Finish my Halloween story by June? Are you kidding? How can anyone visualize a trick-or-treat mass-murder scene while spring flowers are in bloom? And then there’s Christmas, which comes in July for writers, only to reappear as a weird echo five months later. Halloween stories intimidate me, perhaps because so many excellent tales already exist. Thanksgiving seems like untilled soil i ..read more

A few miles north of Alliance Nebraska, an occasional silo sprouts from the quilt of corn and soybean fields. It seems plausible that we might drive for hours and see nothing else. Maybe Carhenge doesn’t really exist. It’s urban legend, a consensual hallucination with no basis in reality. Then, there it is, writhing within the wavy mirage of blacktop heat—a scale replica of Stonehenge rendered in vintage automobiles. We park beside five Harleys and an RV. Dragonflies and July heat surround us as we cross the dusty gravel to the gift shop. We pick t-shirts, and for another dollar, a map that sh ..read more

I had a note to get this out by end of January, but what’s the point of a deadline if I meet it? Only by my being three months late does my deadline truly attain fulfillment. Break the deadline, be the deadline. It’s not like I didn’t have an excuse. Let’s see. Mother-in-law passed away. Prostate surgery (ouch!). A wildfire in Boulder County. Dee and I moved. Father-in-law passed away—yep, just two months after his wife. And how could I forget? Dee fell and broke her kneecap. As I write, she is still recovering in a brace. It’s been a busload of misfortune. Correspondingly, this spring update ..read more