To make a long story short, video games have been an integral, defining aspect of my life for over two decades. They influenced my writing habits, my reading habits, and, detrimentally, my academic habits. These days I play a lot fewer video games, but read a great deal more, and have been writing—like every writer says—what I want to be writing. What I want to see on bookshelves. So if any of the quirky fiction you find here jives with you you have video games to thank at least partly so, because their influence on my writing is hard-coded, a new breed of influence just like films have been to other writers, and hopefully their influence brings noticeable breath of fresh air to my speculative fiction. I don’t much care for genre and subgenre names—they just an easy way for people to dismiss something out of hand without more critical thought—but if I had to align myself with another group of writers, it be the New Weird (Richard K. Morgan, China Mieville, Iain M. Banks, and all the other authors actively seeking to turn our beloved genres on their head and maybe see what happens when they make a head on collision with seemingly disparate genres that by all rights ought to clash with fantasy/sci-fi).
What you’ll find here on my blog primarily are writing prompts—little exercises I assign myself on a regular basis to keep my writing sharp and to practice some specific aspect of writing prose, such as focusing on dialogue, writing an action scene, bringing a setting to life through words, or using an existing image to create a whole new story from it. Some of these little shorts will take place in the worlds my longer works will be set in. Excerpts and sometimes full short stories of my longer works may be posted here, too, along with works in progress and the like. But for the most part, the fiction you find here is just a taste, a little sampling—something written in haste and without proper revision and drafting, and as such raw. However, there’s something appealing I find about the raw, the uncooked, about anything that’s rough around the edges. I think we all do. It’s why most of us would be more inclined to take a trip on Serenity than the U.S.S. Enterprise. Of course, if you don’t mind the occasional hiccup and engine failure.
Selected Works
