Fiction
Stories about people under pressure.
Strange systems, dangerous attention, impossible choices, and people trying to protect each other anyway.
I write horror, science fiction, fantasy, speculative stories, and personal/literary work like Three Gems, where memory and marriage carry the pressure instead of monsters. The real story is often what people choose when the rules stop helping, when attention becomes dangerous, or when protecting someone costs more than expected.
My Writing Studio is organized like an engineering workspace because that is apparently what happens when a systems person writes fiction: drafts, journals, continuity ledgers, revision passes, reader-response checks, and cold editor evaluations. It sounds serious because it is. It stays fun because discovery still gets to surprise me.
Vapor Trails A completed/submission-ready short story built around perception, attention, signal, and the danger of trying to understand the wrong thing too clearly.
The Hollow Wind A completed/submission-ready story about young people, impossible aftermath, and the horror that remains after the obvious danger passes.
The Bride-Casket of Udug-Hul A newly married man opens a cursed wedding gift from his bitter brother and must choose between passing the horror on or letting love become a sacrifice.
Three Gems An in-flight personal-fiction project about memory, marriage, earned knowledge, and little gems of wisdom that become larger only after a life has tested them.
Corporate America An in-flight workplace horror story about enterprise residue, missing people, and the terrible things hidden behind polished process.
Night Drop An in-flight experiment about a mundane property system turning predatory, because sometimes the paperwork is the haunted part.
Teaser Excerpt
The Bride-Casket of Udug-Hul
"The whispering stopped so completely that he understood, too late, that it had been whispering all along. Terry did not move.
The little chest sat open on the towel, lined with old black-red velvet. A darkened clay tablet lay inside. Beside it was something pale and curled. His mind tried to make it anything else: wax, root, carved bone, some antique-shop joke. Then the thing rolled against the velvet.
It had a fingernail."
Writing Workshop
I also build the tools around the work. The tools do not replace the author. They give me better mirrors, colder reads, cleaner records, and fewer opportunities to forget what I already learned the hard way.
story-revision-workflow A disciplined revision path for continuity ledgers, journals, pacing, pressure, cleanup, and release-candidate prep.
story-editor-eval A cold acquisitions-editor style pressure test for polished drafts, submission readiness, revision burden, market fit, and the occasional necessary punch in the nose.
story-reader A reader-response tool for simulated reader-response lenses, beta-reader style impressions, audience friction, and likely places where different readers lean in or pull back.
I share tastes and project notes here, not full unpublished manuscripts. The internet is useful. It is not a trustworthy filing cabinet.