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A few of these stories have been published (and paid for - always be paid, number one rule of professional writing), but several others here have not. Why do I put publicly unpublished stories up here? For several reasons: they may not be suitable for current publications, or they may be background stories to longer works I'm developing, or they are just too strange to work in any magazine I know of.

Writers write to be read, though, and I could not stand the thought of these children of my brain simply languishing on hard drives and backups. So they are presented here for your amusement, warts and all.

Fantasy

Child of Glass (published in the now-defunct Nocturnal Ooze in 2006) - Child of Glass may be the oddest story I've ever written. Based on multiple fairy tales including The Pied Piper and Hansel and Gretel, and inspired by nanotechnology, this offbeat zombie story is told in the second person, placing you, the reader, in the uncomfortable head of the main character..

Granzie - This little story about a gnome's sacrifice for the young paladin he served came to me almost as a fever dream; I wrote it in one sitting over about an hour and a half, revised it once. It is part of my world of Llysse.

Sacrifice (published in 1998 in Anotherealm's inaugural issue under my maiden name) was one of my first publications.

Hearts Desire - For some reason, Elvis, King Arthur, and motorcycles got tangled in my brain. This is what came out - a question about what is truly important in the world. What is our Grail?

Science Fiction

Forget-Me-Not (published in 2005 in the now-defunct AlienSkin Magazine)

The Dead - This story took me, oh, about six years to write. I could not figure out what it was or where it was going. The core theme, how alien widely-separated generations are to one another, was the first inspiration, followed by questions I had about love in old age, genetic research, and what the combination of libertine living and dramatic scientific advancement might do to the world, whether it would create a world in which our American pioneer values were no longer of worth. This is what finally came out. I may expand it into a novel someday.

Supernatural

Hat-Re: Reborn - Hat-Re, a smartalecky rogue of an ancient Egyptian, is one of my favorite characters and arguably the most unique. This is where he came from. Literally.

Stilling the Dead - Helen Highwater shares Hat-Re's world, though they have not crossed paths. Yet. This story came from questions I had about how the restless spirit of a young woman would handle parenting the children she left behind. The answers were, to say the least, uncomfortable.

Excerpt: Skinwalkers - We know what human skinwalkers are - people who don the skin of animals to walk in their forms, sometimes preying on other humans. What happens, though, when wolves don the skins of humans? This novel in progress, set in Alaska in the world of Hat-Re, follows the story of Sara Mack, a Marine who finds out she can't really go home again.

Historical

Excerpt: Four Women of Salem - The causes of the Salem Witch Trials were complex, hard even for today's historians to tease apart. This work, four chronologically-overlapping books told from the points of view of four different women in Salem, tries to explain why - and in the process demonstrates that the Salem Witch Trials were critically important to the development of today's America.