DELIVERY is a short short story that came to me when Amazon announced predictive placement for orders and when I took a look at what one could do with big data and the commercial impulse to serve.
Appears in Analog Science Fiction/Fact, December 2015, Created December 1, 2013, Sold July 1, 2014, 900 words.
WRITING TOOLS is an article that recapitulates what I’ve been saying on my blog and at various conventions about software that make creation, composition, and publication of drafts easier on the writer’s brain. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_92
Appears in Clarkesworld, May 2014, Sold April 29, 2014, 1,550 words
CONQUEST is a brief humor piece that I had to write quickly so I’d have something to read to my writers’ group. It is quite a departure from the rather dismal stuff I’ve been writing recently.
Appears in Analog Science Fiction/Fact, November 2014, Created October 2013, Sold January 2014, Words 2,500.
FORGIVENESS started as an SF homage to Hemingway so I could play with his style, but then I remembered a story I wrote about Kosovo and unremembered guilt which brought in the Nazi hunters, jealousy, rivalry, etc. This went through five drafts to submittal, three editorial demands to make it mean something, and a final polish on the penultimate and final scenes. I never would have written it this well if it hadn’t been for Analog’s editor – Trevor Quachri.
Appears in Analog Science Fiction/Fact, June 2014, Created February 2012, Sold May 2013, Words 5,700
FROM THE TREASURER describes the financial structure of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA.) It was written on request to make clear some of the inner workings of the organization.
Appears in The Bulletin, Winter issue, 2014, 1,000 words, Four graphs.
TOMMY AND THE BEAST was an alternative dog story I thought of while writing TRUE FRIENDS. I read this at Ravencon in 2013 and could barely make it through as I was crying so hard about every damn dog I had ever had and what it felt like as each passed. This is the first story I have ever written that comes close emotionally to any one written by Brian Plante.
Appears in Daily Science Fiction, December 20, 2013, Created April 2013, Sold July 2013, Words 4,800.
TRUE FRIENDS was written when I was asked to write a “dog story” for the next Defending the Future anthology titled (surprisingly enough) Dogs of War. It is set in the same Shardie universe as my earlier stories in this series, but later in the historic chronology, after humanity starts to recover lost ground. The ending is deliberately ambiguous.
Appears in Dogs of War, September 2013 Created April 2013 Sold June 2013 Words 5,000.
DECELERATION grew out of a chance conversation about the eternal conflict of how the immediate more ofter trumps the important in everyday life and especially in the political arena where the next election is of greater concern than the public’s well-being. I’d just finished attending Mike Brotherton’s LaunchPad and was full of astronomic time scales, blue shifts, and periodicity – all to make a cogent point.
Appears in Analog Science Fiction/Fact November 2013 Created November 2011 Sold March 2013 Words 3,800
PILGRIM was written on request for a far-far-future tale. I wanted to give the reader a sense that things have changed drastically, beyond imagination, yet keep it relevant to the modern reader. One of the more difficult themes was that of polytaxatic mankind; one where the variability of the human species has increased exponentially, as has science and exploitation of the Earth. At the same time I wanted to make a point about what will probably never change.
Appears in Fantastic Future 13 date May 2013 Created October 2012 Sold November 2012 Words 7,200
TAXES AND THE SHORT STORY WRITER is a short article advising new writers of how to report their writing income to the IRS and highlights some pitfalls to be avoided.
Appears in the SFWA Bulletin #201 Created December 2012 Sold January 2013 Words 2,258
CREP d’ETOILE was an expansion of a scene from a draft novel I had critiqued at Walter John Williams Rio Hondo writers gathering, which seemed to garner considerable interest, particularly about how food could be produced on a starship. This idea languished until I came across an article on how some Japanese researchers were extracting proteins from … well, crap. The artificial wine was just me, being nasty about pretentious wine snobs.
Appears in Analog, date July/August Created September 2012 Sold January 2013 Words 6,600
HARD CHOICES is another chapter from humanity’s war with the unrelenting and deadly Shardies. This story takes place chronologically earlier than SCOUT and deals with the eternal conflict between ideals and pragmatism, about loyalty to a cause, and the possible consequences of staying morally strong.
Appears in the BEST LAID PLANS anthology (Dark Quest Books) Created November 2011 Sold April 2012 Words 5,200.
WHAT DO DUES DO? was a short two page article (with charts!) explaining SFWA’s income sources and how those funds were expended in the preceding year.
Appeared in the SFWA Bulletin #200 Created December 2012 Sold December 2012 Words 1,264