Welcome!

This is the corner booth. You know, the best seat in any diner? The place where you can sit and people watch. Here you can't so much watch real people -- though we're considering eventually adding a forum where -- hopefully -- you'll be able to, as you can watch whatever is going on in my mind and life at the time.

First of all, no corner booth is complete without a blue place special and at Sarah's Diner, those are really special -- they're free!  For your reading pleasure, check out my Blue Plate Specials, where I periodically post free stuff.  This is not always on a schedule, so bear with me.  Please respect my copyright and don't change or otherwise disturb the content of my stories.  However, they're DRM free and you can share either the stories or the links with friends for THEIR reading pleasure.

Now that you've had a first taste -- 

These are random excerpts of the stories I'm currently working on (these will change as what I'm working on changes.)  Notice these are usually very small because it's on-spec work, novels, short stories or just the beginning of something.  Some of them will become stories or novels, some of them won't.  Some of them already are, but not sold yet.  Consider them the random strangers on the tables next to yours.  Later, if everything works out, you'll get to know some of them far more intimately

Snippet One:

His Duty Formed Him; Like God the World
                                                                   Fernando Pessoa

    His captors dragged and pulled him past the ruined marble archway, the ropes on his wrists too tight, the ropes on his ankles loosened only enough to allow him the small steps which he must take to avoid falling.  They'd stolen his sword.  His blond hair was matted with blood.  He didn't know whose. 
    Three of them held him on either side, their supernatural strength making it impossible for him to escape.
    Still, he struggled.  His fevered mind knew only that he must break free from the hands like vise grips on his arms.  He must defeat the bone-bruising grasp of fingers on his waist.  
    Pulled into the shadows of the defiled church – its cross broken, its holy statues scribbled with obscenities, painted with leers and fangs -- he twisted, suddenly.  The hands tightened on him, frantic, bruising.  He managed to sink his teeth into one of the implacable fingers holding his arm.

Snippet Two:

But grandma was right in the end.  She made sure of it.  Which is why I woke that November morning, with thick fog writhing outside my windows and grandma standing at the foot of my bed, arms crossed, looking sternly at me.
    She wore what she normally wore – a denim skirt, a white blouse, and a look of grim determination.  Her hair was pinned up on the top of her head, and she had her ax in her hand.  “Now, Deirdre,” she said.  “I don’t have time for your foolishness.  It’s time you get up out of that bed and get dressed, because you have work to do.”
    “But grandma,” I said.  Thoughts swirled through my head, like how she’d managed to find me in Denver, when she’d never even had this address.
    “There will be no buts,” she said.  She leaned the ax against the foot of my tenth-hand white bed.  “You will need this.  I can’t help you now.  There’s only so much I can do.”
    “But–” I said. She was gone before I could tell her that she was dead.  Had been dead for five years now. 
    At any rate it wouldn’t have done me any good to remind her.  Grandma would just ask me what that had to say to anything.
    It wasn’t till I’d showered and dressed that I dared come back and look at the ax again.  I didn’t know if I was more scared that it wasn’t there, or that it was.
    I shouldn’t have been afraid.  It was there, right enough.  I took it up in my hands, feeling its heft.  Which is when the window broke.

Snippet Three:

The Old Revolution

    My parents used to tell me stories of Daice.  The fields by the farm, the gentle slope of the valley down to the river.
    In the mind of their Earth-born child who had never seen Daice, nor the old farm, and who knew of the colonization of Daice, its tragic decay and its glorious revolution only through the history books, the region lived in more vivid colors than my own neighborhood in Peace III.
    With the descriptions had come all they didn’t say.  When one talks of doing work by candlelight on a colony planet that was founded as a beacon of technology; when one speaks of scouring the up-turned earth in late fall looking for the gleanings of the Lord’s harvest; when one talks of bare feet on the winter snow, it’s not necessary to say that the noblemen in their silks and velvets were doing something wrong.  The word oppression need never be uttered.  For one I don’t think either of my parents knew the word in Glaish.
    I was nine when news of the revolution in Daice filled every hollo tank on Earth.  My father bought a bottle of wine and he and my mother toasted the success of the revolutionaries over dinner.
    So how did I feel about meeting His Serenity, the rightful heir to the throne of Daice – disgraced, disguised, in exile?  How did I feel about investigating him, setting him up to commit a crime for which he would be arrested and executed?

Next, if you're of a mind to see me sometime this year, this is where I'm going to be:

Liberty Con -- July 9-10

NASFIC - August  5-8

World Fantasy Con- October 28-31