Fiction

 

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Small stories, essays, assignments, a drawer full of unfinished manuscripts. I’ve written many, many D&D backgrounds and worldbuilding snippets and handouts for the homebrew campaign I ran, plus one book-sized travelogue, summarizing 9 years of adventures.

While doing that game-related writing is fun, I took my next step in 2022, during the Clarion West summer Write-a-Thon, and participated in their flash fiction groups, writing a new flash story each week, six weeks long. I left behind the constraints of a pre-existing world and the needs of a particular gaming group, which has allowed me to explore themes and styles I otherwise had no place for. I also met some incredibly cool fellow writers, and learned A Lot from their feedback. As a result, my first story, “We are nowhere near there yet,” was published in Nature in 2023.

I enjoy exploring weird places and perspectives in my fiction, things that creep me out, things that make me laugh, or both at the same time. And hopefully, that will shed a new light on the things we believe to be familiar.

If you have questions, inquiries, or want to chat about writing, shoot me a message.

 

 

Forthcoming in “This Way Lies Madness”, a horror anthology edited by Lee Murray and Dave Jeffery from Flame Tree Press. More info from the publisher here.

 

‘We are nowhere near there yet’ is my debut piece of science fiction, published in Nature Futures. At 950 words, it is a wild ride, featuring an instructor and a student on a trip through outer space.

Find it at Nature:  https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00578-0, or here.

 
In 2021, when much of life was suspended due to COVID-19, I started writing out the notes I had taken during 9 years of a D&D campaign, which turned into a 120k word travelogue, written from the viewpoint of my character Sel.
Sel lives in the fictional world of Urtur: a homebrew D&D setting by my friend Jasper. He owns one of three copies in existence.

I love writing short fiction because of the amount of experimentation one can do with it, and I aim to see more of my short fiction out into the world (when, you know, I can get myself to actually submit it to places). 

Some stories, though, are just longer than that, and I decided to learn the hard way, how much one can play around with weird ideas and forms, and still have a coherent story. So let’s see if I can make that Space Horror meets a Game of Telephone work.