Look and Listen

Biography

My first novel, a sci-fi edged thriller, "The Infinite Instant", is now available from Amazon in print and from Fictionwise as an ebook. It won the 2009 EPPIE Award for Best Science Fiction in March. I'm at work on its sequel, "The Nihilistic Mirror". -------- I have just completed a new dark far-future science fiction, "Galen the Deathless", which is the novel-length extrapolation of a short story I wrote years ago (which first appeared in Bewildering Stories). At present, I am looking for a publisher for it. The sequel to it, "Galen the (Demon) King", is still in the scratch-and-think stage, but I'll be on it in earnest as soon as the first in the series finds a home. -------- I also regularly write book reviews. See www.bewilderingstories.com or on www.goodreads.com. ------- And the rest? I'm single, live in a cold corner of NE Washington State, and spent about 15 years in the IT/Telecomm business before I made the mistake of working for Lucent Technologies. Since then I've been a librarian. I miss my mother, who passed away from cancer after a long struggle last year, more than I can say. She is with God, but I am not consoled.

Inspiration

As a writer, I am inspired by too many authors to name. In the speculative fiction genre, Gene Wolfe, John C. Wright, Neal Asher and Charles Stross are some of the newer writers I admire. And I love the great oldies: A. E. van Vogt, Roger Zelazny, Jacqueline Lictenberg, and Andre Norton, among others. J. G. Ballard is one of the writers I credit for inspiring me with the sheer strangeness of his The Crystal World masterwork. --------- Poe, Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and William Hope Hodgeson are favorites in the horror genre. And who can match Isaac Bashevis Singer and Kafka for a chilling turn of phrase? ----------- I read a lot of mysteries and espionage stories. Of course I've read all the greats, John D. MacDonald's Travis Mcgee and Adam Hall's Quiller series being my two favorites. Graham Greene is another. More recently, I devoured Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge series with great pleasure, shook my head over the over-the-top pleasure of John Burdett's Bangkok series, and just finished Tarquin Hall's mystery novel with his charming Indian detective. ------------- I plan to write a mystery novel (set in Guatemala!) myself, and have just begun reading background material for it. Latin American magic realism and Mayan mythology are just too delicious to resist. I don't intend this to be your ordinary mystery. (What fun it is to plan new books!)---------------- I won't ever write travelogues myself, but am an avid reader of them, with Paul Theroux, Harry Franck, H. V. Morton, and the amusing J. Maarten Troost among the many authors crowding the shelves of my permanent library. I also read a lot of eyewitness history books (such as Bernal Diaz's fascinating eyewitness account of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico). And what I'd call modern sociopolitical works, such as Robert Kaplan's.