My college degree is in art, yet I am also an accomplished and prolific writer. My novels often are expressions of my imagination containing images beyond painting. Since I type in a hunt-and-peck manner, writing as much as I have plus accompanying materials has taken extra time…but it has been my joy.
The worlds, characters, and experiences I have experimented with come to life through my novels. I design my books to be cinematic, easily digestible, appealing to all ages. Ideally, I fill them with new ideas found nowhere else in literature or movies.
If you approach my science fiction looking for hard science, you will likely be disappointed. In my stories, I aim at fun. Science class, and especially math class, put me to sleep when I was young. I am not proud of that, but I mention it to illustrate a point: sci-fi is FICTION. If you want science lessons, read a magazine like National Geographic, Scientific American, or Popular Mechanics. Suppose an invention used by one of my characters seems impossibly high tech. In that case, it might be because it fits within parameters that are necessary to carry the story forward excitingly and interestingly.
In terms of plot, some books are more complicated than others. For example, The First Harmony is a bit tricky because it has flashbacks and flash-forwards, several main characters that the omniscient storyteller follows, and many high-concept sci-fi/fantasy scenarios.
The plots of other stories are more linear. The Telesynthetic Man only follows what the main character, Jeremy Callahan, would know. The first-person story unfolds progressively.
The First Harmony
The First Harmony is a surrealistic tale of war into peace. The ending of the story brings all the seemingly diverse elements to a powerful conclusion. I hope that the real world will become more idyllic, and readers won’t buy true crime novels or other “true-to-life” dramas with overt violence. I believe in choosing to keep any violence in entertainment distant. The First Harmony is about war, but there is a REASON for that. In the end, it is about PEACE.
The Bladeborn Saga
Bladeborn is a series where the hero is often pushed to his limits, arising victorious time and again. Compared to other men in his solar reach, his enormous power is explained in the story’s context and is a significant plot point. Indubitably, the general idea behind the Bladeborn Saga is one man: a superhero with a sword (in a fantasy setting of my device).
Recently I have begun the process of re-writing and updating the Bladeborn Saga. Bladeborn Uprising is the product, the first one-third of the first Bladeborn book. The is more to come. I plan to re-write the entire 1500-page story and spread it out over seven novels.
By the second and third Bladeborn novels, his actions affect each of the planets he visits and places known as the freezing Hells and the Abyss. The extraordinary, adventurous life Bladeborn leads is the only possible way for such a super-being to exist. If I had to sum the series up, I would describe it as a series of triumphs against increasingly impossible (and often, otherworldly) odds.
The Telesynthetic Series
The Telesynthetic Man is the first part of a two-book science fiction series. It concerns Jeremy Callahan, who is lost in a future society, where he is excluded from contributing anything of value. Then, an alien invasion threatens the world, and Jeremy is the only one who can stop it.
Yet, its interest is not so much in the extraterrestrials or the “alienation” he feels on Earth. The key is how the main character’s immediate family never stops believing him and how they work together to save the world from what threatens it.
The Telesynthetic War, published in November 2016, is a science-fiction story about the real-life political disaster taking place in the United States. In the novel, the president’s terrible decisions are often directly tied to the main character. Some people only vote and complain about the government. I wrote a speculative science fiction novel to express some of my frustration about it.
Orphans of the Nexus
Orphans of the Nexus is about two strong female protagonists. I didn’t want all my main characters in my novels to be male, and in my life, I have found many good examples of feminine otherworldliness and beauty.
The novel takes place on Earth and near a grouping of far-off planets where a domineering overlord is poised to seize ultimate power.
Sec-39
I revisited the sense of injustice I felt in current America by writing Sec-39. The story concerns a seated president using dirty tricks to continue his dominance over the United States. I wrote the book in three weeks, taking clues from the headlines. It predicts the rioting that occurred in April of 2020 and espouses the idea that one driven man can change the world, even if he is a simple “nobody.”
All-night Cafe
Not long after graduating from Seattle University, I moved to Denver, Colorado. It was there I began writing poems for pleasure. Since I did theatre for many years, I was well-suited for the performance of poetry.
My initial inspiration for writing and performing poetry came from watching others at open readings in Denver, particularly at a fantastic nightclub called The Mercury Café. After seeing my first few “Open Readings,” I said to myself, “…I can do that.”I would spend the week composing poems, and at the open microphone, I read liberal-minded protests, humorous nonsense observations, and some more edgy stuff. These experiments often rhymed, although they had only a nod to the meter.
I worked in an “automatic writing” way, not knowing what would happen on a blank sheet of paper, and the exciting conclusions were more accidental than planned. I still often write poetry using that system.
I was a fixture at the Friday Night open poetry reading at the Mercury Café nearly every Friday for nine years. I made a media connection with a radio call-in show host, advertising our Friday Night Reading on his show as an aside to our conversations. I got the Friday Night Poetry reading a featurette on a local TV News Station in Denver through that connection.
There were several art openings that I had in the 1990s at galleries and coffeehouses. They were often paired with poetry readings where 30 or more of the local poets read.
I have continued to enjoy composing poetry since the 1990s. Thus, All-Night Café was published to collect my updated poems as well as my more recent poetry.