About my Writing
The Mojave Desert, 1990. Inside this tiny cave, miles from anywhere, I found this dusty typewriter, along with the empty jug, beer can, table, and chair. It was a strange, perfect scene. Exactly the kind of surrealism that I love to write about.
About my Collection
I write what I call "novels in miniature." These are novelettes built with the architecture and scope of novels. My collection explores partnerships under strain: love tested by truth, grief against survival, responsibility against desire. The speculative elements, when they appear, sharpen those human tensions.
Each piece is a standalone world. The setting are often ordinary: a backyard, a sailboat, a desert town. But each piece eventually tilts slightly into the surreal. Sometimes they hinge on an impossible idea, sometimes they are pushed off balance by nothing more than the unbearable weight of reality.
Most pieces in this collection are novelettes, between 7,500 and 17,000 words. A few are shorter, but all share the same scope that fits the happenings of a novel into a form you can read in an afternoon.
I've worked on these pieces for nearly three decades. Rather than publishing them individually as I completed them, I held them back and continued revising all seven simultaneously. My goal was to reach a consistent level of craft across the entire collection, so each piece would be as strong as the others, functioning together as a cohesive whole.
About Novelettes
Novelettes are about compression. I like to reduce a novel to its essence. I like what happens when multiple arcs and consequences reverberate within twenty to thirty pages.
Novelettes take the time to create new worlds, and explore them. Their parts fit together like a puzzle. My method is to pursue compression and consequence. My goal is for the words to flow like water through your fingers.
I write across modes: speculative realism, allegory, fable, domestic realism, surreal catastrophe. Some worlds hinge on one impossible idea. Others remain fully realistic, but the ordinary always shows its strangeness.