Short Stories and Poems

Recent and Featured Publications

"Fountains of Blood" appears in the anthology Straight Outta Tombstone edited by David Boop. In this story set in 1896, Billy McCarty of my Clockwork Legion novels is hired to protect prominent attorney and former Texas governor Albert J. Fountain who is returning home with his son after collecting evidence in the Lincoln County War. Ambushed by a strange creature of the night, the Fountains disappear and Billy turns to Marshal Larissa Seaton for help.

This weird western anthology also features stories by Jim Butcher, Phil Foglio, Alan Dean Foster, Kevin J. Anderson, Robert E. Vardeman, Jody Lynn Nye, and Nicole Kurtz.

Straight Outta Tombstone may be ordered from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

"The Vrykolakas and the Cobbler's Wife" appears in issue 66 of Cemetery Dance Magazine. Set in Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century, the story was inspired by a Greek folktale related in Montague Summers' The Vampire in Europe and tells the story of a cobbler who was turned into a vrykolakas and then comes back to haunt his family. The story is illustrated by GAK, who I had the pleasure of working with back in the early days of Hadrosaur Tales Magazine.

This issue of Cemetery Dance also features stories by Steve Resnic Tem, Jeremy C. Shipp, and Bill Pronzini, plus a number of reviews, interviews and articles by folks such as Ellen Datlow, Bev Vincent, and Brian James Freeman.

Cemetery Dance issue 66 is available at Amazon.com.

DeadSteam edited by Bryce Raffle and published by Grimmer and Grimmer Books features my story “Specter in the Light.” The story is set during the early days of my alma mater, New Mexico Tech, when it was known as the New Mexico School of Mines. It imagines staff members using Nikola Tesla's innovations to bring electric light to mines. The problem is, the electricity awakens something sleeping deep within the mountain where they conduct their test!

DeadSteam is an anthology of dreadpunk, gaslamp, and dark steampunk. These are tales of the ghoulish and the gothic, chilling stories of haunted streets, of vampires and demons stalking the city from fog-drenched alleyways lit only by gas lamps. 17 chilling stories of the monsters lurking around every corner, the ghosts haunting the darkest streets of Victorian London, and the dead things crawling out of their graves to consume the flesh of the living. In addition to my story, you'll find stories by Jen Ponce, Karen J Carlisle, Jonah Buck, James Dorr, Alice E Keyes, and Steve Carr. The foreword is by Leanna Renee Hieber.

DeadSteam is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

While mankind can scarce hope to pierce the Veil without crossing it, a few intrepid souls will ever bend their will against the aether, combining artifice and the arcane to uncover its secrets.

From voodoo death cults to the Day of the Dead, mummy parties, the wheel of reincarnation, the practice of death portraits, and so much more, these tales leave no gravestone unturned.

Be it heaven or hell or the limbo in between, the hereafter is about to get ‘Punked.

My story, “The Sun Worshiper,” is about a spiritualist named Dinella Stanton who is invited to a mummy unwrapping party in London hosted by a prominent scientist. When she arrives, she finds all her fellow guests are scientists who have denounced her as a fraud. To make matters worse, it would appear that the scientist who invited Dinella is attempting to perpetrate a deception of his own.

After Punk is available at Amazon.

Once Upon a Time, ageless tales were told from one generation to the next, filled with both wonders and warnings. Tales of handsome princes and wicked queens, of good-hearted folk and evil stepmothers. Tales of danger and caution and magic … classics that still echo in our hearts and memories even to this day, told from old, cherished books or from memory at Grandma's knee.

Oh yes, tales have been told … but never quite like these. Journey with us through the pages of Gaslight and Grimm to discover timeless truths through lenses polished in the age of steam.

I retell Grimm's "The Dragon and his Grandmother" as "The Steam-Powered Dragon." Three British soldiers pressed to fight in India encounter a steam-powered dragon who offers to take them away from life in the army and gives them an alchemical device that turns coal into diamonds. The catch is that the dragon will return and ask three riddles. If the soldiers can’t answer, they will become the steam-powered dragon’s slaves, keeping his boilers stoked for the rest of their lives.

Gaslight and Grimm is available at Amazon.

Mental illness is very common in our society, but it's also very misunderstood. Many view those with mental illnesses as being weak, but there is a great deal of strength in those that must battle their own minds on a regular basis.

Disharmony of the Spheres focuses on characters with mental illnesses that are still able to be successful. They may not completely overcome their illnesses, but they are able to beat them back and succeed. This book is dedicated to all of the science fiction fans and writers that must battle their own personal demons every day, and half of all of the profits from this book will go to The Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Organization, a group that battles teen suicide.

My story in the anthology is called "A Vanishing Past." In the story, Captain Firebrandt of the space pirate ship Legacy goes on a treasure hunt with his father who is suffering dementia. In the process they learn that his father still has much wisdom and a self-sufficiency that would be all too easy to dismiss.

Disharmony of the Spheres is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

What if those ancient creatures so beloved in fiction, myth, and science had not disappeared? What if they were real? What might have been developed to handle them, and how might man have felt about the thundering giants in yesterday's, today's, or tomorrow's worlds.

Lovely, unique, tales of lumbering giants of old, ancient rulers of the skies, and many others once thought to be myth or legend appear here in Extinct?

My story in the anthology is "Jackson's Hadrosaurs" which imagines that Jean Lafitte and his pirate band use hadrosaurs to navigate the swamps and bayous of Southern Louisiana. When the British come to invade with their terrifying carniverous dinosaurs, Lafitte offers his dinosaurs to Jackson's cause. Will Ol' Hickory still be able to send the red coats a'runnin' to the Gulf of Mexico in this alternate take on the Battle of New Orleans?

Extinct? is available at Amazon.

If you've gained your knowledge of the Wild West from Hollywood and history textbooks, your image of the Western frontier is simple and clear: White men winning the West and saving helpless white future wives from outlaws or hostile Indians or Mexican bandidos. You won't find that here. Instead, you'll find U.S. Marshal Frederick Douglass who fights invaders from outer space. A Navajo girl must thwart the god who threatens all she holds dear. A Hasidic high planes drifter faces New World bandits and Old Testament demons. A black homesteader fights fae in defense of land and family.

"Reckoning at the Alamo" is a new story of the Clockwork Legion featuring Marshal Larissa Seaton, Professor Maravilla, and Billy McCarty. They go to San Antonio to track down a Confederate soldier who wants the South to rise again and will seek the help of elder gods to make it happen!

Lost Trails 2: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West is available at Amazon.

Even in ancient times people stared off into space and watched that red dot in the sky and wondered what was going on up there on Mars. It spurs both scientific inquiry and the imagination. Add two moons with some interesting properties of their own and you have a wonderful place for all kinds of stories of the imagination. Here a colonist finds herself marooned far from home, a rover doesn’t always obey its handlers, Martian invaders struggle with the religious practices of the conquered, working on Mars proves more challenging than anyone could have expected, Martian emissaries express their concerns about their neighbor, a Martian spaceship captain wants his portrait painted and plenty more stories about earth’s neighbor and those who might inhabit it.

My story in the anthology is called "Arachne's Stepchildren." Colonists on Mars discover liquid water contaminated by dangerous microbes. The materials to examine and possibly neutralize those microbes are en route aboard an unmanned solar sail. The only problem is that the spider robots who maintain the solar sail have developed a mind of their own!

The Martian Anthology is available at Amazon.

Ramon Morales and Fatemeh Karimi have just arrived in Los Angeles. The year is 1877 and they are out of money. Ramon finds a job aboard a ship hunting for Mexican pirates. However, it turns out these pirates have unexpected, advanced weaponry. My story in the first Gears and Levers Anthology is called "The Pirates of Baja" and it was inspired by my love of Jules Verne and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In this story, you can get a preview of my novel Owl Dance.

Come, my friends, adventure and romance awaits in worlds that never were but should have been. Magic and science blend together as Gears and Levers explores the quest for all that makes up humanity. Battle pirates, travel back in time, fly in dirigibles, explore the wonders of the Orient, and walk with automatons in twenty amazing tales set in Steampunk lands by masterful storytellers such as David D. Levine, Brenda Clough, Mark Ferrari, Irene Radford, K.L. Townsend, Shannon Page, Bruce Taylor, among others.

Gears and Levers is available at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble and Smashwords.

My story in Gears and Levers 2 is "Endeavor in Halcyon". I wrote the story in collaboration with Kurt MacPhearson. It tells the story of Captain Penelope Todd of the British East India Company's first airship, Endeavor. On a mission to open up new trade routes, the Endeavor gets caught in a storm and winds up in a strange new land. Will Todd and her crew be able to escape, or will they be trapped in Halcyon forever?

Adventure and romance awaits in worlds that never were but should have been. Magic and science blend together as Gears and Levers 2 explores the quest for all that makes up humanity. Battle pirates, walk with ghosts, fly in dirigibles, explore the wonders world, and walk with automatons in twenty amazing tales set in Steampunk lands by masterful storytellers such as Alma Alexander, Irene Radford, Chaz and Karen Brenchley, Shawna Reppert, Larry Lefkowitz, Tina Connolly, Jeanette Bennett, Voss Foster, Frog and Esther Jones, and many more.

Gears and Levers 2 is available from Smashwords and Amazon.com.

The Complete List of Short Stories

If the title of the book or magazine is a link, that will take you to a place where it may be purchased.


The Complete List of Poems