I write about what comes after.
Grimdark military SF, warm space fables, and quiet Rust Belt horror — out of Akron, Ohio.
Three shelves, one idea
War Dogs
grimdark military SF
He was never going to walk away from it. That was the problem with building a man like Tiberius: you can’t unbuild him.
The Rattletrap Watch
warm space fable
A kid the world threw away, an impossible apprenticeship, and a home he decides to keep.
The Whisper Lounge
quiet Rust Belt horror
A man who will not let his dead go, and a building very glad to hear it.
I write about the things that get left behind, and the people who won’t leave them. Leaving is not the better choice.
The books
Pit Bull
War Dogs, Book One
Earth won the Celestrion Drift war, and the scar of it still splits the sky. Tiberius Novak came out of it with nothing but the Pit Bull — a battered exosuit and four drones — taking contracts in Neocrest because contracts are what’s left for a man built to fight something that already ended. Then one leads back to the commander who took everything he had. The war is over. Tiberius isn’t.
Out now
Rattletrap & Mouse
The Rattletrap Watch, Book One
A thirteen-year-old shoeshine boy and a dog named Mister Pleats are taken on by a man whose pocket watch jumps space without a train. A new room, a new dark, a new nowhere. The boy spends his whole first day waiting for the bum’s rush that never comes.
Preorder
The Whisper Lounge
Rust Belt horror
Ash Holloway films abandoned buildings for a living. Since Evelyn drowned he’s been wearing her watch: a cracked crystal, hands stopped at 3:42. Lately it’s been running warm. A building on the corner of Mill and High has been waiting a long time for someone exactly like him.
October 13 · Preorder
I live in a Rust Belt town that has more history than it knows what to do with and refuses to throw any of it away. I’ve spent a lot of years looking at buildings nobody uses anymore and nobody quite gets around to tearing down. What holds me isn’t the danger, and it isn’t the ghosts. It’s that those places are proof of something I believe about people: we hold on, well past the point where it’s sensible, and I’ve come to think that’s the best thing about us, not the worst.