Books, Stories, Essays: My Writing Career I've been writing since ... well, since before I could write. When I was a toddler, I used to draw squiggly lines on a sheet of paper and insist that I was writing something. Those epics have not been preserved. The desire and need to put words on paper have survived, however. In spite of which, for a long time I dabbled in writing, fiddled around with it, started stories and didn't finish them. Then stopped doing even that. And whined about my desire to be a writer. One day, after listening to me whine, my wife, Leonore, said, "So why don't you write?" It was as though a light had gone on. Well, yeah, why didn't I write? So I finished some stories and managed to sell a couple of them, and then I finished a novel and sold it to a publisher. I was a writer. (I'm leaving out the hard parts, but they're rather boring, really.) The published stuff is listed below. Click on the titles for more information about each work. Novels      Budspy Business Secrets from the Stars The Cavaradossi Killings Central Heat The Children of Shiny Mountain Dawn Crescent The Green God Pit Planet The Prisoner of the Blood series:      Insatiable Unquenchable The Seekers Star Trek novels:      The Captains' Honor Time Trap The Trellisane Confrontation Time for Sherlock Holmes Ursus Short Stories On second thought, I won't say much about my short stories. Most of them were published in men's magazines, and I don't mean Playboy. They were all pretty good stories, in my opinion, with science-fictional or fantasy elements, but that wasn't what attracted the editors. The first one, "Adam's Servant," which was also my first publication of any kind, was published in Cavalier magazine in December, 1972. Another story in that same issue was "The Mangler" by some kid named Stephen King. Poor fellow. Here I've gone on to vast literary fame and fortune, and he's languished in obscurity. But that's what he gets for selling his fiction to magazines with semi-naked women on the cover. Tsk. Tsk. Reign of Blood This short story was published in an anthology of erotic vampire tales, Love Bites, published by Masquerade Books in 1995. It stars a major supporting character from the two vampire novels described above - the vampire who makes Richard Venneman into a vampire, in fact. "Reign of Blood" tells how she fared during the French Revolution, how she crossed from France to England, and how she seduced and made a vampire of a fellow named Percy Blakeney. Which she probably enjoyed more than her involvement with Richard Venneman 200+ years later. Life Sentence Zombies! Who can resist writing a zombie story? I know I can't. (At this point, you should insert whatever quip seems funniest to you. "You can't kill zombie stories." "Those ideas just keep eating at you." Etc.) "Life Sentence" was published in the anthology The Book of More Flesh, published by Eden Studios, Inc. in 2002. For lots of info about the anthology, which is one in a series of anthologies of zombie stories, please see the book's Web page. The problem of course, just as with vampires, is coming up with a different twist on an idea which has been used by so many other writers. My twist was to make the zombies science fictional rather than supernatural. But the resulting story is still horrifying, I hope. I know you want to know more. It's eating you alive, isn't it? So buy the anthology! It's chock full of zombie stories with twists. Walk Like a Zombie Thanks to the stupendous commercial and critical success of "Life Sentence," I was asked to contribute a zombie story to another anthology, Aim for the Head. The anthology should be out by summer of 2006 and will include my story, "Walk Like a Zombie," as well as stories by quite a few of the other authors who appeared in The Book of More Flesh. Or as we say in the lit biz, we'll be together between the covers again. Does that embarrass you? As I was writing "Walk Like a Zombie," a really great idea for a grimly humorous zombie story popped into my head. (Can a zombie story be humorous in a non-grim fashion? I shouldn't think so.) So if another zombie anthology appears on the horizon, I'll be ready. Non Fiction Book At Home with Solar Energy Yes, book. Singular. This is my only non-fiction book so far, and I'm fairly sure there'll never be another one. Essays A short but fitfully growing list. Long enough to deserve its own section of the Web site, anyway.