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 major 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

     The Arm and Flanagan

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 and the Soldier

Time for Sherlock Holmes

Ursus



A Book for Children

My only one so far. I have no idea if there will ever be others.
     Damon the Caiman



Short Stories

Earthmen and Other Aliens

In the early days, some of my short stories 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. Later, I sold some to more standard genre outlets. The e-book revolution has inspired me to put those and a few unpublished stories together as a collection, published as an e-book.

For more details about the collection, click on this link: Earthmen and Other Aliens.



Non Fiction

At Home with Solar Energy

It coulda been a contenduh. However, it was published just about the time that that creepy buffoon Ronald Reagan became President and killed the then-nascent solar energy industry, starting with his symbolic act of ripping out the solar energy panels Jimmy Carter had had installed at the White House. Bastard. The book is now an historical artifact. It's still available in some libraries.

The Dead Hand of Mrs. Stifle

It's a book! It's an essay! It's a long essay published as an e-book. Which is appropriate, given that the theme of the book is the way self-published e-books will change the nature of fiction. Click here for more.



Essays

A short but fitfully growing list. Long enough to deserve its own section of the Web site, anyway.