Recent work

Here are some fiction and non-fiction pieces I forgot to post about

LATEST POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS NEWSLETTER: Before there was Battle Bots or Real Steel or Pacific Rim or even Robot Jox, there was the Critter Crunch. Read the epic story of the world’s first robot death match at the 1989 Denver MileHiCon. I’m trying out a different format for this post—an online version of an 8-page zine. Read it here.

History article presented as an 8-pg zine

FLASH PIECE: I have a story in Flash Fiction Online’s November 2025 “”FamPunk”” issue, guest edited by the incomparable Emma Burnett. “So many spec fic stories go big,” she writes in the issue’s intro. “They get larger and larger, up to and involving saving the world/galaxy/universe. They expand and expand, and… then what? Who ever really gets to be a main character in that story? Can you really imagine yourself there? And, is the science/fantasy element really important to the story, or is it just the same old hero story dressed up in spaceships and lasers? In this issue, we wanted to subvert some of the assumptions built into sci-fi and fantasy, the need to be expansive and overblown. Go small and go home.” You can read it here

.
PREVIOUS POP CULTURAL PRECURSORS NEWSLETTER: Before Dracula or Nosferatu ever rose from their coffins, there was Theda Bara. I wrote about the scandalous silent film starlet and the fledgling Fox film studio’s campaign for the film The Vampire (1915) that portrayed her as a wicked maneater offscreen as well as on.

“Would You Marry Theda Bara, Vampire Woman? The wickedest face on the shadowy screen.”—Fox studio

“Her eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borgia.”—Louella Parsons

“She is the arch-torpedo of domesticity.” —Photoplay

Read the full story and see more amazing clips, photos, and hilarious vintage articles about Bara here.

ANOTHER FLASH PIECE: I have a piece in Shacklebound Book’s new anthology Twisted Trails: Tales of the Weird Wild West. I examined a tragic event in Texas history through the lens of Mexican ghost ballads, dark fantasy pulp, EC horror comics, Swinging Sixties steampunk, spaghetti Westerns, sci-fi manga, & psychedelic Jodorowsky fever dream. The ebook is $1 and the paperback is $10 here. (Or you can buy a hard copy at Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree.)

SHORT STORY: Kozy Krampus is unleashed. The new cozy cosmic horror holiday anthology from Underland Press has a story by me about the real-life 16th-century cyborg Götz of the Iron Hand, the monk Martin Luther, and the titular Demon of Winter. Buy a print copy or ebook here.