“Sojourn”

“Sojourn” appeared in A City of Han: Stories by expat writers in Seoul and the other cities of South Korea, edited by Sollee Han (Seoul: FWS Publishing, 2020). (The book is available on Amazon.com, or, in Seoul, from the Fiction Writers in Seoul website.) Reviews: “Lastly, in Sojourn, I found an absolute treat to finish the book. It was a fantastical, fitting, frenetic finish to the series. I enjoyed the playfulness as the characters bring themselves both out of their own loneliness and take us triumphantly out of the collection.” — Adam R. Carr   “When I was reading Sojourn, my …

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“Winter Wheat”

“Winter Wheat” is a story that’s special to me. Like my story “Prodigal” (and several other of my best-received stories) I first drafted it in the summer of 2006, while I was in Seattle for Clarion West. My father had unexpectedly passed away earlier that year—a few days after my last conversation with him, on the phone—and writing the story was part of my working through my feelings about our relationship, as you might imagine if you’ve read it. Not that there’s a one-to-one relationship in any respect: I feel like I’m a lot more like Jim’s dad, and Jim’s …

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Vol de Nuit

“Vol de Nuit” was published in Broken Eye Books’ collection Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird (September 2017). It’s a story that pretty much is what it says on the cover of the book: a Lovecraftian space opera with a pretty heavy dose of weirdness.  The story is illustrated by Nick Gucker, and I’ll pop the illustration into the bottom of the post, just for balance’s sake. In the meantime, look at that cover! Notes: My mother, a French-Canadian, has always been a huge fan of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s work, and especially his autobiographical books about working as …

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“Focus”

“Focus” appeared in the May/June 2016 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It was my second story in Analog in the last six months (the previous one having appeared in the December 2016 issue). The simplest way to sum it up is to say that it’s a story about how companies parasitize everything—or, rather, convince us to allow them to parasitize everything to better serve their ends. The story is set in Vietnam—in Saigon and a South Korean-run factory in an industrial complex in nearby Bình Dương Province. While my wife and I were in Vietnam in May 2014, there …

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Prodigal

My short story “Prodigal” appeared in the December 2016 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It was, in fact, honored as being the cover story , with cover art to match: the first time a story of mine was honored in this way. “Prodigal” is a story with a long history. I originally drafted it at Clarion West during the summer of 2006, essentially on a dare by my classmate Ben Burgis. Some of the scientific groundwork in this story was actually laid in a novella I wrote even farther back, in 2001, titled “With My Mouth.” (I know, I know, the …

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