Once upon a time… a long time ago… in a galaxy far, far away, but is actually this galaxy because otherwise I’d be a space-faring alien and I’m not even willing to accept that as a possibility… although it would explain my mother’s claims that I was a ‘rock baby’ she found underneath a waterfall… Oh wait, where was I?

A long time ago, in my late teens, I thought I’d write the next great American novel. And I did. Then I used a text-to-speech program and realized it was the most pretentious dribble ever written or uttered by a computer, so I deleted the file, did a disk clean, threw the computer tower out, and then drank a fifth of vodka to forget that horrible story ever existed…

Instead, I decided to get a ‘real job’ and studied Cellular and Molecular Biology with the hopes of becoming a doctor. But like the vast majority of my life goals, I fell short. Instead of becoming a world-renowned doctor able to perform the most delicate of surgeries, I found myself working in a laboratory, and I loved it. I didn’t have to tell grieving parents that despite my best efforts their child still passed. I didn’t even need to work with an HMO. I finally achieved my goal of being a published author (in science journals), but even I felt like that was cheating.

All the while, I still wrote crappy short stories often inspired by dreams. Every so often, I’d share my written words with family and friends. I didn’t need my stories to reach a greater audience, because frankly, they weren’t that good. But I still liked to tell stories, and it would be cool to tell stories in a video game, so I came up with the idea of such a game. I did research and tried to learn the system to make a video game, then abandoned the idea for a year at a time, until one day, while trying to write a scene in the program, I said to myself, “I should just write this out like a scene in a book, so I know what I’m trying to accomplish.”

That scene led to another scene, then another, and another, and finally, I looked back on what I had written and realized, “Holy crap, that’s a book! Probably a badly written book, but a book.” I sent the story out to a couple of family members and after their assurances that it wasn’t complete rubbish, I played with the idea of actually publishing something. Why did I want to publish it? For fame? For Glory? For the ridiculous royalty checks (I’m audibly laughing right now, you can’t hear it because, you know, you’re where you are and I’m here)? Maybe this story would resonate with one person, but that’s not even it. In a life of mediocrity, just having one little bit of your mediocrity exist past yourself is an accomplishment.

So, I had the story written, now the only problem was getting good at writing. That meant seminars, classes, editors, programs, etc. I read so many horrible stories for beta-read exchanges that I wish I had the same liberal application of alcohol I deployed in college. The vast majority of them were good and interesting stories, but every third story snuck under my beta-reading eye was an amateur author’s attempt at me reading their fetish porn. Sometimes it was right up front, sometimes I read what I thought was a generic story until all of a sudden the protagonist was wearing a disposable diaper in middle England…

But I prevailed. I found a place where I could read others’ work without subjecting myself to the nightmarish landscape of their fantasies (hey I’m kink positive, but don’t market your story as fantasy without disclosing the fact that in the third act, the solution to kill the big bad is a group orgy that involves a lot of Crisco).

At the end of it, I learned several things: I’ll probably never be the next Great American Novelist, I don’t like reading fetish literature without a fore-warning, some stories are worth telling, and I like reading the stories of up-and-coming authors. This site is dedicated to those principals (again, if you want to send me a story to beta-read, give me a heads up about whether there is niche content that I may not enjoy reading). I’ll include background on the novels I’m working on, short stories and cut chapters, and give reviews and mock beta reviews for books I’ve read. If you’re interested in having me beta-read your book or chapter, there will be links.

Thank you for visiting my small corner of the internets and I hope you at least have a funny joke to tell your friends. Then maybe you can put it on the webs and others can enjoy it.