Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe
This is my second collection and both books contain thirteenth stories -because buildings still don’t have thirteenth floors and that is where my fiction lives. Because when I was a young, impressionable reader (and if anything I’m more impressionable now than before) I read Nabokov’s A Baker’s Dozen and thought that thirteen was exactly the right number if I was ever to publish a short story collection. And those were long years, the years between imagining that I would ever publish a story, much less a book (and the years are never so protracted as in the yearning rather than the doing).
Several of these tales, as in my first collection, are from magazines and anthologies I was lucky enough to be in, as well as some that never happened, and a few that ultimately found their place without my minor contribution. Others are those particular stories that, I don’t want to say writers write just for themselves -every story is that, on some fine level, rather they just appeared, pushing their way out from the poisoned ground, never belonging to any magazine or book, other than this one here.
A Bold Strokes Book Author Interview
Pumpkin Teeth
When I first put this website together, I wrote that my short stories were mostly for exercise, that I consider myself primarily a novelist and that I rarely even read short stories. That’s not really true anymore. Yet I always knew what I would title my first short story collection: most every story is a story of transformation, but I am fascinated by this particular bent of anthropomorphism, that not only do we project ourselves onto things, but then we become terrified of them, never realizing it’s the human qualities that are so frightening.
It’s not Halloween until we carve the teeth onto a pumpkin.
It was a total thrill when this collection came out. I was subsequently honored that Pumpkin Teeth was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award as well as nominated for a Black Quill Award.
Failed Normalcy: Dark Scribe Interview
Below are some magazines and anthologies I’ve been fortunate to have placed a story in.
