I confess that I very, very rarely read other people's original stories on their web pages. My usual feeling is: if your work is so great, why hasn't it been published for real? Which is an elitist and annoying attitude to have. So, here's some stuff of mine to read if you feel like it.

Early Fic

The works posted here might well suck. They're early fics, written between 1985 and 1987.

"Under Ice" was published in a lPoughkeepsie-area literary magazine, "Echoes"; I don't count it as a publication because I didn't get paid. And yes, it is based on the Kate Bush song of the same name. Unlike most stories I read on the net which are based on songs, however, I did not intersperse the full text of the lyrics into the story, so if you hate that kind of writing as much as I do, don't worry. You do not need to know the song at all.

"The Great American Novelist" is not science fiction or fantasy, and you really can't sell a short story outside of those genres and expect to make any money at all; the lit press is absolutely dominated by literary mags that pay in copies. Well, you know, if you're not going to get paid anyway, why not publish on the net? This is humor, of a type which should probably appeal to most writers. And yes, it's autobiographical, sort of, although both the main character and her sister are actually me.

"Kids Will Be Kids" is science fiction humor, and no magazine I've submitted it to has gotten it. I suspect you need to be more familiar with comic books to realize the story is a parody. Since I suspect at least some of the people who might actually come to this page are fans of my comic book writing, I decided to bite the bullet, figure that this one will never be professionally published, and make it available to the folks who like comics instead.

Later Fic I Consider Unpublishable

Not because it sucks but because there's no market for anything like this.

"The Werewolf Baby": Uh, autobiographical magical realism? I have no idea what to call this. It was written in response to a dream I had after my ex broke up with me.

Poems

Poetry is even harder to publish-- and there's less of a point to doing it, since it pays nothing and gets no circulation when you do-- so occasionally I may publish a poem online. My poems, when I actually bother to write any, tend to be reflections of serious emotional upheavals in my life; I generally don't feel the need to write poetry unless I'm hurting badly enough that I can't figure out what else to do.

Magic: Late 1999. Everything in this poem was true then. Turned out eventually it was chemicals-- my birth control pills were screwing with my head-- but at the time I had a 5 hour daily commute and all I could think was that I was overtired. I am no longer actually sure that in reality you can make a healthy person suicidal through chronic sleep deprivation.

Pandora's Box: I think this was summer 1989. Odd for me to look back and see that something I am so comfortable with now was so disturbing to me then. This was about coming to terms with being bisexual. Though I think it could be interpreted as any number of different things, as I was deliberately pretty vague.

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