My fiction writing career has been a long, odd journey. I was a freelance nonfiction writer for much of my adult life, but I started writing fiction in earnest in the late 1980s. I had a double-fistful of short stories published nationally in various magazines and anthologies in the early to mid 1990s. If you’d like to read some of them, click on the Short Stories button in the floating menu above. I also wrote three novels during this time. A young adult heroic fantasy novel titled A Dearth of Dragons, a horror thriller called The Sensitives, and a science fiction adventure novel called Return.

I was a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction Writers of America at the time. I did panels at literary conventions, rubbing elbows with legends like Richard Matheson, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Clive Barker, and many others. I had letters from Ray Bradbury(!) and Stephen King. I had a long, rambling, late-night conversation with multiple Hugo-award-winning-author Harlan Ellison, who had originally called me to chew me out for an article I had written that he didn’t agree with. The acrimony faded rapidly, and we hung up the phone as friends. I eventually sat at an author’s table signing books with my short stories in them!

I also had a good New York agent, but I suspect the books we were trying to sell weren’t quite good enough for publishers to be interested in. The book industry was changing, and I, being a novelist, just didn’t seem viable at the time.

Not gonna lie: I became disenchanted with writing fiction and just stopped producing it. I focused my creativity on sculpting, inspired by a couple of fellow Texans named Jarrod and Brandon Shiflett. For several years, I sculpted a bunch of monsters and critters and produced some resin model kits of some of my sculptures for the then-growing collectible “garage kit” heyday. I had hoped to become a pro sculptor at some point, but that was not meant to be as either. During this time (late 90s to early 2000s), I supported myself by a variety of means, but mostly as a writer and editor of nonfiction, including a stint as the editor of The Sci Fi Channel Magazine. Then I began to study hypnosis, and got good enough at it that it became my full-time career in 2013. It’s still how I earn my living today.

But what about the fiction?
Honestly, I had pretty much forgotten about it in my day-to-day existence. It was a lost dream. I didn’t regret writing the books, and some of my short stories can still be found in anthologies (dee the Short Stories page here on the site). But I hadn’t written a word of fiction for a couple of decades.

Enter Richard Nongard. Richard is one of the most successful hypnotists and hypnosis instructors in the U.S. For several years I had known him as a teacher and colleague and bought several hypnosis courses from his company Subliminal Science. In recent years I developed a good friendship with him.

Some months back, Richard started an online course called Write a Book With Richard, in which he teaches his method for writing nonfiction books in twelve weeks or so and self-publishing them on Amazon. I had been wanting to write a nonfiction book, so I enrolled. It was the best decision I’ve made in quite some time. I ended up writing The Way Out in eight weeks, and it has happily been residing on Amazon since August 2020. After The Way Out was published, Richard and I were talking about passive income, and he suggested I get back into the book-writing business in earnest. “You won’t get rich off a single book,” he told me, “But you might get rich off twenty. What else do you have?”

I replied that I was kicking around ideas for a couple of other nonfiction books, but suddenly my thoughts went to my garage, where somewhere, in a box covered with dust and mouse droppings, my story and book manuscripts lay in sad-but-stalwart neglect. I told him about them, and he said, “You can publish the novels and even do a short-story collection!” It was like a flame had ignited in my mind. The thought of seeing Return, my beloved science-fiction novel, in print as a real, bona-fide book that I could hold in my hand, was intoxicating.

Again, things got twisty. There were problems with Return, pointed out by a good friend from my old fiction-writing group. The book had been written at a lower skill level than I now possess. My current fiction-writing coach suggested I consider what screenwriters call “a page-one rewrite.” I read scores of how-to books during my “remedial fiction writer school” phase. During all this I did end up co-writing a short novel with Richard: a pulp-inspired psychological thriller called GUM that we self-published on Amazon. Then I started working on a vampire novel set in Houston called Stoker Rules. The phoenix had risen from its own ashes.

In addition to being a hypnotist and sculptor, I am back in the book business as well!