I've written fourteen books over the last decade or so, but as of right now, I am still seeking representation. Click here to read about the many unfortunate mistakes I've made on my path towards publication.
(books are listed in alphabetical order -- not order of writing.)
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Chronon: (young adult science fiction)
Nathaniel is a hundred-million dollar research project, but he has no clue. He believes he’s just an average sixteen-year-old with below-average grades, until he finds himself trapped between warring weapons-research corporations. When he realizes he can use his cell-phone to make objects vanish and re-appear with a simple text, things go beyond strange. Nathaniel begins to question who he is, where he came from, and more importantly – who’s behind the creepy texts?
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Elfhame: (middle grade fantasy)
She knows her mother’s name is Carowyn, she knows their home is at the bottom of a green valley, and she knows that a monstrous changeling currently resides there – sleeping in her bed, eating her meals, living her life under the sun with her mother.
Abducted when she was just a baby, Xierna has known only hardship and labor in the twilight realms of Elfhame. To the men of the Upworld, Elfhame is myth, a tale for children as they’re tucked into bed. But this is where Xierna has lived her entire life, as a slave, insulted and mistreated by her dark masters. Home to the elder races of fae, Elfhame is divided into thirteen peculiar territories, ‘brughs’, connected by a series of enchanted door-chambers. Xierna knows the ancient path through them, she’s ‘acquired’ the proper pass-warde, and when she gets her chance to escape, nothing will stop her from finding her way to the sun. And then on to the green valley with her home and her mother.
She’s made a solemn vow to “get free… or die trying”.
Abducted when she was just a baby, Xierna has known only hardship and labor in the twilight realms of Elfhame. To the men of the Upworld, Elfhame is myth, a tale for children as they’re tucked into bed. But this is where Xierna has lived her entire life, as a slave, insulted and mistreated by her dark masters. Home to the elder races of fae, Elfhame is divided into thirteen peculiar territories, ‘brughs’, connected by a series of enchanted door-chambers. Xierna knows the ancient path through them, she’s ‘acquired’ the proper pass-warde, and when she gets her chance to escape, nothing will stop her from finding her way to the sun. And then on to the green valley with her home and her mother.
She’s made a solemn vow to “get free… or die trying”.
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Fiersom's Brood: (young adult contemporary fantasy)
Turns out our billionaire father is like 300 years old.
I’m fourteen, my siblings are all seventeen (because they’re quintuplets), and believe it or not, we all have mental powers. Yes, freaky, side-show mind powers. Apparently our family’s part of some secret, ancient race that descended from Nephilim – fallen angels – like in the book of Genesis.
Anyway… hundreds of years ago, my father made a terrible mistake and now some really bad people are looking for him. And not just one group, but a whole bunch. High-tech pagan commandos, soil-borne demons, Nepheel Inquisitors – if they’re freaky and scary, they’re hunting our Father. And unfortunately, because I ‘borrowed’ a shape-shifting coin and took it beyond Father’s sphere of protection, the bad guys found us. They came in helicopters and blew the roof off our mansion on stilts. They broke into Father’s secret lab to steal our bassinet (that one’s a little tough to explain). They captured our father.
And now they’re after us.
I don’t know why, we never did anything to them, but they want us bad. We're worried as crap about our father. We'd really like to find him and save him, but pretty much all we can do is run. The one thing we’ve got going for us? Mental powers. But it turns out they’re not that useful unless you need to prank one of your jerk brothers. Oh, and we’ve also got a backpack full of ants.
Sounds weird, I know, but it turns out to be important.
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Oneironaut: (YA contemporary fantasy)
Conner has cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and a whole basket-full of paranoid delusions, but one thing he can do better than anyone else -- is dream. When he sleeps he has dreams like no other. Lucid dreams. Powerful dreams. Dreams of flying and strength and victory.
When he volunteers for an experiment to bridge human subconsciousness through sleep, he and the other test subjects discover there are certain objects in the dreamworld that can be taken hold of, and brought into the physical world. Strange and powerful objects. Objects that defy reality. Conner seems to be the only person that can carry the artifacts, but he soon learns that he is not the only person seeking them.
An eldritch, shapeshifting spirit pursues the artifacts as well, a spirit of hunger, who kills with joyous abandon.
In the dream world -- and in real life.
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Song of the Selkie: (middle grade fantasy)
They are the Selkie. Legends say that if a lonely human steals one of their skins while they’re distracted with their music and strange games, they can force the faerie to become a handsome and loyal spouse. The selkie, however, will never be truly happy unless they can find their seal-skin and return to the sea.
Mathan is the half-breed child of one such couple. Fourteen years after being tossed into the ocean and raised by Merrow kelp-farmers, Mathan is reunited with his widowed mother. He longs to take her back with him, into the sea, where they can live together in the harmony and ethereal beauty beneath the waves, but in order to do so, he'll first have to steal her seal-skin from pirates. And not just any pirates, but the bloodthirsty pirates of the Brackenmaid: the legendary 'scourge of the western waters'.
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Spryton Wyldes: the Pine-cone Wedge: (middle-grade fantasy)
Sorry. Never wrote a synopsis for this one. This is the book nobody's read. If you're curious, I'll just tell you that it's about tiny people. Five races of faeries at war over a meadow. Tree-dwelling, squirrel-riding Grellings, cave-dwelling, iron-forging Ruddies, swamp-dwelling, frog-riding Grennies, and then you've got your more traditional Pixies, who live in an apple orchard and mainly frolic. The fifth race is the Bronnie, who live in huts of woven grass and are fearsome hunters of rabbits and other large prey.
The plot of this book involves a band of unlikely heroes, one from each race, united to avert a war, and to protect Spryton Wyldes from the rise of an entirely new race -- twisted, shadowy hybrids -- the Blacklings.
So yeah, I wrote and edited this, but never finished a real polished draft, and never queried it (another reason there's no synopsis). Maybe someday it'll work out as part of my 'backlist'.
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Starship Mythicon: (middle grade sci-fi)
- Starship Mythicon
- Mythicon and the Psi-spiders
- Mythicon and the Mind Marauders
- Mythicon and the Master's Tournament
"Abducted by aliens."
Two gifted thirteen-year-olds wake to find themselves at the very center of the galaxy. Not only are they forty-thousand light years from home, they've slept the last six years away in cryogenic transport. Their abductor is a sinister brain-queen bent on galactic domination who controls millions of drone bodies with her mind. She plans to use Cody, a brilliant and creative math-prodigy, to decipher the coded transmissions of her enemies. And Katrina, a silver-medalist in Olympic gymnastics, she uses to pilot the Red Reaver, a nimble fighter-craft the size of a motorcycle, capable of obliterating entire continents.
The moment they break the brain queen's grip over their minds, Cody and Katrina make their escape. They team up with two of the brain queens other 'projects', a chimpanzee whose intelligence has been enhanced to make him a technical genius, and a rival brain queen with a single drone. In the cavernous hold of the alien's mother-hive, they find a small space-vessel to commandeer, and the flight to planet Earth begins.
The starship is called 'Mythicon', and although it looks like a large chunk of floating rock, it operates on a technology so advanced, the diabolical brain queen was never able to unlock its secrets. There seems to be a mysterious intelligence hidden within the bulk of the starship, and for some reason, it seems determined to see the two kids safely to their home planet. Unfortunately, it's another six-year journey -- another forty-thousand light years. They'll have to cross almost half the galaxy, encountering an array of alien ships and planets and cultures, evading the brain queen's drones the whole way.
Will Cody and Katrina's families recognize them after twelve years? Have they given up on them? Even worse, Katrina's father was sick when she was first abducted -- after twelve years, will he still be alive?
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Talonshale: (young adult sci-fi)
- near future version
The online-gaming industry's most popular sword-and-sorcery game has been hacked. A mentally disturbed game-addict, who sees the game-world as an alternate plane of existence, believes that by orchestrating the largest sacrifice of lives in human history, he can become the actual 'God-of-the-dead'. His modifications warp the game-play in the nanochambers, making it more realistic by making it more deadly. All around the world, people are trapped in their gaming systems, fighting to keep their avatars alive. Because when their character dies -- the player dies with them.
The only person in a position to stop the madman is sixteen-year-old Nicholas Brass, a shy high-school kid who spends his free time pretending to be a wizard. He and his gaming partners, a thief and a warrior, realize that while the hacker may have made himself king of Talonshale, he is still bound by the rules of the game.
Which means no amount of modification can trump gaming skill.
Nick knows it's time to take advantage of his endless hours in the nanochamber. It's time to use his gaming skills to save forty-thousand lives. Unfortunately, there's a huge difference between playing a hero -- and actually being one.
- distant future version
Yeah, I wrote two books with the same concept and characters (actually four, but numbers one and three were never finished -- 1200 pages under the same title). What you see above is the final version.
In the earlier version, the story took place in the distant future, with an intergalactic, almost entirely automated, near-utopian society, where only two percent of the population has to work to support the 'consumers'. Everybody else? Their job is choose an entertainment path. And 'game-worlds' are hugely popular. This version had an entirely different plot -- more of a murder mystery -- but my agent at the time thought the gameworld concept would be better served by an epic, action-packed, 'good-vs-evil' type of a struggle.
So I started over on page one and ended up with something better.
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Wizards of Krimsonspire: (middle-grade fantasy)
- The Runaway Apprentice
- The Gauntlets of Bagabog
In a wild land filled with monsters and faerie creatures, human outposts are few and far between. In one such fief lives a thirteen-year-old boy apprenticed to a cruel and treacherous sorcerer. Discovering his master’s involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the noble duke, Zakrius is forced to run away, or suffer the sorcerer’s wrath. Under cover of night, he takes his only friend: a homely, mistreated serving-girl with a startling secret, and they begin a journey through the perilous and mystical ‘wilderland’. Pursued by a cunning bounty hunter, their path leads them to encounters with a myriad of eldritch beings: trolls, dryads, witches, gnomes and more.
Their goal -- the fabled red tower of Krimsonspire, home of the powerful wizard, Mathis, legendary for his honor and integrity. If anybody in the realm has the courage to stand up to the evil thane and his fief-wizard, it will be him. Unfortunately, rumors throughout the wilderland hint that Mathis' heart is as ruined as the citadel he still watches over -- the citadel he was charged with protecting... and failed.
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