Strange dystopian thoughts creep into my conscious as I walk down the city street. People stay a little back from each other—hands in pockets. No one hits the button to cross the intersection at the circle. The church looms ahead. The structure, all brick with heaven reaching spires, crosses time from 1874 until the urban now. The city seems quieter as I approach. I don’t know why I am here. When my mother was alive, she had wanted me to get baptized. The Episcopal church she

Tenacity is the key to the submission process. The publishing world is fairly small and is slowly being eaten away by changes in commerce and technology. Even with the advent of e-books, real books prevail to some extent. Traction is hard to come by in self-publishing. One of the problems I have faced is my books in print were previous published making them reprints more or less. Throughout the years, I have continued to push forward with submissions in hopes of a breakthroug

In 2017, I took over all my past projects. The first I released was Anarchy - Strange Tales of Outsiders, on Friday the 13th, in January of that year. The book spans the earliest beginnings of my work, Where the Road Roams (2009), to the more recent, The Carny Cage (2017), and marked the start of my website and other DS releases that followed. Anarchy is fitting turn on my writing journey. It took me a long time to figure out my genre. My books were hard to peg with horror, w

Deep in the woods, the trees are stirring to life on Arbor Day. The Vixens: Angelic Angie, Rachel Rage, Nurse Candy Stripes, Dirty Dixie, Pretty Black Panther, and Mistress Melon-EE, are undefeated on the backwoods wrestling circuit. That is until their Winnebago crashes and they come face to face with Tree Thing, an aberration of the forest. Their salvation lies in Ranger Rick, a one-eyed German Shepherd, and their wrestling skills. Who will survive the smackdown? Timber Tan

I had lost my way for a while, not realizing it as it was happening. I think the only life I allowed myself was through writing. I am not saying I did not live just not to the fullest while I hunkered down and wrote Rebel’s Edge. All three manuscripts were completed as I travelled for work. The chaos of modern life was forgotten as I remembered a punk life once lived and a teenage self lost to time. The relief and emptiness of finishing the three books and the curse of not be

In 1998, I was visiting San Francisco and exploring the Castro District. It was gentrifying some at that time, but the neighborhood still held its gay charm. I have always been drawn to the dark side of things and in the shadows of the enclave of the BART train station I found an angry piece of graffiti. Spray-painted on the wall in blood red was the inscription, “Burn the AZT Death Tarp!” Twenty-one years ago the epidemic was just being slowed with the advance of new drugs,

I am coming to the end of the first wave of my writing. Fifteen years ago I started with screenplays, first for a short film, Spike. The finished project did not have the budget for the shadow people and was definitely on the fly. I wanted to follow it up with a Warhol style short that is now lost to time. I kept writing and dove into a feature screenplay, Tracer, about growing up as a punk. Looking back, it was rough but had moments. I remember seeing the film Tarnation and

Life is in constant flux. Right now I am writing the final part of my Rebel’s Edge series, Over the Edge. I started on it right after finishing the second one last summer and, with work and other commitments, it has taken longer than I had originally planned. The important thing is that it is almost done and will mark an end to a period of my writing that started ten years ago with Where the Road Roams. My first wave of books on my own imprint, DS, was released in 2017. I am

I have always had a love for film. In my youth, I almost directed a primitive version of my short story, The Deadfall. I had plans in 1989. I was going to rent a camcorder and do it myself, in the line of the direct to video films of the time like Truth or Dare, Blood Cult, The Ripper (with Tom Savini), and Boarding House. I saw pictures in Fangoria of these home made films and sought them out on VHS. Honestly, they all were pretty bad, but if they could get made, why couldn’

Nostalgia entices with echoes of the past. Human nature has me always trying to recreate a lost feeling, mostly subconsciously. Traveling to a place, Santa Cruz, I have been before to find it changed by progress, going to a concert of a once epic band, Depeche Mode, to hear a cracked voice of an aging star, or seeing a new movie, Halloween, that hits a few familiar tropes and has a great score but is not actually scary like the original are all examples of what feeds nostalgi