This Red Business
A mythic, character-driven fantasy novel about a tattooed badger, her fractured found family, and a frontier city on the edge of revolution.
This Red Business blends the folkloric intimacy of Watership Down, the warmth of Legends & Lattes, and the moral grace of The Goblin Emperor, with a streak of Pratchettian mischief and old-soldier heartbreak.
At the heart of the story is Pumpkin: an ex-revolutionary, recovering addict, prison escapee, and deeply reluctant hero who must decide whether the city that broke her is still worth saving.
Themes:
Memory. Found family. Revolution. Recovery. Civic courage. The stubborn work of choosing hope.
Status:
Complete.
Fimbulwinter
A Norse-Irish mythic fantasy novel about the end of the world, the burden of memory, and two wounded survivors trying to carry fire through the snow.
In the year 901, as the followers of the White Christ reckon time, the Great Winter has swallowed the northern world. The sun and moon are gone. Wolves prowl the dead villages. The gods are fading. Ragnarok is no longer prophecy, but weather.
Kori Oddbjornsson, last survivor of the winter-doomed village of Two Trees, flees with little more than a white bear cloak, a sack of books, and the names of the dead he refuses to let vanish. He is a berserker who will not fight, a young jarl of nothing, and the unwilling keeper of a ruined people’s memory.
On the road, he meets Idunn: a fierce, grieving young shield-woman caught between Norse and Irish worlds, heathen and Christian inheritance, vengeance and survival. Together, with an ill-tempered orange cat named Loki and the runes of dead gods at their side, they must cross a frozen Ireland of ringforts, monasteries, sea-roads, old gods, and older monsters.
Fimbulwinter is a story of myth after catastrophe: of Odin as a broken patron, of Irish gods stirring in the snow, of Christian monks keeping warmth in the dark, and of two young people learning that survival itself can be a sacred duty.
Themes:
Memory. Grief. Ragnarok. Syncretic faith. Trauma. Mercy. The refusal to become what hurt you.
Status:
Complete draft.
The Exempla
A cycle of literary Roman exempla about civic virtue, memory, duty, and the fragile soul of a republic.
These stories return to the old Roman tradition of exempla: moral episodes from history, retold not as marble lessons, but as living human moments. They are written for an American audience in a time of civic dread, exhaustion, anger, and remembrance.
Each story takes a figure from the Roman Republic and asks what their virtue cost them. Not what they symbolize from a distance, but what it felt like to stand inside the duty itself.
In “Remember the Republic,” Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is summoned from his farm to serve as dictator in Rome’s hour of need. He accepts the terrible power of emergency command, saves the Republic, and then lays the fasces down again. The story asks what it means to refuse the crown when the world is begging for strongmen.
In “Not Gold but Iron,” Marcus Furius Camillus returns to a Rome shattered by the Gauls and finds his people tempted to abandon the ruined city for safer walls. Among ashes, dead senators, sacred geese, and the fire of Vesta, he argues that a republic cannot be carried away like furniture. Some things must be rebuilt where they fell.
The Roman Stories are about civic courage without nostalgia, patriotism without idolatry, and memory as an act of resistance.
Themes:
Republican virtue. Duty. Anti-tyranny. Memory. Sacrifice. Rebuilding after ruin. The moral danger of surrendering citizenship to fear.
Status:
Ongoing short fiction cycle.
Short Stories
A growing body of standalone speculative stories about haunted places, wounded people, old powers, and the strange grace of finding shelter.
My short fiction moves between worlds: the fog-drenched frontier forests of Ascham, the occult battlefields of the Cold War, the myth-haunted ruins of Rome, and the private interiors of characters trying to survive what history has done to them.
In “A Place to Call Home,” Whissen Foss, a battered gnome veteran with a bad-tempered bear named Moose, stumbles into the deep woods after a storm and begins the slow work of building a home. The forest watches. The Neighbors test her. Piece by piece, stone by stone, the house becomes an act of healing.
In “Black Maria,” Sam Stone arrives in winter-dark Hallstatt to investigate an innkeeper screaming in Russian about vanished prisoners and black vans. What waits there is not merely a ghost, but a system of erasure given shape: Soviet terror, bureaucratic murder, and the spiritual violence of being made to disappear.
Other stories explore Jewish memory and folklore in postwar Vienna, Roman civic virtue, old gods, queer little frontier communities, monsters as historical wounds, and the humor that survives when everything else has been stripped away.
These are stories of witnesses, survivors, exiles, veterans, archivists, ghosts, and people stubborn enough to keep a fire lit.
Themes:
Memory. Home. Folklore. Trauma. Monsters. Moral courage. Found family. History as haunting.
Status:
Ongoing.