Rthing It Up

Happy to announce that this month (May, 2025) Lightspeed Magazine features a new short story of mine, with the somewhat awkward title, Rthing It Up: An Oral History. 

Yes, I know the awkward title is entirely my own fault, but I promise it makes sense almost immediately. So run on over and read it—or listen, if you prefer, as there is an audio version— and then come back here and we’ll talk some more.

The story of the story

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my creative process, because I don’t fully understand it myself, but what can happen, on occasion, is that I say to myself, “self, I desperately need something to work on at this moment in time,” and then I get an idea and yada-yada-yada, I have a story.

In this particular instance, the need for something to write came out of a very peculiar set of circumstances: it was December, 2023, and my wife and I were spending the Christmas season in a hotel while helping settle the estate of a family member who had just passed away. My job was making sure everyone had food, which frankly meant a lot of free time with my laptop. Also going on, in my head, was fragments of an oral history I was reading about Hollywood, the ingestion of an alarming number of terrible stories about what was happening in Gaza, plus my own thoughts on colonialism in general, and I don’t know what else. (Vague memories of World War Z (book not movie) were probably a factor too, for the way it was written.)

Anyway, what I came out with was, wouldn’t it be fun to write an oral history of the invasion of Earth, but told from the perspective of the invading force.

And, it was fun!

(Mild spoiler: Rthing It Up includes what I consider the funniest sentence I have ever written.)

Anyway, if you didn’t take the time up top to cut over to to the story, maybe now you should!

There Is No Cat

Since we’re talking about short stuff already, I want to draw your attention to the short fiction collection I will be publishing next month (June, 2025) called There Is No Cat: Schrödinger’s Catastrophe and other stories. There, you will find five previously published short pieces (all with Lightspeed Magazine, my publishing home-away-from-home, it seems) and two previously unpublished stories, plus an introduction and a nice cover and so on.

It’s a pretty disparate collection of stories that came out of my asking myself for something to write, and my self responding. Preorder it now…!

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