Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I’m an author of weird horror, sword & sorcery, and science fiction and at the expense of possibly sounding trite, I’ve been writing since shortly after I was yanked kicking and screaming into this world. When I first learned to read and write, I would draw these superhero-horror “comics.” I for some reason wrote around the edge of the page in a square, instead of straight across, narrating my drawing in the middle. At least at first. I think the later issues changed format as I developed cognitively. It was a series about a character wearing a pharaoh mask and when he removed it, it revealed a single giant eyeball (like a member of The Residents, though I was of course not familiar with them at the time) and would result in an uncontrollable discharge of energy that would bloodily kill everyone around him. In retrospect it must have been a mashup of Cyclops, who I would have seen on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and Serpentor who was then appearing on the only G.I. Joe story arc that really spoke to me which was the batshit sci-fi one.

Since then? Writing has always played a role in my life. Regardless of what music scene I was involved in at any point, or whatever intellectual or artistic or philosophical or cinematic movement I was delving into, it was always in the back of my head that writing fiction would be my real, eventual creative contribution in life. Even at 11 or 12 I already had some pretty romantic notions about writing fiction—some which probably limited me, some which might persist to this day. For many, many years I was writing fiction here and there but not really nailing it, starting and stopping and walking around radiating palpable frustration with the whole endeavor. Early on I felt like a story was always on the tip of my tongue. The words and the concepts were there for me but the craft and the structure came sporadically if at all. Around 2010 I started writing a lot of odd-shaped, unsellable stories filled with too much thinking. I was getting there. I eventually figured out how to make stories work, through trial and error, a bit of close observation of solid storytellers, but mostly the mechanics of storytelling sort of somehow spontaneously clicked. I can remember when it happened, but I am not quite certain how or why. I have a couple of different theories.

In 2018, after about 10 years of trying to sell my fiction in earnest, I made my first sale to Doug Draa for the relaunched Startling Stories. I sold one to him for Weirdbook the following year. Both came out in 2021, and I also had a Cthulhu Mythos horror-comedy come out in Gavin Chappell’s Lovecraftiana in 2021, and some other stories in themed anthologies. I’ve continued to get published in magazines and anthologies since then, and here I am.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
I’ve been an avid fan of horror, science fiction, and their sub-genres/sub-sub-genres basically my entire life. While I was never a D&D player and can’t purport to have been the REH fan many other s&s authors were/are (the “weird stuff” that resonated with me earliest was The Twilight Zone, slasher/sci-fi-horror movies, Troma movies, etc., placing me closer to the Lovecraft side of the Weird Tales dichotomy), writing more secondary-world fiction lately has gotten me thinking about where s&s entered my lexicon. I hadn’t fully appreciated until recently how a lot of what I watched on TV at a very young age was some kind of sword & sorcery/sword & planet tale. The cynic might say “some kind of toy commercial,” but when you read the lineups of writers on those cartoons, the big shows and the ones with six-episode runs, the people who wrote them were published all over in genre fiction and were filtering those traditions of s&s, sci-fi, and horror into the cartoon medium to be enjoyed by an emerging new audience—weird little kids like me. So though I now write fiction that I consider adult (and couldn’t write something kid-focused if I tried, I don’t think) I believe my experience of the genre begins there. I was a fully addicted 8-bit Nintendo fanatic and I assume the countless hours I clocked playing Rygar (which remains an underappreciated classic) had some impact on my imagination. I played MUDs on the early internet, I read Tolkien (I know, not s&s) when I was 12 until hitting that Silmarillion-shaped wall. While I haven’t read a Marvel comic since about 1993, I was in the late-’80s and early-’90s an avowed “Marvelite,” and one occasionally found clanging steel in some of those comics. I think the stuff above was so formative at such a young age that it’s now embedded deep in the background of my mind, as a sort of vibration or an intuition about what it is to tell an episodic story. Which is a good distance to be from it when I’m writing s&s, having the vague sensibility there without anything specific bleeding into my work.

It’s funny—I have been thrilled to see my s&s getting mentioned favorably in the same breath as Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance. I take even these comparisons made in passing to these esteemed figures as the highest form of compliment, but honestly I’ve only read one Vance novel and maybe two stories by the High Priest Klarkash-Ton. I really can’t point to them as influences. If anything since I’ve been writing more s&s, I’ve been influenced by stuff like René Laloux, insofar as La Planète sauvage, etc. really push how imaginative and weird they can get with imagery and concepts while maintaining a coherent, internally consistent narrative.

I also have a lot of influences outside of genre fiction which I think also might help me avoid being derivative, since I’m not looking to any one author or work for ideas or direct stylistic inspiration.

One of my biggest influences is probably the 19th century European novel. The psychological realism that you find in Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Flaubert. Literature that fixates on what drives people; their self-delusion, how their desires work at cross purposes with their own best interests, and the complexity of human relationships. Stories that aim to describe people as they actually are, rather than how they would ideally think of themselves. I think such literature starts earlier too, in the late-18th century with Goethe (also an influence). Not that I reach those heights (or depths), but my stories in contemporary settings do often feature characters who are in some way conflicted and deluding themselves about their own motivations. I think in part that’s just how I see people behaving in the world and so that’s how I think of characters. I also dig authors who tried to paint full pictures of their societies and how people acted and why--Balzac, Turgenev, Zola… Naturally s&s is a bit different from any of this, but maybe these influences rear their head in my s&s too, in ways I’m not aware of, or maybe they will some day.

Other big influences? I watch a lot of classic international/art house cinema, and I think the influence of some of my favorite directors, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Max Ophuls, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Haneke, Béla Tarr, and others finds its way into my writing in different ways, likewise with slasher movies and Euro-horror/Italian gore movies. And I can’t forget Shaun of the Dead. It was a revelation for me when it came out. Then there’s Lovecraft, Moorcock (particularly Dancers at the End of Time), J.G. Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Edward Gibbon, too, though I’ve only finished reading four books of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I think I could do a full, separate interview to discuss each of these figures’ influence!

With self-publishing easier than ever, there are tons of books being released every day. What makes your work stand out from the crowd? What can readers get out of your work that they can’t from anyone else?
The answer may be slightly different for “real world” fiction and secondary-world fiction, but there’s overlap. In “real world” stories I try to use locations and parts of life and sometimes kinds of media with which we inundate ourselves, that feel hidden in plain sight to me. I try to depict conflicted emotional realities, too, that simmer under the surface of life. If I can achieve some relatable depth or illustrate an element of life that a reader hasn’t seen on the page before, then that’s amazing, though I think the reader has the final say on if my work stands out singularly in that capacity! I think my sense of humor brings a lot to my stories when I use it, too.

Beyond that, I try to keep the reader reading and guessing. So whether it’s slice-of-life weird horror or dark heroic fantasy, I try to set up and pay off a twist or an image a reader couldn’t possibly anticipate. If someone reads one of my stories and says, where the hell is this stuff coming from? This author’s on some other shit, I do feel good about that. But the weirdness has to be justified within the story and compelling, not just a gimmick.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
I’ve just been trying to keep writing new stories and selling them to anthologies that I’m excited about. I do interviews (like this one), both for promotional purposes and because I enjoy talking about my craft and my interests, but when I’m speaking I sometimes get very nervous, and then I’ll misspeak or feel like I’ve been unclear about something and get more nervous. Even when I’m typing and can review it, I get concerned that I have conveyed something imperfectly. I think maybe I just need to be interviewed more frequently to get more comfortable with it. 

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
It depends on the story and if I’m writing it with an anthology call directly in mind or if it’s just an idea that occurs to me. The editor is the first audience an author wants to impress, right?

I think writing in different genres lets me try out different concepts and experiment stylistically, formally, and with different kinds of settings and characters. For instance my sci-fi/horror story in last year’s Strange Aeon anthology, “Song To…” is half told in a very expressionistic, lyrical style, which depicts a character’s experience of a particular state of mind, and the other half is told as a pretty deadpan police procedural, and the latter characters encounter the first one from a different angle. I think that narrative parallax is sort of a Joycean technique. But I certainly don’t do stuff like that all the time. I don’t think I’d do something like that in an s&s story unless an editor was asking for it. And I’m only interested in such techniques to the extent that they carry the story and let the reader enjoy putting the puzzle together. Style and form are tools to accentuate the story, not to show off or try to bamboozle.

Beyond that my fiction just varies depending on what I’m going for. Sometimes it’s lyrical, sometimes it’s urbane, sometimes it’s noirish, sometimes it’s madcap. As long as the movement of the characters and prose and the level of psychological depth consistently fit the parameters of the world I’ve created for the story, and appropriate for the kind of story, I’m happy with it. In a way I think just writing more is the key to being comfortable experimenting. There is always an opportunity to write another story and try something different.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
I’ve got “The Tears of Blood” out in Die By The Sword, and in February I made my second appearance in Lovecraftiana with a weird science/Mythos horror novelette titled “The Study of Worms”. I should have a horror-comedy out soon in the cosmic horror anthology from Eerie River Publishing curated by Tim Mendees, and I’ve got another story coming in Lovecraftiana later this year too. Next year sometime I’ve got one coming out in Chthonic Matter. I’m always working on new stories—if I finish two in a month I feel like I’ve had a good month, though I’ve not been accomplishing that month-over-month as frequently as I’d like to lately. I write pretty quickly and usually the editor I submit a story to is the first person to see it. I feel like it’s an important part of writing, for me at least, to have a sense of when my own work is in good enough shape to print. I don’t often discuss what I am currently working on or stories that I haven’t sold, but I will say, for those who enjoyed my story in DBTS, that I have already revisited the Kingdom of K’Zal again. Where that story will show up, one never knows.

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
Basically all of the new-new stuff I read is small press anthologies and I am having trouble deciding which one to mention, so for “new” I’d like to go farther back to 1998. While I don’t follow new Star Wars stuff, I was a big fan as a kid in the ‘80s, and was then frothing about it around when the Special Editions came out in ‘96. Earlier this year I read a Star Wars EU novel for the first time since high school, to see how it held up. The novel was the first Boba Fett one by KW Jeter. It was fascinating to read a novel like that from my current perspective, appreciating it as contract work for a jobbing author rather than just seeing it as a branded product. Jeter is known for cyberpunk, and you can totally catch where the Lucas-isms end and the cyberpunk-isms work their way in. At the same time there are scenes that your mind’s eye can’t see as anything but Star Wars. I can’t imagine the author considers it his finest work, but it’s an interesting artifact and it must have been fun as hell to write.

For an old one, I’m making my way through Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and while I’m not finished yet, it’s a total hoot. Monty Python 430 years before Monty Python, only much dirtier!

Any final words?
Thank you so much for asking me to do this interview, and thanks to anyone out there who has enjoyed one of my stories! This interview series has become one of my favorite things to read online, as I am continually impressed with the sheer variety and uniqueness of sword & sorcery authors’ influences, experiences, perspectives on and reasons for writing, and creative visions. I can only hope that I have added to that with my contribution!