Writing and me

I write from my home in mid-Michigan.  During the summers of 2012 and 2013, I’m sure I wrote a few lines in London, Oxford, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands, and I certainly wrote in airports and planes along that trajectory.  Occasionally I can be found writing in Lexington, Kentucky, or from various points in Ohio.  Originally from Toledo, I’m a Midwesterner all the way.

Fiction

Currently I’m working on…too many writing projects.  One is an untitled novel I began for National Novel Writing Month 2010.  For a number of years it was my main writing project.  And then I strayed.  Now that untitled novel has several newer casts of characters as competitors for my affections – and my time.

In my first NaNo project, The Artist’s Wife (begun 2009), I challenged myself to try contemporary literary fiction, limiting my sci-fi/fantasy roots to dream sequences and magic realist elements.  Since 2009, I’ve kept loosely to the container of literary fiction while growing the magic realism.  However, in November 2015, the magic realism began stretching its vines a little further toward contemporary fantasy.  And I still return to work on projects which are firmly rooted in sci-fi and fantasy.  Like I said, too many projects!

[Don’t be a] Teasers

Of the Desert, begun in very different form in 2001, is set on a non-Earth world.  An extended cast of characters explores social structures, international politics, gender, mysticism, and identity.  Imagine a character-driven Dune meeting women’s & gender studies halfway through a literary fiction tale of artists, academics, common folk, and revolutionaries.

From childhood and adolescence, I’ve been fascinated with medieval history, culture, and stories, through both historical fiction and works of medieval literature.  It naturally follows that I (like everybody else) have a variation on Arthurian/Grail legends.  Mine is located in some type of lineage starting with Sir Thomas Malory’s middle English medieval romance Le Morte d’Arthur and moving through Marion Zimmer Bradley’s feminist and neo-pagan revisioning of Grail legend in The Mists of Avalon.

Threads which connect all of my projects include strong literary fiction and magic realist tendencies combined with a deep appreciation for the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and historical fiction, as well as an abiding interest in writing gender, sexual, and queer identities through fiction.

Please see the “Writing” drop-down menu for some excerpts.