About This Site...

 I wrote a novel when I was 12. Probably it was more a novelette, but I thought of it as a novel. I spent all summer writing it. I wrote a first draft, futzed with it, then a finished draft. It was the early 60s, the Age of Bond, so I wrote a spy novel. It was set in La Paz, Bolivia. I'd seen photos in National Geographic and it looked like a suitably exotic locale. I remember nothing else about the story.

I wrote it on my first typewriter, which was approximately the age, size and weight of a '49 De Soto. My mother had taken me to a used typewriter shop in downtown Baltimore to pick it out. I remember wandering aisles of dusty shelves, scanning old typewriters of many descriptions before making my selection. I picked one that had a look of gravitas, a serious writing machine. The shop owner grinned. "Son, that thing weighs more than you do," he said. "Tell you what. If you can carry it to the counter I'll knock a few bucks off the price." My ears burning from what I perceived as mockery, I wrapped my arms around the thing, slid it off the shelf, and barely managed to get it to the front of the shop. He knocked a few bucks off the price.

It took up the entire surface of the student desk in my bedroom. I remember it had a sticky ; key and a period key that punched a hole through the ribbon every time I came to the end of a declarative sentence. I went through a lot of ribbons.

I finished the novel by the start of the new school year, and mailed it to a paperback publishing house in New York City that had put out a spy novel I enjoyed. Then I waited for the letter of acceptance and my first check. Instead, a few weeks later I got the manuscript back with what I later realized was a very kind note, informing me that the publisher only did paperback reprints of previously published hardcovers, and wishing me luck with the ms. elsewhere.

I was shattered. My first rejection as a writer. My whole summer wasted. In a fit of rage I ripped up the manuscript and tossed it. I wish I hadn't done that. I'd like to see what the twelve-year-old me wrote.

Despite the demoralizing start, I've been a writer ever since. It was another eight or nine years before I saw my first check, for a short story in the science fiction magazine Analog. I learned to take rejection better, if never well. Over the last couple of decades I've put a lot of journalism and several nonfiction books on public view (click here if you're interested in that), but almost none of my fiction. So I built this site as a place to put some of it.

A few notes:

I will be adding to this site periodically. If you want to get an alert whenever I do that, use the RSS feed at the bottom of the home page, or click here and send me your email address.

This site is for my fiction only. Please don't submit a story and force me to send you a rejection letter. We all hate rejection letters.

This site was designed for me by Frank Lusardi. Big thanks to him and to the artists who contribute original illustrations. I'm honored.