…writing reality with a loose thread
Upmarket fiction about identity, power, and the women navigating it.
Writing & Books
I wrote my first “novel” in 3rd grade, but it took me until… ahem… later (with a stack of messy first drafts and novel starts scattered around) to realize that writing was my passion. Now I have a polished book to query, five completed first drafts to work on, and enough ideas and starts to last the rest of my life. And the stack keeps growing — I’m going to have to live longer. :-)
By day, I’ve spent decades in technology and enterprise systems — enough years inside complex institutions to become fascinated by the stories people tell to survive them. I studied film, mathematics, information systems, and sociology, which probably explains a lot about both my fiction and my search history.
Not too long ago, a friend said, “You should get an MFA in writing.” I just laughed. Can you imagine? Another degree? I mentioned it to my wife, and she said, “That sounds like a great idea.” Hmmm…
I live in Maryland (suburban DC) with my lovely wife of many years, our teenaged son, and six cats (mistakes were made) in our dream mid-century modern house looking out into the woods through big windows.
Vivienne just wants a normal life, but her identical twin Orchid considers Vivienne a spare copy of herself, and she’s not afraid to use their psychic connection to manipulate and control Vivienne to get what she wants.
When Orchid is taken hostage, Vivienne’s own body suffers, showing bruises from Orchid’s beatings, and she sees glimpses of Orchid’s captors. Vivienne does everything she can to save Orchid, but she is too late, and Orchid dies.
The sisters’ connection, though, proves stronger than life and death… Orchid’s consciousness stays with Vivienne, and when it becomes clear that Orchid wants to use Vivienne’s body for her own second chance at life, the sisters struggle for control.
Orchid’s desire for power and wealth and her reckless faith in her own abilities force Vivienne to grapple with her own identity being subsumed by her sister’s—and breaking free could mean the end of one sister’s existence… or both.
These are some of my favorite books and ones that have influenced my own writing, in no particular order.
- Margaret Atwood: The MaddAddam Trilogy, Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye
- Toni Morrison: Sula, The Bluest Eye
- Octavia Butler: Lilith’s Brood, Parable of the Sower
- Stephen King: The Outsider
- Johanna Chambers: The Enlightenment Series
- Jordan L. Hawk: The Whyborne & Griffin Series
- KJ Charles: Henchmen of Zenda
- Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
- Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions
- Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky
- James S. A. Corey: The Expanse series
- Carolivia Herron: Thereafter Johnnie
- Alan Lightman: The Diagnosis, Einstein’s Dreams
- Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game
- David Morrell: The Protector, The Fifth Profession
- Christopher Moore: Lamb, A Dirty Job
- Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife
- Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
- William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch
- Casey McQuiston: One Last Stop
- Andy Weir: The Martian, Project Hail Mary
These are some books I’m working on — only the ones that have at least some words on paper. Enough to keep me busy for a while.
Larkin has one rule: ask what her Dad would have done. Then she meets a world full of people doing the wrong thing for the right reasons — and has to figure out if her rule still holds.
Larkin knows how to survive. She knows how to read a landfill, run a team, and make something from nothing. What she doesn’t know is people — why they lie, why they compromise, why the ones trying to do right keep doing wrong.
When someone she loves needs something only she can find, Larkin crosses a continent to get it. Every person she meets along the way is doing the wrong thing for reasons she can’t argue with. She’s spent her whole life asking what her father would have done. She’s about to find out the answer is more complicated than she knew.
If Oryx and Crake is the world after, Trash Girl is the world just before the point of no return.
Kate woke up in a hospital bed knowing her wife’s name and almost nothing else. The doctors called it amnesia. It wasn’t.
Kate has always kept her two lives separate — her marriage, her Seattle life, her job on one side, and her role in the Fairy Guard on the other. After nearly drowning in Puget Sound, the separation is complete. Someone took the Fae side entirely.
Now Kate knows objectively who she is without being able to feel any of it. She has a hidden identity she can’t access. Stolen memories she can’t retrieve. A wife who has never seen her whole self.
Getting herself back means choosing to stop living fractured. It may cost her her marriage, her safety, and her place in both worlds. But Kate is done letting other people decide which half of her gets to exist.
When a bureaucratic error declares her dead, a woman discovers that the life she’s been living wasn’t really hers anyway.
Lindsay has spent her whole life performing the version of herself her mother demanded. The only person who ever saw through it was Haley. And Haley is gone.
When an explosion destroys her office building and declares her dead along with it, Lindsay walks away. Gabrielle — the woman she becomes in the space that opens up — turns out to be someone Lindsay never had permission to be.
Katie rebuilt her life carefully after Greg dismantled her. Then Greg came back.
Katie is fine. Everything is fine.
It’s been two years since Greg left, telling her it had been fun, but he never really loved her. Two years since he returned to his big-city, high-paid job. Two years since her world quietly fell into a thousand pieces.
Now, Katie is stronger than ever. She’s moved to a quaint apartment in a converted Victorian — too many memories in the old place — and she has potluck with her bestie every Tuesday. She makes a meaningful impact on dozens of lives as a high school math teacher. She’s all about a bubble bath with a glass of wine in her clawfoot tub.
Everything is fine… is what Katie actually believes until she looks up from grading papers and Greg is standing in her classroom doorway.
Greg left the love of his life because he was too stupid to realize what he had was more important than a job and a title and a fancy condo in the city. By the time he figured it out, he was terrified it was too late. But he’d never let poor odds stop him — and he has uprooted his entire life to give him the best shot at winning Katie back.
Now he just has to convince the woman he shattered that the man who broke her is the same one who can make her whole.
Sex and the City meets About a Boy — urban, voice-driven, funny, a found family that sneaks up on everyone including the protagonist (and a French-speaking toddler with a stuffed seal.)
Leila has engineered her life to perfection. Good friends. Good scotch. No complications, no dependents, and absolutely no one who can blow up her carefully constructed routine.
Then her estranged sister Leisl shows up at 7am on a Monday with a toddler on her hip, a mountain of designer luggage, and absolutely no warning. Bryce is two and a half, speaks exclusively French, and comes with a stuffed seal named Phoque. Leisl is gone by noon.
What follows involves inflatable Winnie the Pooh costumes, a broken hand, the most judgmental Mommy and Me group in Washington DC, more boxed mac and cheese than any human should consume, and four adults who discover — entirely against their will — that they have accidentally become a family.
She spent years being the chaos to his calm. Dying turns out to be the thing that finally stills her — and undoes him entirely.
Tilly has been living the 90s DC punk scene for a decade — with a vengeance. One day countercultural starts looking… lonely.
Sarah Rice just wanted to give a little girl a home. She didn’t know the little girl came with enemies.
A queer literary retelling of Frankenstein told from Robert Walton’s perspective — the letters he wrote, and the ones he couldn’t send.
1990: Sarah McLachlan or AC/DC. That’s what one girl raised in a small southern town realizes she can decide for herself at her northern progressive college.
When her estranged mother dies, a young woman inherits a house, a stranger in the driveway, and the punk community that knew her mother better than she did — and has to decide what to do with all three.
She was promoted to the most classified research facility in the world. The “scientists” there are solving climate change, curing cancer, and eliminating any human who can’t keep up — and she’s the only one with a connection to the outside.
Faith O’Connor has spent her career treating people who commit atrocities in God’s name. Then something walks into her office — impossible to explain, impossible to ignore — and she realizes she can’t tell anyone what she’s seeing without becoming her own next patient.
Inside the dome, everything is controlled and nothing dies. Outside it, one scientist is willing to sacrifice everything to save the wild, and she’s running out of time.
A journey of discovery (and some suspected money laundering, some mistaken intentions, and one hell of an idea for a side hustle) for the woman who does the books and her besties who knit at lunch.
What happens to a girl who can read and navigate a landscape better than anyone around her, when early 19th-century society keeps trying to force her into a container that doesn’t fit?
