Casa Cabeza: Books

It's a brave new world of publishing, and I've been into it since before e-readers were a thing. If you want to know more about me and my work, you've come to the right place.

Sneakatara Boatman and the Priest of Loki

Wanderhaven is the city with everything, the gateway to the world and the capital of the Kingdom of the Western Isles. The streets are hard, though, and for a teenaged street-urchin named Sneakatara Boatman, they can be cruel, too. “Sneax” will do anything to escape the grinding poverty and hopelessness she’s known all her life. On most days, she’s lucky just to survive. Sneax’s lone friend is an apprentice wizard named Elaina Emboo, a rich girl from a nice family who hates the life that her father has planned for her. Elaina envies Sneax’s freedom but doesn’t understand what all that freedom actually costs.

When the infamous fire elf smuggler Draks comes to town, Sneax gets a chance to maybe change her life. But change is dangerous, and a fire elf will kill you as soon as look at you.

Sneakatara Boatman and the Priest of Loki is out now on Amazon.Com for the Kindle and Kindle app. The follow-up, Sneakatara Boatman and the Crown of Pluto, will be out sometime in 2015. After that, I'll be publishing a print version that collects the complete work into a single volume.

"The Adventures of Hiro Arturian, Samurai" is a webcomic project that I did with artist/photgrapher Kevin Fraga. We had a lot more story planned, but sometimes life gets in the way of comic making. Still, I like the way this first issue came out, and it has an ending of sorts. The fight never ends; duty is never satisfied.

One of my old roommates, Chris, has become one of the most successful aviation officers of our generation. This story is dedicated to his twin boys.

Bronx Angel: Born Leader

Bronx Angel was supposed to be a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, set in the Bronx. I started writing the story as a captain in Korea but recast it in as a comic in a modern setting in 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq.

"Born Leader" is a straight-up war story. I wrote it as a prologue to Politics By Another Method and then printed it as an ashcan before the first NYC Comic Con. It wasn't some huge commercial success, but pretty much everybody who read it liked it.

Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method

The controversial follow-up to "Born Leader", Politics By Another Method is my anti-war book. It's not Fields of Fire, but I hope it has something to say. I wrote it shortly after leaving the Army, at about the same time that my father was trying--and failing--to come to grips with his own experiences in the Marine Corps and with his transition to civilian life. PBAM tries to capture the costs of war from the individual soldier's perspective, but you'll have to decide for yourself how well it succeeds.

Regardless, if this story has anything to teach, it's that fiction needs to be uplifting to be commercially successful. I've never been the best of judge of my own writings' success, and this story is an example of why. I've been a little better and a little happier writing crazier, more fanciful stories about would-be hobbits and superheroes, but I regret how difficult it is to engage meaningful topics with Young Adult fiction.

Cover art for Awesome Storm Justice 41 #22.

Awesome Storm Justice 41 is a shared webcomic project developed by my friend Steve. Steve is a working lawyer living in Canada, and he got busy in the middle of production for the project's first story arc, so he asked me to come in and finish the arc, and then he liked that work so much that he asked me to keep going with the story. I wound up writing six episodes of what would become a twenty-eight chapter work-in-progress, and in the course of that stint changed the direction of the comic.

ASJ-41 is about as commercial as my work gets. If you wanna see what I do with superheroes, well, here it is.

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