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

Books

Swim, Bike, Run, Live, Love, Repeat: A Story of Swimming, Family, & Belonging

My memoir is a story of loneliness, family, and the search for belonging, often in the unlikeliest of places. Yes, it's a West Point story. But it's not not a war story. It's about sports, camaraderie, and finding one's place in the world.

Friends, my memoir currently sits at 4.9 stars on Amazon with a whopping 17 reviews. Goodreads has it at as a straight-up 5-star book.

Sneakatara Boatman & 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.

“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 her father has planned for her. Elaina envies Sneax’s freedom but doesn’t understand that freedom's cost.

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. It has 4.6 stars with 10 reviews on Amazon. Goodreads has it at 4.5 stars. Based loosely on my kids' long-running D&D characters and on a vacation we took to Mount Desert Island, Maine, when they were little, folks have really liked this one.

The sequel, Sneakatara Boatman and the Crown of Pluto, came out way back in 2015. People didn't like that one as much, but I did. Alas. Speaking technically, it needed a "Save the Cat" moment.

Finally, there are two more Sneax-universe short stories:

Drakar & the Order of the Blackened Glaive (Google Drive PDF, co-starring Elaina Emboo)

Heroes: A Sneakatara Boatman Story (Google Drive PDF)

Older Stories

The Adventures of Hiro Arturian, Samurai

The Adventures of Hiro Arturian, Samurai was 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 book-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 him and his twin boys. He inspired large parts of this story.

If you're looking for an introduction to my work, this isn't a bad one. It's got the twisting story logic I often use, and it's free. The links here go to shared Google Drive file.

If you read this or any of the others, do me a favor and let me know what you think.

Russians

Back in my comic-making days, a friend asked me to write a short script for him to use in an anime-style illustration contest. Russians was the result.

We didn't win. But I've always liked this story. It's short, action-packed, and well-illustrated. Plus, I wound up recycling and reconstituting a bunch of these ideas, first for a short story called "Centurion Six" and later for The Return of Dr. Necropolis.

Recognizable today are both Frank's ex-wife Jaynie in her first appearance as well as the first appearance of Amphetamine Methyl-Phencyclidine, aka the combat drug AMP.

Find it here via shared Google Drive PDF.

Bronx Angel

Bronx Angel was my first book. It has all the problems that any first book has, but folks have also told me that it's held up well over the years. More than anything, it's about the costs of war.

We designed this first issue as a mini-comic prologue to the main three-issue story and then printed ashcans for the first New York City Comic Con. Artesia's Mark Smylie really liked it, and we made enough contacts that a now-defunct micro-publisher called Dakuwaka eventually made plans to republish it. But then my tiny start-up, Proletariat Comics, LLC, went out of business after our basement flooded, followed almost immediately by Dakuwaka itself. And here we are.

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

Born Leader is a straight-up war story. It wasn't some huge commercial success, but pretty much everybody who read it liked it.

You can read it yourself right now on a shared PDF via Google Drive.

The controversial follow-up to Born Leader, Politics By Another Method is my anti-war book, such as it is. It's not Fields of Fire, but I still think 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's perspective. You'll have to decide for yourself how well it succeeds.

The most important thing I learned from writing this story and especially from sharing it is that it's way easier to engage serious topics through the lens of science fiction and fantasy. When you start talking about real stuff in real world terms, you run the risk of turning people off before they ever even open your book's cover. To a certain extent, that happened here.

Plus, to paraphrase Sylvester Stallone after Rocky V came out, "People want to be lifted up, and I threw them off a cliff." Plenty of people do that in American fiction, but you have write like F. Scott Fitzgerald to get away with it.

Both Bronx Angel stories have truly outstanding art from Randy Valiente, and Manny Trembley did PBAM's outstanding cover. Honestly, the book is absolutely better than almost anything you'll find on the indie scene from a bunch of guys you've never heard of. I remain proud of it, even if a few folks who never opened it hated me for writing it in the first place.

Read it here via shared Google Docs file.