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Greetings! Welcome to Planet Moderan. Pull up a rock, or a gravity-resistant
couch, or whatever you have on hand. Get comfortable, grab some refreshment, and
let me tell you a story...use the links above to travel
wherever you wish to, but be warned-here there be MONSTERS!
*insert big evil grin here*
I like monsters.
Monsters are my friends. They have kept me company most of my life, living under
my bed, in my closets, under the stairs, in the basement, and of course in my
gray matter.
Now that I'm an "adult", I like them no less. I like reading about them, I like seeing them drawn and portrayed on the tube, and most of all, I like creating them.
I'm not drawn just to any old monsters, though. I don't care for the way vampires have been twisted from nocturnal immortal predators to sexual surrogates, I don't have much to do with ghosts, and rarely deal with werewolves or other relatively normal creatures of the night.
When I was eight years old, I discovered HP Lovecraft, and the combination of science fiction and horror that he purveyed has always fascinated me. Though I write on a variety of topics, and in a variety of styles, the bulk of what I do exists in those strange hinterlands at the borders where sf and horror meet. I've even tried my hand at working in HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. Well, more than tried my hand. I've written twenty-two short stories, one really long novel, and innumerable lines of code within the Mythos. I'm the fiction editor and webmaster of the Cthulhu Mythos website Letters from Outside (LfO), and the originator and manager of the writers' workshop OutsideLookingOut (OLO), which caters to Mythos writers.
And I LOVE Science Fiction! I have more than five thousand sf books here in my lair, a collection that has taken me more than thirty years to amass, and more are always coming in. My favorites are Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Philip K Dick, and Larry Niven, and I am also inordinately fond of the dystopian cycle of John Brunner (Stand On Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider), which prefigured the cyberpunk genre of sf, and of the work and philosophies of Philip Jose Farmer, who once wrote that all fictional universes intersect at some point...
I'm also a big fan of the "noir" stories and novels of such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, et al, the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, and the unique storytelling talents of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, either alone or in tandem (best of all). Other comics are good, too. :-)
So those are some of my likes and influences, just in case you wanted to
know. I'm told that they show in my work, but you can be the judge of that. Just
click on one of the categories above, and...
Thanks for coming, and
enjoy!
