Back on Mother’s Day in 2021, our car got into a minor kerfuffle with another car. No one was hurt, the other people were nice and helpful, and anyone who works at Echelon Insurance can burn in hell – moving on. The nice responders asked me if I was injured. Since I had all my limbs and wasn’t bleeding, I said I was fine. We had a Mother’s Day event to go to, and I heal like Wolverine 99 times out of 100.
As it turned out, I lied. By the time we got home, my right knee was the size of a healthy melon. I figured I’d rub some dirt on it and be fine. Well, I wasn’t. By the time I saw my orthopedic surgeon, X-rays showed that my knee cap had been split and healed, and that my hip was going through some stuff. Part of it from the accident, and part of it due to my arthritis. Not enough for it to join an Emo band, but it was worrisome.
Worrisome enough that my doctor petitioned my insurance to have it replaced. They said no. And thus began my journey into pain killers, agony specialists, yes, they exist, not just in medieval dungeons, pain so severe I ended up getting help from a mental health professional, you’d like her, and my mobility kept decreasing.
Flash forward four years.
In the fall of 2025, my pain doc took an X-ray of my hip (you can see it below) and noted that I was nearing 0% usuable bone in that location. Three of my docs, Ortho #1, PCP, and Agony Man, coordinated their efforts and found me a guy whose waiting list has a waiting list. When he saw the X-ray, he assumed amateurs had made a mistake. So he called me in, took twenty-five images, and rendered his judgment.
“This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
Agonizingly long story short(er), on Thursday morning, I go in to get a new hip joint, a new hip socket, and half a pelvis. If you have half a prayer to spare, I’d appreciate part of it being aimed my way.
The nice thing about being an invalid is having time to write. And, thanks to them finally taking away my blood pressure medicines – yeah, way too many – I am once again the heat-seeking sci-fi stud your therapist warned you about.
So, here we go.
The Darkling Wind will be in the hands of the editor around Valentine’s day, and The Plato Wars is on pace to hit this summer. While Darkling is a stand-alone story, Plato rips you face-first back into The Brittle Riders universe. And, finally, just in time for the holidays, you get to meet Edward Q. Rohta and his merry band of hedonistic sycophants, who will bring about the end of all things, as far as humans are concerned, in the gen-O-pod(™) Wars.
The Darkling Wind – As diplomats, military officials, religious zealots, and desert spies race to understand what’s happening, the line between gift and weapon begins to blur. Is this benevolence from the stars – or a biological first strike wrapped in pheromones and pleasure? Satirical, outrageous, and deeply human, The Darkling Wind explores how society, aging, and power unravel when faced with a technology that bypasses logic and speaks directly to desire.
The Plato Wars – The Plato Wars take place in a world where philosophy has outlived humanity and become digitized and weaponized. The ultimate cybernetic goal, a unified global interface, has been created, and its name is Plato. Ideals once debated in lecture halls are now enforced through territory, and war, as rival factions interpret ancient philosophies as doctrine, destiny, or justification for conquest. As tensions escalate, alliances fracture along ideological lines rather than species or geography. What begins as localized conflict soon expands into a global struggle, where the question is no longer who or what deserves to rule, but whether the ideas guiding this rule were ever meant to survive contact with reality. In a world programmed into Plato which has been shaped by inherited dogma and living consequences, The Plato Wars explores how belief hardens into law, law into violence, and whether any society can escape the shadow of the thinkers who imagined it.
the gen-O-pod(™) Wars – Earth’s alien guests, The Sominids, proved that faster-than-light travel was a myth. One that made civilizations rise and fall. After they accidentally split the moon in half and killed most of the settlers there, they left. Denied AI thanks to The Plato Wars and denied the stars thanks to science, humanity started to fade away. Into this slurry of dismay came Edward Q. Rohta. He created chimeras he called gen-O-pods(™) that people could fuck, kill, or do whatever they wanted with. Humans were proud again. Proven rulers of all they surveyed. Until the chimeras rose up and killed every man, woman, and child on the planet. This is their story.
Oh, wow, will you look at the time? That’s enough of me. Go back and enjoy the real world. Until we do this again, remember you are wonderful.
