Testimonial Archives

I am honored to have won the Gold award for Best Unpublished Short Story in the 2022 Royal Palm Literary Awards of the Florida Writers Association. The story is part of the Tales of Verdant anthology.

“Fishing Hands” tells of Marta Bloom’s struggle to be accepted as captain of her father’s fishing boat in the Islands of Winter. She fights both a skeptical mate and the huge, dangerous tsifta fish, one of which took her father’s foot.

After this story came close to winning last year, I worked extensively with international award-winning author Mark Newhouse to revise it. I thank him for his most excellent assistance.

I am honored to have been selected to participate as a first reader for submissions to the online magazine “Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.” The selection was based on submitted samples of my writing and critiques. As a first reader, I assist the editors in working through the plethora of submissions received each month.

I am very excited that Writers of the Future selected one of my stories as a Semi-Finalist. WotF is a highly-recognized international contest that receives thousands of entries each quarter. SF level puts this story in the top few of those thousands, with only eight Finalists deemed better.

• 3rd Quarter 2023: “The Twisty Little Job, All Different” tells of Ethan Webb, a successful app developer, who is honored with a job at the most creative company in the world. When he gets there, though, he finds the company so disorganized that he doesn’t know how to make progress. Even the hallways and offices change every day.

I’ve also been pleased to have gained seven Honorable Mentions in the quarterly contests. HM puts these stories in the top 10-15%.

• 2nd Quarter 2025: “Magic for a Magician” follows the down-on-his-luck stage magician Flash Fortuna, now reduced to kiddie parties, as he discovers some dangerous real magic in an antique book.
• 2nd Quarter 2024: “Flimflam Clyde and the Floggy Gold” in which Clyde Wandon, itinerant flimflam man, runs afoul of the flying froggy people in the upper atmosphere of Bright while running balloon tours of the floating forests.
• 1st Quarter 2023: “Immaculate Degeneration” brought us Reb Fenet Powrfaith, a miracle worker in a theocracy that doesn’t believe in miracles. Yet Fenet is losing his power, taken away by his god Elláh for reasons he doesn’t understand. This story is in the anthology Tales of Verdant and also becomes the opening for my second novel Khubar f’Elláh, the follow-on in the Empathic Humanity series started by Not Like Us.
• 3rd Quarter 2022: “To Go or Not To Go” shows how Lisa and Chris Westhof get into conflict whether to sign up for the new colonization ship. Chris is excited to go, while Lisa’s career is just taking off right where she is. This story is part of the anthology Tales of Verdant.
• 1st Quarter 2022: In “Someone Worth Saving,” Captain George Sayers takes his starship Bright Past to the planet he left in disgrace ten years earlier. He wants to reconnect with his now-adult daughter, but finds instead that the planet is destroying itself in a devastating biowar.
• 4th Quarter 2021: “A Shot Full of Courage” tells of Rick Gander, who never wanted to sign up for the Army of Mankind but finds himself hot in a battle to save the people on One Hope.
• 3rd Quarter 2021: “Legal Incontinence” follows Detectives Soren Moller and Manny Hong as they work around the constantly-changing laws in the chaotic pure democracy of Tileus. “Legal Incontinence” is a part of the anthology Tales of Verdant.