My Writing
Who Am I
I'm a software engineer who has spent his career working on public interest causes. I've equipped primatology expeditions investigating the impact of eco-tourism on chimpanzee health. I've designed systems to survey refugee needs in humanitarian crises, document pesticide use in sensitive ecosystems, and track the spread of vector-borne infectious agents.
My career has been about bringing analytical rigor and craft to projects that matter. For the past decade, I've been applying that same discipline to fiction writing, and I'm about to publish my first novel. You can get a sample of my writing by checking out this free short story:
Also, click the subscribe button at the top of the page if you want notification when The Keystone debuts on Amazon. Don't worry, I'm too busy writing to blast your email inbox, I expect to send only a handful of emails per year.
Writing What I Know
Writers often hear the advice: "write what you know." That's good advice, but in speculative fiction we have to apply it selectively, because we write about things as far as we know don't exist: ghosts, magic, faster-than-light drives. Readers come to be transported beyond the fields they know.
But once they get there, things have to make sense. Not just the world-building, but the characters' choices. That's where we write what we know:
- The perfectionist who sabotages himself with unrealistic standards.
- The narcissist boss who blames employees for their own shortcomings.
- The person carrying regret from a lost chance at love.
Miraculous places only feel real when the emotions inside them are recognizable.
Honoring the Genre Contract
In genre fiction like heroic space opera or romantic comedy, there's a kind of contract: readers agree to let you stretch credulity -- superhuman heroes, far-fetched coincidences, impossibly funny situations. But the writer has to make the impossible feel real by making the consequences of that impossibility recognizable and plausible.
To honor that contract, I ask:
- What would it actually feel like to be the heroine in a romance novel? You’d feel unbearably vulnerable, which raises the stakes for a "happily ever after."
- What does the galaxy look like to a hypercompetent space hero? Like it's being run by dangerously incompetent people.
My Mission
My mission: To write high-quality genre fiction that honors the reader's trust and makes the marvelous and improbable feel real.
The Keystone -- Coming by January 2026
Murderbot meets A Man Called Ove meets His Girl Friday. Captain Kate MacClaine is the spacer you call when you’re out of options. She’s brilliant at flying, navigating, and obliterating pirate bases—but she’s impossible to work with.When her charming ex shows up with a new fiancée and a mission to save the galaxy, Kate has to do the one thing she hates most: learn to trust a crew.
The Quest for Norumbega -- Coming later in 2026
In post-apocalyptic New Jersey, the Talmudic scholars also know kung fu.
Benno is a young slave who asks questions nobody can—or will—answer. When Master Choseng Schwartz defeats Tiger Hall and frees their slaves, Benno thinks he's found his answers. But those answers just lead to harder questions—the kind that cost everything.
He faces a paradox: to save the girl he loves, he must turn his back on her and take up the Quest for Norumbega—the legendary treasure-house of sages holding the cure for a world blighted by misapplied knowledge.
The quest will break his heart, but lead him to his heart's desire, lost a thousand years before he was born.
Philosophical, funny, and unexpectedly moving. For readers who believe the best stories make you laugh and break your heart—preferably on the same page.