Welcome to my incredibly self-serving website.

Writing can be a sucky business.  It's a challenging task -- and a tough career choice, to boot.  So, like so many out there who spend too many nights hunched over a computer looking for just the right word, I've put together this website for a little self-promotion.  (This is the part where you should start running for the hills if you've somehow reached this site in error...)

About me:  I'm a playwright, author, columnist and editor whose works include several plays, screenplays, and works of fiction (as well as over 250 published nonfiction articles).  My articles have been published in a variety of magazines including Writer's Digest, Women’s Enterprise, Media Inc., Marketing, Me!dea, Minority Business News, Antique Trader Weekly, Action West, Texas Computing, Computer Currents, and Markee.

In my daily life I'm an entertainment publicist, and the head of a small (and quirky) creative PR firm, Paranoid PR (www.ParanoidPR.com).  I also spent two years as the editor of the Southwest editions of Computer Currents/Texas Computing Magazine -- an invaluable experience I still draw from every day.

But this website's not about my PR business, but is really about the other, slightly nutty (or nuttier) side of my brain -- to highlight some of my recently published fictional works, and to provide a convenient overview "at a glance" of my puny fictional writing career thus far.  I'm ultimately just having some fun here -- hoping to find new readers, to link to some great sources for fiction that I'm honored to have been a part of, and to spin a yarn or two in the process. 

My publication credits for short fiction include the October, 2003 edition of Fables (www.Fables.org), as well as the magazines Anotherealm (www.Anotherealm.com) and Terror Tales (www.TerrorTales.com).  In September 2002, my story "Whatever You Want" was voted as the Best Story on the Web for that month by Ahmed A. Khan's Index of Online Fiction (http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/fictiononline/choice.html) -- Reader's and Editor's #1 Choice.  That story also received more reader response than any other story in the history of Anotherealm to that point.

Most recently, in April of 2004 my story "Until My Dancing Days Are Done" was voted the 2003 Reader's Choice Award in the first annual online Reader's Choice poll by readers of Fables magazine.

At the moment, I'm seeking a new agent following the retirement of my previous literary rep, and am currently marketing two book-length collections of short stories, as well as the novel "Headlights," three screenplays, two plays, and a nonfiction book on Public Relations entitled Public Relations for Absolutely Everyone.  I'm also nearing completion on my latest novel, a work of modern fantasy for young adults entitled Dragons in the Sand.

In my fiction writing, I enjoy testing and exploring some of the darker places in the mind's forest -- from the archetypes and fairytales that thrilled and scared me as a child, to modern-day explorations of life, love, men, women, and those occasional unforgettable moments of magic, fear, and exhilaration we all find in the world.  My influences include such writers as Angela Carter, P.D. James, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Larry McMurtry, JRR Tolkien, The Brothers Grimm, and dozens more.

So this is me.  Thank you for visiting -- and reading!  And if you're a writer like me, drop me a line about your successes -- and don't give up.

                     Author's Photo: Tara Middlewood.