Big news! My first ever short story sale is now available for purchase. You can get the Winter 2021 issue of The Colored Lens, which contains my short story Travelers’ Crossing, via Amazon Kindle for $4.99. If you happen to have Kindle Unlimited then you can read it for free! (But maybe make a donation to The Colored Lens if you like it?) At over 130 pages it’s a hell of a bargain! Since this is a small press magazine they rely mostly on social media and word of mouth for promotion, so I’d greatly appreciate sharing the link to the Amazon page (or even to this blog post) to help spread the word.

This publication is a big deal for me since I’ve been writing science fiction off and on since high school with the goal of selling to a magazine, so it’s not a stretch to say that I’ve been working towards this for decades. This feels like the first step on my literary journey.

I hate to give away much about my short stories, but if you’re wondering what this one is about it’s a time travel story (my favorite sci-fi subgenre) that showcases my affinity for using science fiction to try to say something about society. It also features one of my favorite concepts: moral ambiguity. I think Travelers’ Crossing is one of the best things I’ve ever written, and it was the first story I wrote where I felt things really clicked. One of those “lean back from the keyboard with a sense of satisfaction” moments.

I hope you enjoy the story, and thanks for supporting me by buying the magazine and/or sharing this blog post!

If I’m being honest, I’m not a huge fan of photography as an art form. I’m not saying that it’s not an art form, I’m just saying that for the most part it’s not for me. One strong exception is photomicrography, or the art of taking photographs of insanely tiny things, generally through a microscope. One of the best outlets for this work is the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition which announced its 2020 winners a few months ago.

These microscale photographs capture images of our world beyond our natural perception. A fly’s head becomes a nuanced structure of ridges, hairs, and texture that you could almost reach out and touch. An image of a beetle’s leg can be used to illustrate convergent evolution with a crab’s leg. Your mind can be blown by the size of the scales of a butterfly’s wing, or, like me, you can simply marvel at the size of hairs on a fuzzy beetle.

Astronomy asks us to look up and marvel at the immense scale of the Universe that dwarfs our everyday lives. Microscopy asks us to look down, and see the beauty of an entirely different universe all around us.