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On March 22, 1974, Ari Marmell was hatched out of an egg laid by a rooster on the night of the full moon. Due a mix-up, he wound up in the infant ward at a hospital in New York, where he was claimed as a (relatively) normal human and taken home. He and his family fled New York barely a year later, either because his father received a job offer in Houston, or because they were chased by angry mobs with pitchforks; reports are unclear. For the next 27 years, Ari lived in Houston. His father told him bedtime stories when he was in preschool and kindergarten, stories without which he might never have become a writer. He received his first roleplaying game—the red Dungeons & Dragons boxed set—at age 9, and the AD&D Players Handbook followed less than a year later. He spent very little time on class work or studies for the next, oh, 13 years, instead spending his efforts on far more important things like fighting orcs, riding dragons, and rescuing extremely beautiful princesses from captors who always felt the need to dress them in the scantiest outfits that could still possibly be deemed “clothing.” (Hey, he…

Titan Books

Titan Magazines

"Reputation" appears in issue #136 of Star Wars Insider magazine.

Credits: Sole author

Art by Tom Hodges.

Notes: This story offers just the tiniest glimpse into the background of Cad Bane, a bounty hunter introduced in the Clone Wars cartoon series.

"In Deepest Silence" appears in the fifth issue of Shock Totem, a magazine of genre fiction and nonfiction with an emphasis on the macabre.

Credits: Sole author

Cover by Mikio Murakmi.

Notes: I think the best way to describe this particular story is "Horror On a Submarine With a Touch of Lovecraft Seasoning."

You should follow the link and take a gander; it’s a heck of a Table of Contents.

Availability:
• Amazon.com
• Shock Totem Online Store

Shock Totem

In a comic book world, what happened last night in Aurora, Colorado, would itself prove to be a superhero origin. A tragic crime, during the showing of a movie about a masked crimefighter? Heck, it almost is the Batman origin story, on a larger scale.

But we don’t live in a comic book world. The terror, the grief, the pain in our world is real. Real people, going through a real experience that those of us fortunate enough not have been touched by violence can’t even begin to imagine. In the real world, good doesn’t always rise triumphantly from the ashes of this sort of evil; and even when it does, it’s rarely as direct or obvious a path as it is in the comic books.

Here’s the thing, though. Here, in the real world, even if there’s no good to be found in something like this? We can, at least, avoid making it worse.

We can choose not to politicize it. We can choose not to make it about "us vs. them."

We can choose not to view it as nationality vs. nationality; religion vs. religion; Left vs. Right. Even if it turns out the gunman did see it that way–and we don’t know yet; we might never–it doesn’t mean that we have to. The people who were taken, the people left behind to suffer, aren’t confined to one ethnicity, one religion, one political party.

Some politicians are already politicizing this. Don’t. Don’t do it; don’t let them do it.

This isn’t about "us vs. them." Because today, "us" is everyone.