writing

• Robot Sumo

  12 Jul 2020

  When I wrote the drones in SEER this was kind of what I had in mind for how quickly they move and attack. Being controlled by computers means they would be able to acquire targets and make adjustments at lightning speed. Picture this kind of battle happening between hundreds of airborne drones. Of course, since they have to destroy each other instead of just push each other out of the ring it probably wouldn’t be over quite so fast. It’ll be cool to see how advanced these kinds of competitions become within the next decade. Having no remote controls really ups the pace, and I can imagine some pretty exciting robot battles in the future.

• Not Human Cover Breakdown

  25 Sep 2019

  I’ve always been a sucker for those videos that go layer by layer and show all the CGI that went into movie scenes, so I thought it would be fun to do something like that for my cover of Not Human.

  I’m really proud of how this cover turned out. I know it doesn’t look totally realistic (it’s really hard to get those gashes to look real and like they’re actually on her face) but I do think it turned out pretty decent. Each layer that I turn on in the video took quite a bit of time to get right. For the gashes I followed a pretty awesome tutorial for making realistic cuts.

  Making the skull look metal actually took a lot of time as well. I had to play around with different metal gradients applied over the skull until I found one that looked right.

  All of this was done in Gimp, which I’ve heard can do nearly anything photoshop can do except it’s free. I’ve used Gimp some before, but this was by far the most elaborate work I’ve done in it. This was a fun project to do, and I’m sure people skilled in photo editing could have done it better, but it was really satisfying to do it for myself and learn some neat tricks along the way. I think it’s pretty amazing that with the technology we have today an amateur like me can take two images and a metal gradient and end up with something like this.

• Welcome to my Website

  14 Sep 2019

  Welcome to my website! I’ve been working on this a while and I’m excited to finally share everything I’ve been working on. Head on over to the subscribe tab to enter your email address and receive a free short story, Not Human, which includes a bonus preview of the first two chapters of my upcoming book, SEER. You’ll also be the first to know about new releases and all the latest (infrequent) news.

  I hope you’ll check back for new updates and blog posts and join the conversation on social media or via email.