Novels The Littlest Evil Overlord (Nov 2002) Here Be Dragons (Nov 2003) Flash Fiction Betrayal (July 2000) Rent (September 2000) Frost (7 Jan 2001) Daisy (3 Feb 2001, topic: unrequited love) Coffee (13 Apr 2002, topic: rain) Valor (20 Sep 2003, topic: home) Short Stories Sweet Sorrow (1996) Pieces (1996) Poems Battlecry (1995) Bleeding (1997)
Update! November is over, and with it, my second novel. Go read it. (Caution: Rated PG-13ish.)
I've been writing off-and-on for years — basically since a creative writing class I took in high school (circa 1992). Occasionally you'll see me hanging out on writersbbs.com (most often in the Flash Fiction forum). In Novembers you won't find me there, though — Novembers are for NaNoWriMo, the insane effort to write an entire novel in a month.
Aside from this site (and its earlier incarnation, which Cox decided to delete) and some school magazines, I've never gotten anything published. Maybe it's because I've only ever submitted one short story, I don't know...
My real name is Joe White, but my online writing alias is vulcanviking (because of my pointy ears and (once-)long red hair). I'm a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and am currently living in Omaha, Nebraska, where I have a steady paycheck but not a Donutland or Emil's or Chick-Fil-A for hundreds of miles. Alas.
I need to get around to making a contact form. You won't find my e-mail address online because spambots are evil.
I've got several novels floating around in my head, but so far I've only written two. Neither is published — in fact, both are still very first-draft. Each novel was written in a month (November, of course). You can read both novels on this site.
November 2002 novel: The Littlest Evil Overlord About: A disgruntled member of the Evil Overlords' Union. Genre: Humor/Satire (in case you couldn't tell); Heroic Fantasy (sort of). Rating: PGish, for some swordfights (there are heroes and villains, so of course there are swordfights) and a very mild bedroom scene that you might miss if you weren't looking for it.
November 2003 novel: Here Be Dragons Word count: 52,186 About: Set in present day, except that one day the power goes out, everywhere, and dragons start roaming the interstates. Genre: Urban Fantasy. Darker in mood than last year's. Rating: PG-13ish, for swearing and (non-explicit) sex scenes.
If you haven't ever written Flash Fiction, you need to. Somebody posts a topic, and you have an hour to write a complete short story. Not very long, right? That's actually the good part — you don't have time to agonize over whether your topic is good enough (perfectionism, also known as "writer's block") — you just write! (The same principle applies, on a larger scale, to NaNoWriMo.)
Below are some of my better flash pieces. Most were written in the flash fiction challenge on the Writer's BBS, though I did a couple on my own time (but still in flash format). Bear in mind that these are all first drafts. I like "Coffee" and "Frost" the best, but "Valor" and "Rent" are up there too.
Some other (non-flash) short stories I've written. Both of these were for a college class called "Introduction to Creative Writing: Fantasy". These are actually both somewhat beyond first-draft stage.
Whenever I see an ad for a poetry contest, I have to laugh. "Submit your original poem of 20 lines or less..." Ha! I'm tempted to submit "Battlecry", just to see what they'd do. That would make for twenty very long lines.
The poetry I like isn't literary poetry — it's song lyrics. So that's what I write.
Here are a couple of poems I wrote back in my teenage-despair days. (Yes, I was still having teenage despair when I was 22 years old.)