Award Winning Writer and Photographer

This book is a milestone for me. It’s my first piece of published fiction. I’ve done a lot of writing. I used to be a newspaper reporter. As a small town journalist most of the articles I wrote were less than a thousand words. When I retired, I kept right on writing, just couldn’t stop. I

started writing fiction—novels. Creating works of around one hundred thousand words was like having an unlimited budget. It was fun.

   The novels I’ve been writing are works of suspense. That’s what I like to read, so it’s only natural this is what I would choose to write. I’ve written a half dozen and I have yet to publish one. I’ve been trying to go the traditional publishing route rather than self-publishing and I can tell you it’s darned hard to break in. This book is a departure from suspense in that it’s what I call “sorta sci-fi.”

   I’m testing the world of self-publishing with this novella. It’s about an alien wasp species that enters our world from who knows where—another dimension? —parallel universe? —different time?—wormhole in space?—who knows?

   One thing I do know is that I don’t like wasps.

I have an extensive personal history with stinging insects—bees, wasps, hornets. It goes all the way back to my childhood in Kansas, where I used to run around the yard barefoot. The lawn featured a lot of clover. Honeybees were attracted to those little white blossoms and occasionally I stepped on one—which stung me on the bottom of the foot, of course.

   It kills the bee to lose its stinger like that. Those stings weren’t going to kill me because I’m not allergic, but I can tell you they hurt like the dickens when you’re five or six years old.

   As I got older, I found other ways to interact with stinging insects. One that stands out in my mind happened when I was about twelve. I took a break from fishing in my favorite brook and stepped into the woods to empty my bladder at the base of a tree. Before I was done my ankles started burning and I looked down to see was going on down there. I found I was that I was watering one of those underground yellowjackets nests. They weren’t happy. Unlike those honeybees, these ground hornets can sting you over and over and live on. Boy, that hurt. Those are just two of my many, many encounters with these bad bugs. I find when I start telling people about them, they have their own stories about getting too close to hornets and bees. Here’s how this story “Invasive Species” came about.

   I’m not certain, but I suspect this story was born in a deer camp in New York. That small tow- behind camper that sleeps three sits idle for about ten months of the year and during the absence of any hunters it becomes the abode of mice and wasps. The first chore of each hunting season is the eviction of these unwanted critters.

   Wasps are sneaky. Just when you think you’ve gotten rid of them all—another one shows up. Somehow, we never got stung during this annual extermination process, although we did have our share of close calls.

   Anyhow, this is probably the reason why I woke one night from a very bad dream in which a ginormous wasp flew right at my face. This nightmare event left me wide awake in the middle of the night. Being a writer, I used the time to write what became a long short story based on my nightmare.

   That initial story titled “Doctor Spyder and the Blinking Wasp” was more than five thousand words and I never found a market for it. Most publications specializing in speculative fiction want something much shorter or much longer. I ended up giving it to my friend and former

colleague Joe Bills, who is the proprietor of the Escape Hatch Comics bookstore in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Joe intended to involve some local youngsters in creating a graphic novel or comic based on the story.

   He never quite got around to doing that and I went on to write a bunch of other stuff. Years went by. One day when I had time on my hands I came up with a new idea for another chapter of the

story, which would only make it longer and less appealing to the publications that publish short stories. I decided to do it anyway.

   But when I went looking for that original story—well, it wasn’t anywhere to be found. Apparently, it hadn’t survived an intervening computer crash, and I didn’t have a print version of it anywhere.

   I was about to give up on it, declare the story lost and gone forever, when I remembered giving a digital copy to Joe. I emailed him and—yes, he still had it. He sent it back to me and I went to

work on the next chapter—and the next—and the next. And when I was done, I had a novella.

   My wife, Marsha, is responsible for the wonderful cover.