My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in February: FREE Sci-Fi & Fantasy.

Nearly 200 short stories, novels, samples and excerpts, available at no cost.

She's an Artificial Intelligence Containment operative, monitoring AI for signs of sentience.

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Sonja is an Artificial Intelligence Containment (AIC) operative, or a badge in hacker slang. As an operative, Sonja is tasked with finding and evaluating AI that may be sentient. If they are, her mission is simple—shut their system down. The world is already dealing with containing one rogue AI. As the AIC sees it, they can ill afford for others to follow suit. Sonja agrees. It's why she's a willing cog in the corporate machine and has devoted her life to serving the AIC. But nipping sentience in the bud can feel an awful lot like murder. Can Sonja push away the ethical quandaries of her work and do what needs to be done?

Last year was a bit of a roller coaster as I brought Probability Amplitudes, my first collection, closer to completion.

In September, I reported 43% of the required word count remained to be written.

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Then, in November, I took a few steps back, editing out more than 17,000 words of my story “Fire From Heaven.” Those words were, to use a technical phrase, “not good.” Striking them increased my outstanding percentage to 54%

Well, I’m back, baby! After writing over 17,000 words of an as-yet unfinished novella, my outstanding percentage is once again 43%.

One-third mark, here I come!

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Current status: 57% of the material for Probability Amplitudes is in “First Draft” or “Final Draft” status.

New Material Required: 68,656 words

First Draft: 83,930 words

Final Draft: 7414 words

TOTAL: 160,000 words

Questions? Please share in the comments!

My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”