HB

The Klatch

From the moment Colonial carrier CECC-2147 crashed on the remote and uninhabited world known as Dog End, the clock began ticking. Rayna DeLong, her son Robbie, and her sister Helen barely had time to bury the dead before they had to meet the challenges of survival — creating farmholds and raising crops, keeping their sometimes-balky equipment operational, working to establish themselves as the first colonists on this brand-new world.Hanging over their heads through all this is the greatest challenge of all: The next wave of colonists is coming, Rayna and Helen must bear eight daughters in time to meet them or the colony will fail — and Robbie is the only fertile male within 120 lightyears.Set in a remote and richly-realized future, The Klatch is a story of human triumph in a universe of harsh realities and hard choices. Its vivid and evocative characters will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page.

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Kaeleigh Goes All the Way, book 1

Kaeleigh is like most thirteen-year-old girls — full of energy, bursting with eagerness to enjoy life, and looking for a boyfriend. But she's also intrigued about having a girlfriend, and wants to explore the possibilities of multiple-partner play, too.The trouble is she doesn't know anyone else who's into the same things.All that changes when her older brother, Luke, reluctantly brings her along to a party game he's been playing for the last two years. In a single night, Kaeleigh's life is transformed; and, with time, even her relationship with her brother is no longer the same.

• 24 MB zipfile

Eden's Garden

Twelve-year-old Leo Wulf did something stupid where his thirteen-year-old next-door neighbor, Eden Shepard, could see him. Worse, she caught him on camera and now has devastating blackmail she can hold over his head.Eden promises a mortified Leo that she'll delete the photo if he agrees to come over to her house on Friday night, and be her slave until midnight.But Friday nights are when Eden's guests are there: Four ten-year-old girls whom Eden has been hosting since they were in Kindergarten. And Leo has to do anything, and everything, Eden tells him to do, or that reputation-destroying photo will be in everyone's social media.As Leo's enslavement progresses from making everyone dinner to answering awkward questions about what it's like to be a boy, Eden begins her true agenda, with results that Leo, the girls, and even Eden herself don't expect — and won't ever forget.In all the best ways.

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The Hangout

A short story for Halloween, a haunting trick to add to your bag of treats.Thirteen-year-old Cameron Evans' Saturday starts out filled with anticipation: He's meeting two girls at a pond several miles out of town, a favorite swimming spot for Cree and Sasha, and they've invited him to join them so they can get to know him better.The day goes from hopeful to wonderful when he arrives. What begins as a late-summer idyll featuring slow, sensual kisses and skinny-dipping leads to a three-way makeout session, and when the girls suggest going to their hangout for guaranteed privacy, Cameron is sure he's about to get lucky, two times over.Unfortunately for him, this is the day all his luck runs out.This is a story about sudden darknesses in the world: The voids that can open without warning, and lead to terror, agony, and oblivion.

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Love in the Limelight

A short story of a boy who has everything bright in his future, and of the woman whose own future seems complete — except for one thing. He's extraordinary and gifted; she's just as blessed with good fortune. He's facing a hard challenge, and hoping for victory; she wants him to be victorious, as well.A young man. A woman. Each of them wanting the same thing, neither of them sure if it will ever be in their reach.It's the old, old story of the sweetly whelming sting of love, with a classically Brücke twist: One of the players is thirteen, while the other … is not.

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O Mother Where Art Thou

Four families. Four women. Four young men. Four mothers. Four sons. Love, of a kind no one is supposed to feel - and yet, they do. Nearly a quarter million words, more than five hundred pages, words to warm your heart … and other parts, too.Man of the HouseTragedy leaves five adopted children in the care of a sixth, a young man who is just as shattered by his father's death as his mother is by her husband's murder. Trying to find a way to heal themselves and get on with their lives, they move to a new town, a small town, with the goal of starting over and putting down new roots. But as Joey continues caring for his younger siblings, his mother Carrie must confront a reality she doesn't know how to deal with: Her son isn't a little boy any more, and her woman's nature is beginning to notice the man she sees emerging in him.A Lad, Insane?Walsh Donovan is the mid-teen son of fashion designer Tabitha Donovan, who numbers David Bowie among her clients. Walsh has it all, including a spacious bedroom in a loft in the SoHo borough of New York, a retinue of girls who know his bedroom as well as they know his body, and energy enough to see to all their pleasures. Tabby is tortured by an unholy attraction, and sends her son to spend time with her lifetime best friend, Annie Peters, where things go from bad to worse. It's an untenable situation, and it must change. Somehow.Whatever You Say, MomTrying to help her son Reggie get over the latest heartbreak - dumped by a girl, again - his mother takes him for a weekend getaway at the beach. She's glad to see him begin to bounce back and be more like his old self again, but they encounter a small snafu in their plans: A convention has caused all the hotels to be booked nearly solid, and the only room they can find is a single, with one bed.Only a Motion AwaySasha Parker made some hard mistakes when she was young, but her son Chris isn't one of them. Releasing him for fostering and adoption as an infant seemed like the smartest decision at the time, but now, years later, she's not so sure of that. So she reaches out to him, initiates contact, and they begin to know each other - not as mother and son, but as a woman and an intelligent, insightful young man. Reggie's forgiveness balms Sasha's heart, and they find themselves experiencing something neither of them has ever felt before, when they realize they have a lot more in common than shared preferences in landscapes.

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Hermana y Hermano

A short story based in events and characters from Man of the House (available in my collection O Mother Where Art Thou).This is the story of a day in the life of Miguel and Juanita Ruiz-Baxter. The day is common in many ways: They go to school, talk with friends, go home and play and do homework — but what makes the day uncommon is a request a woman has made of Miguel.He's honored by her request and agrees to do it, but he senses his sister's unease; and after they've spent the afternoon with their friends, he asks her what's wrong.Juanita tells him, and discovers she has yet another reason to love her brother more than she's ever loved anyone else, or ever will.

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The Kaiserin Contingency

Kaiserin looked like a gem of a planet. Blessed with moderate climate, an abundance of water and breathable air, teeming with vibrant blue plantlike life, it seemed an ideal place to establish new human colonies.Then the colonists started disappearing.In weeks, 2500 people were gone: Women, men, children, even their livestock. Dead? Driven mad by a local toxin? Killed in a conflict with each other, or hunted down and devoured by an unknown animal? No one knew.Now it’s up to transhuman Colonial Sheriffs Wenda de la Seine, Lovey Jingpao, and Samson Olivera to discover what happened on Kaiserin, and how, and how to keep it from happening again.But as their investigation continues to uncover no leads, their suspicions turn more and more toward a predator — or pack of them — lurking in the nearby scrubland, and they wrestle with the possibility they may be powerless to act, let alone retaliate.Set in the same cosmos as The Klatch, but taking place seven hundred years later, The Kaiserin Contingency is more than a whodunit novella. It’s a story about the value of love in the face of the unknown, the enduring power of human triumph and the sorrow of human tragedy, and the danger of assuming anything is what you think it is, on a world beyond human experience.

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The Goddess Chronicles, book 1: Erin

Erin is the new girl in town, a bright, pretty, and fearless tweenager who forms a fast and intense friendship with the woman who lives next door. Over the course of a few heady months, she does more than move into the neighborhood; she takes over her neighbor's life, and exerts a seemingly magical power on her — the power to allure, to enmesh, to enrapture. What begins as a simple acquaintanceship deepens and expands to passionate consummation, despite all resistance on the part of Erin's neighbor — and her certainty it can only end in disaster.Just as things teeter out of control, Erin reveals one more dimension to her depths — and takes her astonished lover on a journey from here to a place outside every universe.

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Randy and the Grandma Gift

Randy is a typical girl in most respects. She doesn't love math, does love her mothers, and loves making music most of all. It's not until she's 11 years old that she realizes her greatest love is the man who helped conceive her.The problem is that he doesn't see things the way she wants him to, and unless something magickal happens, that's never going to change.

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Heart-Weave Basket

The Goddess Chronicles, book 2

The thing about being a devotee of a deity — any deity — is that it tends to complexify your life. The busier your deity, the more likely they are to pass off tasks to you.Eris, being involved in tricksterish fuckery as well as keeping her hand in with chaotic systems, was perpetually occupied, and yeah, she’d kept me busy from the start. However, she had also helped in ways I hadn’t asked for, and only realized later.A woman is charged by her goddess with a divine duty: To locate a refugee demigod recently liberated from obscurity. She and her early-teen presenting immortal boyfriend — who happens to be a satyr that ejaculates wine — soon discover that there's more to the story than they've been told.When they bring their charge back to their home, which is a refuge for immortals ranging from naiads to succubi to imps and more, they're faced with two urgent questions: What is he, and how do they keep him from spontaneously transforming into a work of art?The answers to those questions are enmeshed in a secret being kept by the Goddess of Chaos herself, and only a seemingly ten-year-old sun god holds the keys to a resolution.

• 23 MB zipfile

Recomb Patrol

Graphic ficlet

An experiment with imagery and text that tells of some of the repercussions of a future wherein genetic engineering (recombination) is a mass-market reality, and children are reduced to commodities that can be made to order from catalogues.Too short to be a short story, this is more like a transgressive, semi-erotic haiku with about 93 extra syllables (fewer than 400 words). 1620x4560-pixel JPEG.

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A Night on the Town

A young woman and her wife are looking forward to sharing a home with their brother-in-law … and brother. A midteen boy learns the value of yoga, and more, when his sister teaches him how to manage his stress. A student volunteers to help a sex-ed teacher demonstrate some fundamentals to her class. Twin brothers aim to top their previous record for orgiastic delight in the boys' locker room. A boy sets out to discover whether the stories he's heard about a specific seat in a movie theater are true or not. A youth's promotion on the job leads his mother to treat him as the man he's becoming. A biologist discovers a fascinating object of study in a teen boy, who is eager to volunteer to help her with her research.May 29th, 2026: The last day of school at Burlingham Contiguous, and the beginning of "summerclad season" all through Peed's Vale, when students are free to roam the region and act on their desires, and see to the fulfillment of others.These sixteen short stories take you through a day and a night (and maybe a bit more) in a place that has very few taboos.

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