Wrath Writes

Dr. Emma Wan is a superhuman cop trained to respond to superhuman threats—currently, though, she’s been tasked with parenting N.A.T.A.L.I.A., a military android prototype (although it prefers “Nat”). When a man in a mask single-handedly floods downtown Albuquerque, Emma and Nat arrive to save the day—only to find that the attack was calculated to draw Nat out into a vulnerable position. The confrontation is interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected interloper who carries enough electrical charge in their body to trigger Nat’s deadlier contingencies.

All four escape with their lives, but Emma is left with a host of questions and a gnawing unease.

Lupe is a super-powered transient running from a catastrophic past. Living life charged to two million volts has left them with few friends and fewer options. In the hours following the confrontation downtown, the masked man approaches Lupe to recruit them to his cause: a desperate gambit to destroy the N.A.T.A.L.I.A. prototype and assassinate its supporters.

After all, it was designed to kill mutants, and once its design is finalized, mass production will begin.

Powered follows Emma and Lupe’s convergent fight to derail a ruthless extermination.

Words: 7,142 Reading time: about 20 minutes Warnings: Real life

DAY 1: OCTOBER 14, 2025

I took the first step of my Guadalupe Ridge Trail hike at 7:15 AM on October 14th, 2025 with a crisp crunch of rounded white gravel.

There was a storm to the southwest, inbound, swallowing the iconic silhouette of El Capitan in a gray haze. I had about an hour before it reached me, more or less—by which time, it would be best if I were sequestered in the shelter of the vault toilet at the trailhead, the only roofed structure for miles. The trail—at this point, a gravel road—was a good 15 feet wide, bounded on both sides by waist-high brown shrubs interspersed with 12-foot-tall sotol stalks, and just barely uphill. With my pack, Dirtbag, 50-something pounds full, I still felt the slope. My tracking device-plus-satellite relay zweeped once from the top of my pack to let me know it had successfully sent the first track point of the day to the online map where my itinerary buddies could monitor my progress (fortunately, it only does this for the first one). Birds flitted through the vegetation, up with the dawn, rushing, like me, to beat the rain. The mouth of Slaughter Canyon yawned ahead of me. Thunder rolled across the front of the range like surf, sloshing up the canyon and washing back out again.

Earth. The planet we call home. Every human being who ever lived was born—and died—on this little blue marble. But for all the time we've spent on our home planet, most of it remains completely unexplored. How can this be? There are no blank spaces on the maps, no inch of the surface where our satellites can't see. Let's dig a little deeper and find out—what's INSIDE EARTH.

Happy Earth Day! You ever wonder what's down there?

You ever wonder what's deep, deep, deep, deep down there?

You ever feel inexorably, fatally drawn to find out what's down there?

Words: 5,421 Reading time: about 15 minutes Warnings: real life

October 10th, 2025. Departure day.

It was official now: the government would still be shut down at least through the 13th, which meant neither I nor my parents would get to go to Carlsbad Caverns on this trip. As gutted as I was on their behalf, I was also practically vibrating. The forecast called for rain on the 12th and 13th, before my official Hike began, but otherwise looked clear until the 19th, at least—two days before the end of my Hike, but oh well.

I packed my poncho.

You might have heard the process of converting fanficiton to original fiction referred to as “filing off the serial numbers.” Fifty Shades of Gray is the obvious pull, but not the only one; for example, Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, the basis for the explosively popular Heated Rivalry, started off the same way (along with many many others).I can’t speak to how these authors went about converting their fanfictions into distinct intellectual properties; I can, however, speak to how I did it for Powered, as it’s a method I would (and may) use again in the future. It’s likely general enough to be usable for drafting or re-drafting works that were never fanfic at all. Perhaps you, too, will find it useful—or at least interesting.

I think of it less as filing off the serial numbers and more as rebuilding the gun.

It’s a very simple 20-step process. As follows:

Determine whether the story is amenable to un-fanfication. Alternate Universe stories are prime candidates, while stories that entwine deeply with canon have poor prospects. These two things are not mutually exclusive. A good rule of thumb might be: “if someone with no knowledge of the source material picked up this story, would they get past the first two pages?”

If the story can be disentangled from its origins, come up with replacements for character names, place names, vocabulary that’s canon-distinctive… anything that would get you sued. May include shifting character genders/ethnicities/abilities/etc. Execute a “Find and Replace” in the original document. This is what I would call the “serial number filing” phase, producing the “filed” story.

Reread the “filed” story with the replacements in place. Neaten up any glaring goofs. Imbibe the story as a whole piece of art.

Close the document and shelve it for 3-12 months. No, really. You have to make time to fall out of love with it, or the rest of this won’t work.

I used to have an ant problem in my kitchen. It's probably not what you're picturing—they didn't get into the sugar or set up camp in the coffee. I kind of wish they had. There's people who deal with that kind of thing for a living. No, I'm pretty sure the ants in my kitchen found religion.

Spring is sproinging, and you know what that means - bugs getting into your house!

But what if they loved you? What if they loved you so, so much?

Continue reading, if you dare

Words: 3,800 Reading Time: About 15 minutes Warnings: real life

It started with a gate.

The date was April 12, 2024, roughly 11:30 AM. I was on Day Two of a three-day hiking trip, up at the top of the Permian Trail in the McKittrick Ridge area of Guadalupe Mountains National Park—GuMo, to its friends—aiming to see what the end of the trail at the park boundary looked like before heading back to my car and the developed campsite.

I found the park boundary. What I didn’t find was the end of the trail.

It's a reasonably well-circulated tidbit that the dialogue between Romeo and Juliet, when they first meet, forms a sonnet. That fact lodged in my brain and, like a sign nailed to a still-growing tree, was eventually absorbed in such a way that it permanently affected the shape of the thing absorbing it.

One of my favorite writing tricks to pull is to show two characters getting onto the same wavelength through mostly just their dialogue. I've experienced it in real life, occasionally - not a moment when something clicks, but a momentum, a roll, a groove. So I thought I'd take a moment to sit down and talk about how I do it because dammit, Jim, I'm an author, not a magician, and I don't need to guard my secrets.

For the sake of example, here's an excerpt from my upcoming novel, Powered:

Our main two, Ambrose and Lupe, go from a reasonably normal conversation to literally finishing each other's sentences, despite the fact that they're arguing. Ambrose takes Lupe's monosyllabic cops and carries right on from the verb: will shoot anything that moves. Lupe, for their own part, picks up the contradiction with a conjunction (BUT it's stupid), once again maintaining the flow of what could be a single sentence from a single speaker (albeit a conflicted one).

This (and most of the prose chicanery I pull) is mainly a matter of rhythm. People in fiction don't really talk like people in real life (try transcribing a conversation if you don't believe me), but rhythm helps dialogue flow the same way it helps rappers speak so fast it makes your head spin.

You may also note above that the dialogue tags and interstitial actions get shorter and then disappear as the two characters get spun up to the same speed, which is significantly faster than everyone else in the room... or at least headed in a different direction.

Basically, it's like this, but in prose form:

Did Iron Lung leave you craving cosmic horror? Give Anglerfish a try!

We got:

Protagonist losing touch with reality (or is he?)

Slowly ratcheting tension capped by an explosive finale

Immense, ancient, unknowable entity

Challenges with radio communication

Explicit nonbinary rep

Have you been seeing things?

Words: 4,383 Tags: Fantasy, Noir Warnings: Gore, hand injury

***

The ghost on Isa’s desk tapped politely against the green glass of its lantern. Isa didn’t look up, intent on getting the invoice to her latest client written up before midnight. Rain spattered against the window. The lamps fluttered in a draft from some-damn-where.

Labor – 16wt. Lantern – 80wt. Travel & Lodging Reimbursement – 30wt.

Thunder trundled down the street outside. The ghost tapped on the glass again. Isa’s fingers tightened on the pen.

Fee & Fine Reimbursement – 25wt. Whining Surcharge – 5wt.

The ghost dragged its nails down the glass. The pen’s nib tore through the paper. Isa slammed the pen down, printing a firework of ink on the invoice, and glared at the lantern on the corner of her desk.

“What?” she snapped.

Vague limbs stirred behind the green glass. Something like an arm made overtures at the window.

“No,” said Isa. She crumpled up the ruined invoice and pitched it at the waste bin. She took out a fresh sheet of paper and smoothed it on her desk.

The lantern rattled. The ghost moaned, a mouse-sound, tinny and distorted.

“Use your words,” said Isa, starting the invoice over.

Attn. G. Palacios Re:Services Rendered….

This epilogue has a prologue, but it isn’t mine to tell.

In unromantic itinerary terms, it was the kind of logistical Rubik’s Cube that my brain seems to latch onto as the ideal vacation:

Sunday: drive 4 hours to Dallas to meet my sister (who was flying in from Georgia) and eat at the infamous Rainforest Cafe;

Monday: see the Great North American Total Solar Eclipse of 2024 before driving 8-9 hours to Carlsbad;

Tuesday: see The Caverns plus Ranger-Guided Tour;

Wednesday: drive my sister to El Paso (3ish hours) for her to fly home before returning myself to Carlsbad for

Thursday-Saturday: 3 days of hiking in the Guadalupe mountains; followed by

Sunday: drive 10-11 hours back to Houston in a single day in order to return the rental car (and return to work) on Monday morning.

Having accomplished the entire trip, I feel confident in saying that everything prior to the Mountains is my sister’s story. Should she decide to write about it in a public forum, I’ll point you to it.

This story is about the Mountains.

Words: 7,029 Tags: Urban fantasy, horror Warnings: Gore, animal death, drug abuse, body horror, queerphobia

***

The city’s winter coat is brown and gray.

By January, every scrap of green has withered or sloughed off or been trampled into mud. Even the sky goes the color of dust on silver, piped out of the smokestacks that cluster like tube worms around the port. The Thing in the Gulf—storm god, old one, demon, fiend; whatever it is, it’s above my paygrade—lies in fitful hibernation, dreaming ravenous heat-sweat dreams of hauling its howling carcass ashore. It overwinters in the Sigsbee Deep.

We think. No one dumb enough to go looking has ever come back.

A low traffic rumble and the shriek-and-chatter of grackles cover my squelching footsteps as I make my way under the long arc of I-45, high halls, a concrete cathedral. Sparse graffiti mottles the great gray pillars. Brightly-colored trash outcrops in bare spots: green glass bottles, blue plastic tarps, fabric flowers, paper packages. Offerings, scattered.

Some people will pray to anything. Some people have no choice.

Something wretched is stirring in Third Ward.