First Lines

From the upcoming novel and four stories due to be published this or next year.


There were some days now when she didn’t think about the ghost in her head. 
Into Everywhere


The origin story we like to tell ourselves is that our little town was founded by a grumpy loner name of Joe Gordon, who one day quite early in the settlement of First Foot parked his RV at the spot where one of the ceramic roads left by an unknown long-lost Elder Culture cut across the new two-lane blacktop between Port of Plenty and the open-cast iron mine at Red Rocks. 
'Something Happened Here, But We're Not Quite Sure What It Was.' (Tor.com, 2016)


On the sixth day of every month Fernanda Wright negotiates the rings of security around the Stratford tesseract and lays a flower at the tomb of her undead husband. 
'Rats Dream of the Future' (Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2016.) 


Mike Torres saw his first elf stone three weeks after he moved to the Antarctic Peninsula. 
'Elves of Antarctica' (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris, 2016.)


It really did look like Mars. 
'Life Signs' (For an as yet unannounced anthology.)