Welcome!  Pull up a chair, make yourself at home.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering who I am.  Hopefully, this will help to clear that up for you.  It’s hard to say though, I can be a bundle of contradictions.  Like origins, for one.  I’ve lived in the Midwest as long as I’ve lived anywhere, so I suppose it’s my home.  It certainly colors my writing, and some of the locales and places I write about are based on the fond haunts of my youth.

Ah yes, the writing.  Like so many writers, I started at an early age – my first poem was published when I was in fourth grade.  What started out as an amusement turned slowly into first a hobby and now an obsession.  I toyed around with it until after I had graduated from college, then submitted a story for the anthology “Book of All Flesh.”  They kindly accepted it and the rest, as they say, is history.

My writing tends to rummage through all the speculative fiction tropes, borrowing elements from science fiction, fantasy and horror as I need them. If there’s a consistent theme to the work, it’s relationships. How they grow, how they start and sometimes how they end. For me, the setting is an excuse to push two characters together and see how they relate to each other when everything else is on the line. It’s the human element that draws me into a story, no matter how fantastical the surroundings.

My interests read like someone pulling words at random from an encyclopedia: Knitting, Culinary History, Imperial Rome, Foreign and Independent Film, The American Civil War, Comparative Anatomy, Feudal Japan, 80’s New Wave – the list is as varied as it is endless.  Fortunately this provides no shortage of material to consume when the time comes to put pen to paper (or at least fingers to keyboard).

I’m fortunate to have a wealth of friends, most of whom also write (we’re an insular bunch, really.  We tend to stick together)

I also dabble in film reviews from time to time, mostly for the opportunity to wax enthusiastically about Asian cinema.  I worked for a time in an independent video store that specialized in foreign film that wasn’t from Italy or France.  It gave me a love for the earnestness and frenetic action that typified Asian film at the time, and it carries through into an enjoyment of their approach to topics even today.

So that’s me in a nutshell.  A large and verbose nutshell, certainly, but space is relative on the Internet.  Feel free to poke around the Web site a little.  In addition to news and other tidbits, it’s a safe bet that movie reviews, essays and maybe even the occasional story will sneak in as well.  Thanks for stopping by!

— J.C. Hay