Here’s a 500-word sample of my previous written work. If you’re interested in looking at my games-related projects, you can find them under the tabs above. Please note that the rest of this site doesn’t contain any links back to this page, so if you go elsewhere you may need to follow the original link to get back.

Infernal (excerpt)

I arrived in the Under-Market of Pandemonium, as I always do when I use the Cleveland Gate.  For those unfamiliar with Hell’s wide array of tourist traps, the Under-Market resembles nothing so much as a vast, smoky convention hall hewn from rough gray stone.  The floor is dominated by rows upon rows of wooden stalls, stretching as far as the eye can see.  High above the crowd, a dim orange glow is cast by iron chandeliers with curling arms and candles of murky red wax.  The Market squats in the heart of Pandemonium’s middle circle like a great big bad-tempered turtle, casting a gloomy shadow over the more modernized buildings around it.  Because of its central location, I’ve always felt the Under-Market provides the best sampler of everything the city has to offer.

On any given day, the Market might display heavy artillery pieces, assorted parts from long-extinct animals, glassware haunted by minor historical figures (on one trip I came very close to buying a lovely little tea set inhabited by the extended family of a Belgian duke), cat-sized scarab beetles bred to fight one another, fried snacks, the bones of fraudulent saints, and sets of chains-and-manacles inscribed with cuneiform sigils.  At the very least, those are the things I saw immediately upon entering that day; I couldn’t say what else might have been down the next aisle, and there was no time to find out.  I was here for work.  After reluctantly tearing my eyes off a ceramic bulldog with a sign claiming it was possessed by three of Genghis Khan’s generals, I took a deep breath and dove into the crowd pulsing through the Market, angling towards the row of exit doors I could vaguely make out in the distance.

I made an effort to laser-focus on getting out of the Market, but there’s really only so much you can do to resist getting distracted in a place like that.  I passed an enormously fat man with glowing yellow pustules dotting his face haggling over the price of pickled leeches with a woman whose eyes looked like dying stars.  She met my gaze for half a second and I felt something inside my skull start to itch; best keep moving.  I skirted carefully around something that resembled a pile of partially-rotted hands, undulating and whispering softly to itself. The crowd seemed to be giving it a wide berth, and I wasn’t going to be the one to buck the trend. I walked right under a restaurant in the form of a driftwood building on spidery metal stilts called “Tall Horace’s Bar and Grill”, delicately picking its way through the market about 10 feet above the mayhem. A giant of a man (who I had to assume was Tall Horace) with a flowing mane of brilliant white hair and a distinct lack of skin stood on the restaurant’s balcony, shilling their new drink made from seven flavors of scorpion venom and a shot of bourbon. 

After far too long spent shoving my way past infernal bargain-hunters, I finally reached the far wall and the exit doors I’d been dreaming of.  At long last, I pushed through them and traded the putrid, sulfurous air of the Under-Market for the putrid, sulfurous air of greater Pandemonium.