Tom Marcinko

Tom Marcinko
Excerpt: 
­How about a taste of "Temperance," then: ­The lounge crowd went ooh and aah as the mushroom cloud erupted from the pillar of fire. Sunday’s lips and jaw tightened as he gave the blast a long, cold look. He’d brought us here to make a point: “This is the atomic age,” he said. “This is modern America. We can do this -- and Temperance thinks she can control us? With an absurd superstition? The time of her kind is past.” He gestured toward the blast as proof.
Bio: 
­I was born in a crossfire hurricane, and I -- oh, wait, that's somebody else. I'm from Pennsylvania but now somehow live in Arizona. For most of my life I've wanted to be a writer. I went to Clarion West during the last year of George I's regime. A lovely and brilliant woman who went to Clarion Classic that same year is now my wife. We're parents, yet. My first novel, a "new space opera" entitled Goddess of Mercy, is making the rounds of agents on an island off the coast of North America.
Publications: 
­My most recent story is "Temperance," in an e-book called Bites of Passion: An Anthology of Vampire Erotica, ed. by Cecilia Tan. You can get it here (inexpensive!).­ I've sold two other stories to Circlet Press that are so blazingly explicit I felt the psychological need to blush behind a pseudonym. They're in the soon-to-be-released e-books Like Clockwork and Like a God's Kiss. Others: "The Nixon Wrangler's Tale" -- EventHorizon.com (edited by Ellen Datlow; you might find it on the Wayback Machine) "Whiter Teeth, Fresher Breath" -- Interzone "The Dark Nightingale Returns" -- 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories "Faith in a Higher Power" -- Rosebud (written during Clarion West) "Deep Space Sein" -- Science Fiction Age "Henry the Human Flea" -- The Edge I think of myself as being all about the outer space, but it does seem that vampires have been good to me.
Writing Description: 
­I've tried all kinds of genres and styles. It seems that when I write still-lifes about sterile lives and stunted emotional growth in small dead mining towns (some people can pull that off, really, and I enjoy that sort of thing), nobody likes my stories, but when I write stories where things happen, they're somewhat better received.
Writing Goals: 
­Several projects are nipping at my heels, begging to be completed, but I think it's time to finish the novel I began to write just for fun about this time last year. Working title: Grand Theft Spacecraft. I pitched it to myself as "Two Lane Blacktop -- in space!" but it seems to be turning into something else. It has talking squids in it. Word count so far: 33,000. If I can get that up to 90K, I'll be happy.
Website: 
­http://tomaq.livejournal.com/
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