Writing

I love to write. I have a PhD in English and taught college writing and literature courses for ten years. Here are some examples of technical and academic writing I’ve done.

Technical Writing

  • “Creating Email Messages with MailChimp” – Download PDF
  • An engineering and software development agency,  RMA , based in Davis, CA, developed a variety of specialized hydrologic engineering applications for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers . I was hired to write user manuals for three of these applications, including CWMS (Corps Water Management System), HEC-ResSim (Reservoir System Simulation), and HEC DSSVue (Data Storage System Visual Utility Engine). Each user manual was about 200 pages long. Here are two of them:

Special Project

The Petting Zoo: A Novel, by Jim Carroll (Viking, 2010) – In the summer of 2009, I quit my lucrative freelance gig to serve as assistant to poet Jim Carroll who, very ill, was trying to finalize The Petting Zoo. It was about 90% there when he died — all the writing was done, at least in draft form, but all the pieces were scattered across multiple sets of drafts and manuscript versions. I wrangled his drafts and notes into the book that was published. 

Academic Writing

  • “The Metacolonization of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: Mimicry, Parasitism, and Americanism in the PSA,” published in Science Fiction Studies. Download PDF
  • “Period of Adjustment: High Point over a Cavern: A Serious Comedy,” published in Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, Philip C. Kolin, Ed. Read it >
  • “The Puked-Upon Whore Speaks: Angry Essentialism and the Avant-Garde,” chapter from my doctoral dissertation. Read it >
  • I wrote the “Jim Carroll” article for Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 143. Download PDF
  • CatholicBoy.com , the Jim Carroll website, is a mess at the moment (I’m in the process of moving it to a new CMS), but it is the most authoritative and thorough resource on Jim Carroll in existence.