Watching bats in flight when I’m hiking feeds my sense of wonder — and Batman on TV inspired my earliest role-playing adventures. Navigating the unseen is one of my passions, so when I decided to buck years of shyness and discomfort with anything resembling self-promotion, I opted for the nickname “Bat” as my comfort zone for flying the web.
This is my first website that’s about me, my fiction, writing, reading and related obsessions. In addition to riffing about a few of my favorite influences in speculative fiction I’ll be mentioning outstanding new work that gets under my skin.
Expect forays into weirdness. I get worked up over bog bodies, carnivorous plants and the bleed-through between worlds.
I’ve published short stories, poems, book reviews and a science fiction novella. I grew up on Hitchcock, and reading Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktock Man” broke my head open.
I live close to nature on the California coast. When I’m not writing and reading, I observe wildlife and study ancient cultures. Early exposure to the ancient Egyptians left me with a compulsion to dig things up, explore symbolism and use natural materials in landscapes and interiors.
I’ve returned to fiction because there’s nothing else I’d rather do. This makes my copywriting alter-ego nervous.
Give me a daring writer over a safe writer any day.
“You cannot create except by being re-created yourself. The sense that does the changing inside ourselves is the sense of wonder, it is that faculty of living as though you never lived before. We will change the world as long as we can be changed.“
— Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Update: My first drabbles, 100-word stories, will appear on Specklit soon. My flash, “Shroud” is out in Apokrupha’s Dark Bits under my unmasked Bryce Hughes byline and “Rip” is forthcoming in Apokrupha’s Vignettes from the End of the World.
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Photo credits
Background image: Bats! by Seth Tisue
Header Image (in color): Egyptian Fruit Bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) by Arran ET
Adam West, Bob Kane and Frank Gorshin on the set of the Batman TV show in 1966. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Bat Hughes, Writer 