This is Douglas Todd's web page. That would be me. I last updated it in December 2019.
I write stuff. I've been writing fiction for longer than I care to say, and tinkering with interactive fiction and games for almost as long, but most of my projects never see the light of day for various reasons. In 2017 I decided to start pushing them out into the world remorselessly. I'm revising old work and finishing new work. As I make projects public, I'll add them to the list below.
I'm visible on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Goodreads, though I tend to use them for news and announcements only. There's also an Amazon author page which will tell you very little.
THE RING
Hard-boiled detective procedural SF. Unlike Gillian's Eye, I'm not reluctant to give this one the SF label.
Welcome to the Ring, Jessica Gray! As our new security officer, you're the sole law and order on the station. We think you'll have an interesting first year, especially as you deal with the body in the locked airshaft, the veiled corpse no one recognizes, the epidemic of people turning blue, the murder where the sole suspect couldn't possibly have done it, and other strange occurrences. Oh, yes, and did we mention the conspiracy? No, no, not that conspiracy. The other conspiracy.
GILLIAN'S EYE
A semi-dystopian alternate-future SF novel. I am always reluctant to put the SF label on anything, but this does have a lot of future tech around the margins, and of course there are always the nine-foot insectoid aliens, so I think I can get away with it.
When the aliens began attacking every night, the Council reunited nations and became the defender of humanity. But there are some who say the Council is just as much of a problem as the aliens.
For example, a young woman who's learned the hard way that anyone who gets in the way of the Council disappears forever. Or a girl who's fleeing an accident she'd be blamed for, who makes a discovery the Council would kill her for.
Then there's Gillian Roth--feared by everyone who knows she exists.
Gillian has a lot of secrets. Secrets about the Council, secrets about herself, secrets about her family. Sometimes it's nearly impossible to keep all of these secrets at the same time. When some of the secrets end up endangering the people she loves, she and her family have to run for their lives. In the process, they become entangled in the biggest secret in the world, a secret that changes everything.
Gillian isn't going to be happy when she finds out what it is.
HOW TO GO TO HELL IN 10,000 EASY STEPS
An urban fantasy set mostly in Louisiana of the 1990s, with a bit of political intrigue and a light dusting of horror.
Valerie wants to sell her soul. But it seems like Hell doesn't want it, which is a real disappointment.
Actually, Hell is having some serious problems, and it looks like Valerie is going to get ensnared in them whether she likes it or not. Along the way, she'll meet a lot of colorful and interesting people, most of whom are immortal, many of whom aren't very nice, some of whom would like to see her dead.
She'll also experience some truly horrifying things because, no matter how nice some of the people in it are, when it comes right down to it, Hell just isn't a very pleasant place.
A Handful of Stories
I've dug out a few stories to provide you with supplemental reading. I don't write short stories the way I write novels. I figure in a short story there's no time to do more than make a sketch; the reader is going to have to do a fair bit of the work themselves. I'm aware this can cause problems (I had a friend tell me once "I liked your story, but I needed to read it three times to figure it out"), but I don't seem to be able to write short stories any other way. This is also part of the reason I write very few short stories. Anyway, you may find them rewarding. Or you may not.
The two at the top of the list each stand alone, but they have the same protagonist and universe. If you want to experience the events in them in the same order she does, read "Overkill" before "Reverse Procedural." They are both from 2017. "Codependence" (1999) and "The Vanishing Girl" (2006) are two of my favorites from my older crop. If you have known me for a long time, you may well have read them in other places. "The Lamia in the Penthouse" (2014) is a horror vignette that I forgot I wrote and recently unearthed. It was inspired by an old Virgil Finlay Weird Tales cover.