On the historic day that entomologist WAYNE HATFIELD discovers a bumble bee widely believed to be extinct, he is run over by a reckless mountain biker high above the hills of Ashland, Oregon. The absence of proof of the bee sighting drives WAYNE back up the mountain as his frustrated wife, NANCY, a science writer, is courted by their new (and newly divorced) neighbor DAN, a young retiree and startup publisher.

Meanwhile, someone has begun laying traps along the hiking trails, injuring bikers and making WAYNE (who believes that bikers threaten bee colonies) a prime suspect. BRADY, an injured biker, and ETHAN, a local reporter eager for a big story, conspire to elicit a confession out of WAYNE.

When DAN offers to publish NANCY’s next book, we learn that NANCY and WAYNE are still grieving their late daughter, whom WAYNE believes speaks to him on the mountain. As WAYNE’s mental health weakens and the bikers’ case against him strengthens, WAYNE retreats yet again to the mountain, where tragedy and the truth converge. SPECIES OF LEAST CONCERN tackles issues of conservation and extinction, and what it means to be among those left behind.

FINALIST: 2016 Source Festival

Thrown together by circumstance (the circumstance being, they were thrown out of an establishment), three outcasts bond in shared experience, come to terms with human nature, and make plans for a final journey...or a final stand.

One couple and another night of Netflix leads to a wild time-hopping adventure in escapism in a COVID, climate-changing world.

Two couples, separated by 12,000 years, fall apart and come together thanks to a time-traveling watch, the paleo diet, and not-so-natural selection.

Synopsis:
Stacey, inspired by her recent trip to an animal sanctuary with her fiancé Greg (who was too cheap to take her to the zoo), has embraced veganism. Greg, who is on the paleo diet, does not share Stacey’s passions. He’s also a software developer and recently invented Stella — a time-traveling app for his smartwatch which has suddenly become his new significant other.

After an argument over Greg conveniently missing Stacey’s meals (which he blames on Stella), Stacy secretly asks Stella to take her back to the day she met Greg, thinking she can convert him to veganism if he had only met her that way.

To her surprise, Stacey is taken to the Paleolithic era, where she is captured by Nag, the bride-to-be of Grog, the son of the tribe’s leader, Nog. Grog has been trying in vain to convert his tribe to vegetable farming, a new invention in response to the dire overhunting of wooly mammoths. Grog and Stacey are kindred spirits.

Meanwhile, Greg has acquired a new watch with a new (albeit snarkier) version of Stella — she’s still in beta, after all. He sets off in search of Stacey and soon finds himself captured by Nag, whom he finds exotically exhilarating. When Greg reconnects with Stacey, she refuses to return with him, having fallen for Grog. She throws her watch into a tar pit to prove her intentions.

Desperate, Greg returns to that fateful day with Stacey at the animal sanctuary and instead takes her to the zoo in hopes of a different outcome. After his hopes are dashed, he returns to the cave and abducts Stacey back to the present. Both he and Stacey are surprised when Grog shows up, having rescued Stella from the tar pit — and as he and Stacey begin their future, Greg returns to the past, where Nag awaits him.

Two authors, a husband and wife, and how their Amazon.com sales ranks take over their lives.

Here's the artistic statement I wrote about it:
To be an author in the age of Amazon.com is to know one’s sales rank. To be unhealthily obsessed with this number. Now we know not only that we’re not popular but exactly how unpopular. Changes in technology reflect changes in society, in which we measure everything—miles walked, calories burned, number of friends, likes, retweets. In a world in which everything is measured, how do we look beyond numbers to what matters most?