Who is Doug Lane and What Does He Write?

Stories are composed by writers. Writers are composed of stories. Who makes up whom? Can one exist without the other? Which one is the unreliable narrator?

Don’t look at me — I just work here. 

The allegation by my late mother was that I cried when I got home from my first day of kindergarten because I didn't learn to read at a higher level than I already did. I was probably just hangry, but it’s hard to say. 


Armed with a library card from my grandmother, I cut my teeth on the works of Ray Bradbury and other writers on the SF shelf at the Carnegie library in my hometown in upstate New York. The Twilight Zone taught me who Charles Beaumont was; Star Trek and The Outer Limits introduced me to the work of Harlan Ellison. The fiction from this trio of writers instilled in me a desire to be a storyteller. Writing is, after all, a lot like magic, and part of the fun is figuring out how the trick is done — and another is devising new ones. 


My first-ever published piece of fiction was in my high school newspaper in 1980. I was in the seventh grade, and it shows. Good luck finding a copy of that bit of juvenilia. I sold my first piece of professional fiction in 2006. In between, I was working out the trick in a stop-and-go fashion: creative writing as an educational choice, clunky tales, long starts at bad novels, better-then-good scripts, and enough lover’s lament poetic crap to choke several dozen horses. I also worked a variety of jobs: reporter for two local newspapers, defense contract deliverables manager for a government contractor, a brief foray into distillate sales for a major oil company, quality assurance for one of Ross Perot’s companies, and marketing writer and project manager for a GPS tracking software company. Life is Chutes & Ladders. You learn to climb, and you learn to roll when you slide. You also learn how to renovate a house, build a website, make ice cream, and tell better stories.


I earned a degree in English from the State University of New York in Binghamton in the earliest nineties. Eighteen years after the fact, I returned to school for a masters in Journalism from Georgetown University. I’m mulling a doctorate in Library Science — Pitt has a solid-looking program — but it feels like padding the resume.


I changed my byline from my full name to Doug Lane between my first sales and now, frankly because I got tired of having to decide if I needed a period after the ‘J’ or not. The ugly downside to this: neither Goodreads nor the Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base will let you do a name change mid-career. So if you go looking, you’ll find me out there under both names. I might even be under other names, but that would be telling.


Home has been in New York, in Texas (twice), in Virginia, in Maryland, and is now in Aloha, OR with my wife, who gives me the room to tell stories. I’m also still renovating houses and making ice cream. Try the toasted cocoanut.