Welcome to The Nowhere Pub — a place that’s a little hard to find, and harder to describe. The site shares its name with one of the story collections living here, and that’s not entirely a coincidence. Like its fictional namesake, this is a place where different kinds of stories end up, where the clientele is eclectic, and where you’re never quite sure what you’ll find when you walk through the door.
The Regular In The Corner
The only voice you’ll encounter here is mine — the slightly unhinged regular who’ll talk your ear off about artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, whatever anime I’ve been watching, the occasional tech deep-dive, or just whatever happened to be rattling around in my head that week. These are the Ramblings, and they’re the most active part of the pub at the moment. Pull up a stool — fair warning, the topics get eclectic.
What Else Is On Tap?
Three ongoing collections of fiction live here, each quite different from the others:
Pub Tales — the stories that give this site its name. An interdimensional pub where genre archetypes from across time and space pull up a stool and swap stories. Space pirates, chosen ones, detectives, emperors — if they need a drink and somewhere to sit, the Pub will find them.
Kethyras — a fantasy series following two very different women navigating a city I’m still building from scratch. Nonna is a half-dokkalfar barbarian with a drinking problem. Helene is a powerful elemental mage. They shouldn’t work as a pair. They do. (Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser may have had something to do with that.)
Short Fiction — standalone stories with no connecting thread except that they came from the same head. Dark, funny, tender, strange — sometimes all four at once.
The Proprietor
I’m Benjamin (“Ben”) Cohen — software architect and developer, with a writing habit that refuses to go away. I grew up literally crawling around IBM computer room floors (my mother was a Systems Engineer back when computers filled auditorium-sized rooms and required their own environmental systems), triple-majored in Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science, and spent three decades in software development before a detour into writing — which I discovered I enjoyed, and turned out I wasn’t bad at. I’m now back in software development, which explains both the reduced posting frequency and the occasional tech Rambling.
Along the way I also picked up some credentials as a Yakuza Executive Consultant. Yes, really. I could tell you more, but then other people would kill you.
In The Cellar
There’s also a novel. “Rough Times in Osaka” — a character study set in the Osaka yakuza underworld, based on a remarkable real story, written collaboratively with the person it’s about. It exists. Its future is still being decided.
Come On In
The door’s open. Pull up a stool, have a look around, and see what catches your eye. If something resonates — or if you just want to tell the kook in the corner to pipe down — the contact link is always open.
