Month: June 2017

Sponsor Me and I’ll Kill Your 1730s Doppelgänger Horribly

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Yeah, I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-Thon thing. The goal is to raise funds for Clarion West, the excellent SF writing workshop I attended eleven years ago. This year I’m working on the same thing I was working on the last time I signed up for the write-a-thon, though I am working on a new draft of it. A lot of the vague outline is the same, but some of the details differ: https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011840873119744 https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011993172484096 As I noted (in the full conversation with Kate, which for some reason I can’t seem to embed here), the evil plotting Habsburgs are out, …

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Free RPG Day 2017

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So, I’m running behind again, but I figured I’d write this up anyway. Free RPG Day 2017 happened a the weekend before last. A few of us made the trip of to Dice Latte in Seoul for the event. I didn’t take any pictures—I’m terrible at taking pictures of anything but the kid, these days—but I can say a good time was had. We arrived late, expecting my friend Justin to run Blades in the Dark rather than joining in on any of the official tables (because none of us had thought to sign up for anything—if I had done, I …

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Another Prodigal Reprint

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I got another book in the post the other day! Supposedly the publication date for this one in in July, but it seems available at some places, at least: Somehow, my shaggy dog story has been reprinted in three languages so far—Chinese and Czech, along with English—and appeared in two Year’s Best collections so far! This one is The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois  and published by St. Martin’s Griffin (which is MacMillan). It’s the second time Gardner has selected one of my stories to appear in his annual anthology, and as always it’s an honour, …

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How to Play Hazard (The Dice Game)

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Here’s something I came across researching the book project I’m working on right now, set in early Georgian London: hazard, a dice game with crazy rules, though it’s the ancestor of the simplified dice game craps, which I’m pretty sure is familiar to anyone reading this. Kristen Koster has a reasonably good summary of the game here, but I figured I’d try write it up as well, and see if I couldn’t make the rules a little simpler to follow. I figured some notes about cheating would also be appropriate, since that was widespread in dice games historically. Whether you’re …

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“Focus” in Analog

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My short story “Focus” is in the current issue of Analog! I was happy to discover this when I received contributor copies on Friday in the mail. (I’ve been too busy to post an update since then, and likewise I’m so behind on everything that I only noticed the story was out when I received the print copies…) The story is set in Vietnam—in Saigon and a South Korean-run factory complex in nearby Bình Dương Province, and is about how companies parasitize everything—or, rather, convince us to allow them to parasitize everything to better serve their ends. It’s inspired in part …

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