Category: WRITING

In With the New

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In with the new project, that is. I had a little choreography to work out, since I’m planning to co-write a story with a friend soon, but just got a great idea for a screenplay that pretty much appeared in my mind, not quite fully-formed, but almost. The screenplay sort of brings together a lot of things I’ve wished I could see in a Korean SF movie, and following Justin Howe’s advice, I figure now is a good time to try write it… especially since there’s enough time to get a draft done and submit it to the PIFAN-hosted NAFF …

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Charles on the Cthulhu Festival of Film, and What We’re Working On

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I’m in the home stretch of the screenplay I’m trying to wrap up today–a project that anyway I’m not really supposed to be talking about for now, though hopefully at some point I can because it’s interesting, and relevant, and Lovecraftian, and set in Korea–but in any case, since I am busy and can’t discuss it anyway, here’s something else: My friend Charles attended the recent Cthulhu Festival of Film in Seoul a couple of months ago (at the end of February), and soon after posted his thoughts about the films and the event in general. I haven’t been able to …

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Launch Pad Workshop Opens for Applications

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I was swamped back in February, so I forgot to post about the application deadline for Clarion West, which was a couple of weeks ago, but for those who are working in a creative capacity–not just as a writer, mind you–the Launch Pad workshop is open for applications. Basically, it’s a crash course in astronomy designed for people who could use some training in the area to better handle related subjects in their creative work. In my class, we had mostly fiction authors (and not all of them exclusively writers of SF), but also a science comedy team. Screenwriters, film …

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Looking Back: “Erosion” (1999)

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In 2005, I hadn’t published much of anything, in any sense approaching a professional one. I mean, I’d gotten poems and short pieces into chapbooks, had published a couple of poems and a a small think piece in the university magazine were I did grad school, and a few short student articles in my undergrad campus newspaper; I’d even had a short piece of fiction included in a refugee awareness training program, though that was because my sister asked me to write something for the handbook she was compiling. But I had submitted a story to precisely one market in …

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Eleven Years…

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By the way, it’s been eleven years since I landed in Korea. Okay, really, I arrived on 30 December. It’s still 30 December in a lot of the world, so I’ll just ignore the fact I’m a few hours late on Korean time. Yeah, it’s been eleven years since I flew across the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arrived in Incheon International Airport, and took a bus down to Jeonju Iksan, to be met by someone I’d never met–but whom I’d heard about through my friend Joleen. Eleven years is a long, long time, considering that when I first …

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New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

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For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

My essay is titled “Thinking Big: RPGs, Teaching in Korea, and the Subversive Idea of Agency,” and it deals not only with my own experience using RPG-like systems in language teaching, but also how RPG-like approaches to interaction might be just what’s needed to fix Korea’s utterly broken TEFL paradigm… and maybe to instill a deeper sense of agency in young people whose literature, education, and upbringing seem specifically to stifle that sense. But I’ll add that it’s just as much about my return to gaming as it is about the stuff mentioned in the title… and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in there, too.

The WyrdCon Companion ebook is free to download from here.

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“The Bernoulli War” in Rich Horton’s Year’s Best 2013

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So, after he had kind things to say about “The Bernoulli War” (he rated it among the top novelettes in Asimov’s in 2012, and given the order he mentions, apparently the best), I was delighted when I heard that Rich Horton wanted to include it in his The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition. And checking out the Table of Contents at that second link, I see several friends among the authors collected (including my Clarion West classmate Caroline Yoachim), as well as several authors whom I admire mostly from afar. Very encouraging… And I have more, related, news, …

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And Soon, We Shoot

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You’ll have to forgive me for doing something today that I don’t often do: being (relatively) brief. I’m busy, is why. I am now grading essays from midterms — a few weeks late, I’ll admit — and then I’ll be storyboarding the film we start shooting our next short film project in Bucheon at the end of the month. The tentative plan is to get the thing shot in four long days of hard work, but if it takes an extra weekend, we’ll make it happen. To get that done, we need to be so damned organized you wouldn’t recognize …

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The Book of Cthulhu II

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Argh! I don’t know how my original post back in September didn’t get posted, but anyway: back in September, my Lovecraftan-Dreamlands-inversion story “Of Melei, of Ulthar” was reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu II edited by Ross Lockhart of Night Shade Books. It’s pretty flattering to have my story requested for reprint at all, let alone alongside some of the authors whose work is also among those pages… Not bad for a story I couldn’t finish in time to submit to the anthology it was requested for, if I say so myself. And, by a strange twist of fate, I’m currently …

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On Le Sacre, Oedipus Rex, and Igor Stravinsky

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This week, I had the students who are studying Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative check out a couple of works by Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (the ballet) Oedipus Rex (the opera-oratorio) For Oedipus, we watched the one-hour DVD of the Seiji Ozawa production (the one with Jessye Norman) in class; for the other, I had them check out The Rite on  Youtube — it’s one of the productions in which the performers did they best to reenact Nijinsky’s original choreography, and they also attempted to resurrect — as faithfully as possible — the original costumes …

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