Category: WRITING

Martian Migraine’s Cthulhusattva ToC Announced!

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So, the whole world is right now poring over reports of the biggest data leak yet to journalists (and rightly so, though, er, we’re not surprised by much of it, are we?), but I’ll go ahead and post this anyway: It looks like the word is out on the table of contents Martian Migraine’s forthcoming Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis. My story “ἱερὸς γάμος [Hieros Gamos]” is among those appearing in the book, hooray! The cover fits the book concept pretty perfectly, too: I’m thrilled: it took a while for ” “ἱερὸς γάμος” to find a home, but I’ll spare you …

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“Beyond Mere Lotophagi” in Green Devil Face #6

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So, I’ve been pretty busy lately—baby, work, game prep, life—but I figured I’d pop up in and mention that I just got my contributor’s copy of Green Devil Face #6, the recently restarted Lamentations of the Flame Princess zine. There’s a bunch of great stuff in it: a piece on diseases for the Early Modern historical setting by Andre Novoa (author of the recent “The Squid, the Cabal, and the Old Man” adventure), with globalization considered; a nasty monster designed by John G. McCollum; some tables for generating bizarro relics—and also, I think, a clever proof on how much objects illuminate worldbuilding—by Paul Keigh, who …

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“Sunshine,” and other publication news…

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My short story “Sunshine” just went live on the Cosmos website, and with an excellent illustration to boot: It’s a story I wrote last year during the MERS outbreak, and it’s about a grim as you can get with a title like that. I’ve posted some notes (on the genesis of the story, trivia, background notes, and more) as usual over on my Story Notes archive. You can see them here. Other Recent Publications: Besides that, a couple of my book reviews appeared in the December issue of the digital magazine Kyoto Journal, issue 84: “Thoughtful Juxtaposition.” (A review of Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, …

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Black Envy, White Envy, and Creativity as an Act of Love

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I recently checked out Hervé This’s Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism. In its pages, This opines about a dizzying array of things, though one must admit he plays fast and loose sometimes with some of the quotes he makes. (The quote from Plutarch that adorns the sidebar of my teaching subsite, for example, he attributes to Aristophanes.) Likewise, the book could have stood to have more specific, practical explanation of how its general and broad concepts might be applied in practice, though I suppose this book represents Hervé This in a sort of manifesto mode. Even so—or maybe because of this?—a …

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A Short History of the Donghak Peasant Revolution by Soonchul Shin and Jinyoung Lee

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Note: I’ve appended an update to the end of this post, with information provided to me on Facebook. Read on for more.   Original Post: I’ve been reading up on Korean history—not just out of interest in filling in some blanks in my historical knowledge, but also, I’ll confess, because of an ongoing writing project, and because the library at work has a ton of materials to which I previously had no access—and the results have been interesting… for the most part, anyway. Sometimes, though, that’s not the case. There’s hits and misses, and the book I’ll be discussing today is …

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An Evolutionary Myth by Bo-Young Kim

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This entry is part 65 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m very happy to announce that a translation of Boyoung Kim’s “An Evolutionary Myth,” — co-translated by yours truly and Jihyun Park — has just been published in the current issue of Clarkesworld, issue #104 (May 2015), alongside a diverse selection of authors including Chinese author A Que, and the Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi, as well the American authors James Van Pelt, Matthew Kressel, Andrea Pawley, and Ian Muneshwar. As for Jihyun and myself, this is our first published co-translation, and we’re pleased as punch. Hopefully it is only the first of many… The original story contained some footnotes that didn’t …

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On Reviewing Books

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My buddy Joe recently asked me about my process for reviewing books, how I approach it and go about doing it. (I have done reviews for a few magazines and newspapers, but these days I mostly review for Kyoto Journal.) I figured I might as well talk about it here, since it may interest others. I suppose is “the usual,” ie. this kind of a four-paragraph thing: plot summary positives negatives overall impression Do I do this? Well, the structure, yeah, sort of. But, no, not really. I have done it, and occasionally I do revert to it when I really am underwhelmed …

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Itaewon and the Imjin War (異胎圓 or 梨泰院?)

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Update (11 Feb. 2015): Commentary on Facebook has been helpful, especially this comment by Heyjin Jeon: In 1457, King SeJo (Son of King Sejong) said to the Minister of Finance, “Make workhouses for poor people at Bojewon, Hongjewon, Itaewon.”It’s before Imjin War. I think “梨泰院” listens like “梨泰院” and people made new meaning about the name. http://sillok.history.go.kr/url.jsp?id=kga_10305007_002 Here’s the relevant passage from that source: 다만 염려되는 것은 가난한 백성이 병든 사람과 더불어 뒤섞여 거처하기를 싫어해서 이로 인하여 뿔뿔이 도망하여 흩어지는 일이니, 보제원(普濟院)·홍제원(弘濟院)·이태원(梨泰院) 등 세 곳에 별도로 진제장(賑濟場)을 두고 사람을 임명하여 감독 관장(管掌)하게 하고, 또 오부(五部)의 관리로 하여금 날마다 윤번(輪番)으로 왕래하면서 검속(檢束)하고 …

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What do the Starfish Think?

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I haven’t made an update here for the last few weeks, and a lot of long-promised (albeit probably not long-expected) posts languish unfinished. People are probably wondering if I went for a swim in the ocean and didn’t come back. Rest assured: I fear the ocean as much as I ever did, and am safe and (mostly) dry… just busy. That’s the nature of job-hunting, and it’s a bit like writing: lots of sitting at a computer fiddling with details, hoping your intended meaning comes across, sending things off into the void and then waiting for responses… so you send out more things …

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Magic, Science, Inconsistency, and the Principle of Acceptable Variance

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I’m enjoying Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, an exhaustive look at the practices of the cunning folk in England (and to some degree America) from 1550-1900, which I’m reading as research for the book I’m writing now (which has a cunning woman as a major character). Baker’s text is full of (ie. basically, completely composed of) countless examples of what folk magic involved in different moments during modern English history, and it also has lots of interesting observations on how much of what neo-pagans claim as history is actually just “invented tradition” (in the sense that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger discuss in The …

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