A Lovely Discussion of a Lovely Story

This entry is part 73 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m late catching up—it’s been one of those weeks—but on the radio a few days ago, Paul Matthews (@ajosshi) discussed our translation of Bae Myung-hoon’s lovely short story “The Peppers of Green Scallion,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld a few years ago.  Listening to Paul read from and discuss the story was a delight for both of us, and he definitely hit on a lot of the things that made us love the story and want to translate it in the first place.   You can check out a recording of the discussion over on Arirang’s Check it Out podcast. (Or …

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#dungeon23, Days 10-20: Medium Lunar Fragment

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series #dungeon23

This post is part of a series detailing my participation in #dungeon23. Feel free to follow the link above to check out the series in order, or see the first post in the series if you don’t know what this project is. Days 10-20 were a bit of a challenge, mainly because our admins at work cheerfully made this week a hellish mess for anyone teaching a winter class. That is to say, this is rough, and yes, there were days when I jotted down a few days’ worth of entries to “catch up”; there were days where I got …

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#dungeon23, Days 1-9: The Lunar Surface Access Complex

This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series #dungeon23

So, I’ve joined in on the #dungeon23 thing. (Or, #facility23? Er, whatever. Check out the original post if you don’t know what this is.) I will be posting here intermittently about it—probably after each “chunk” is finished, rather than on a fixed schedule like once a week. I’m not sure whether I’ll bounce each post to social media or just just toot/tweet them occasionally: I guess we’ll see.  My first chunk this year took 9 days, so that’s what I’m updating about. (I know it’s the 10th of the year, but this is everything up to and including yesterday. I …

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Review(s) of “Sojourn,” and Other Thoughts

I was very gratified a few weeks ago to learn of Simon Scott’s comments about by story “Sojourn”, one of the stories from the 2020 collection  City of Han that he discussed in a review in Kyoto Journal. He begins this way: In this era of extreme global hypersensitivity to race and national narratives, it is arguably a high-risk proposition for a Western expat author in Asia to write about such things. Yet two of the authors represented in this volume of expat short stories from South Korea, Gord Sellar and Ron Bandun, fearlessly walk the ideological plank of their …

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A**hole Island

Hey, finally post that’s not about RPG stuff, huh?  I’m ending the first week of my month of writing time this year. This is the first time I’ve reallyt sat down and done some serious writing since 2018. I… just didn’t have it in me, somehow, in 2019, and throughout most of 2020 our son was home with us and my wife was recovering from a work-related injury for a chunk of the year, so … really, honestly, I guess I’d have to say it was some combination of there being no time and no energy.   This year, though: we worked …

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