Recent Books (More Recenter Books Edition)

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So, here’s some stuff I’ve read lately… It’s a lot of what I’ve read so far in 2006, at least since my last book post. Since I typically are working my way slowly through any five books at once, these posts tend to come slowly, and to have a lot in them when they do come, so I’m including just fiction here. I’ll put up a second post, a bit later, with the  nonfiction stuff in it.  Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan I picked up this book in Los Angeles, and I’m very glad I did.  A creepy …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos LXIX and LXX

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This entry is part 55 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. This is my second post on the Cantos after returnint to them following an eight month break. I do …

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“The Peppers of GreenScallion,” and More

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This entry is part 68 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Among the many wonderful things included in the June 2019 issue of Clarkesworld, you may find two things of interest to those following Korean SF, or my own work as a cotranslator with Jihyun Park. The first is a translation of Myung-Hoon Bae’s “The Peppers of GreenScallion,”translated through the efforts of Jihyun Park and myself. It’s a story about war, systemic failures, bureaucratic nonsense, food, and love. We’re very proud of it, especially given the fact that it turned out to be a lot more fiendishly subtle than we originally realized: little things throughout proved challenging to translate, including an …

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Recent Reads: Troubadour Verse Edition

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Though I was inspired to return to Provençal verse by a game—one run by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert—I’ve been interested in Occitan culture and literature for a long time. Honestly, it was kind of dumb luck, because reading Pound had reawakened in my a craving to return to old Occitanian song and verse, and when I realized I hadn’t read any a decade or so, I decided to get my hands on some. Fortunately for my bank account, a request for a branch loan at school worked out and I got both of the books I asked for: Meg Bogin’s …

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RPG Quick Shots

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This post contains some thoughts on a few shorter RPG books I’ve read lately: The Derelict: A Tale of Terror for Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Peterson Beasties: A Manual of New Monsters for Your Original Edition Game by Thomas Denmark Caves of Shadow by Monte Cook Fate Accelerated  by Clark Valentine with Leonard Balsera, Fred Hicks, Mike Olson, and Amanda Valentine If that doesn’t appeal, this may be a post to skip. 

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She Bleeds by Elizabeth Chaipraditkul

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Update (20 April 2019): I’m not sure why I never posted this, but anyway, I just discovered this among my draft posts. Maybe I was planning to publish thoughts on all four of the Gen Con LotFP books at once? I’m not sure, but anyway, I’m busy and the other Gen Con books (which I have, but which I haven’t looked at yet) will have to wait, so I’m putting this out there now.  Original Post (20 January 2019): This is a quick look at Elizabeth Chaipraditkul’s She Bleeds supplement for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. As the back cover text reads: …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXVIII

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This entry is part 54 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. This is my first post on the Cantos in eight months. I do hope to finish the Adams Cantos …

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Readymade Bodhisattva, “The Flowering,” Los Angeles/Riverside, and More

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This entry is part 67 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the SF in South Korea series on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s happened in the field. It’s just that:  My interests have broadened out from SF to other forms of speculative or “genre” narrative (and, in a big way, to include tabletop RPGs in general), and a lot has happened in many other narrative genres and different media within Korea.   I’ve been a little less involved in the informal Korean SF world since 2013. We were abroad for a while, and then we had a kid and moved …

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Reading The Warren by Marshall Miller (and a new World Playset: Deck 17-R01)

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This post is a brief overview of an RPG I managed to read through, but not yet try out, called The Warren. It’s a story game about… you guessed it, intelligent rabbits, sort of a RPG adaptation of Watership Down and stories like it. (Did the cover art above give it away?) This post includes short explanation of my (honestly sketchy) familiarity with the family of games it belongs to, an overview of what I found interesting in the game’s design, and a free (but not yet playtested) “World” playbook I designed for the setting, and a pretty wacky one …

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A**hole Island “Final” Edit/Rewrite Under Way

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Well, I’m finally back at work on A**hole Island. It’s one of two novels I drafted between the fall of 2016 and the summer of 2018, at which point I toppled over from exhaustion. Working a day job, doing editing on the side, parenting, trying to sell the odd short story, plus writing at that pace is not sustainable all at once, especially since A**hole Island is the shorter of the two novels. (But also the one that feels most complete.) I started working again on it today, taking some advice from a friend (thanks, Jeremy!) and hacking away at …

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