Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXIV

gordsellar2 Comments
This entry is part 51 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Okay, time to get my shoulder back to the wheel, I think. I’m making another try at returning to the Cantos. It’s been a busy time, but not so busy I can’t do this a few days a week in the morning, as a warm-up to my own writing. At least, I hope I can do it.  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 …

Continue Reading

Free RPG Day Redux

gordsellar0 Comments

Oh, by the way, when I posted about the LotFP game I ran last Sunday for Free RPG Day, I neglected to post about the rest of the event, which happened at Dice Latte in Seoul. After all, I didn’t just run a game: I also played in one. Specifically, for the 11:00am session, I got a chance to try out Kids on Bikes, which was… well, I guess I’d say it is like a rules-lite version of Tales from the Loop, with the following differences: none of the particularized setting of Simon Stalenhag’s world: there is no set lore …

Continue Reading

Free RPG Day/Playtest: Eldritch Cock Meets the Wizard’s Tower

gordsellar3 Comments

Though I’ve got more serious news I’m still processing, this post isn’t about that. It’s game stuff.  Sunday was a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of a day. I was signed up to run the Lamentations of the Flame Princess table at the Free RPG Day event at Dice Latte in Seoul, so I figured I might as well give that adventure I’ve been revising—the one I discussed drafting here—one more quick playtest. The adventure involve’s a wizard’s tower, which was a good fit for this year’s LotFP Free RPG book, Eldritch Cock—a book of demented, cool spells using the same spellcasting rules …

Continue Reading

At Last, A Use for Scapple

gordsellar2 Comments

I’m not sure how I ended up with a license for Scapple: I think it was thrown in with my Scrivener license, though it may have been included in some bundle of Mac software. What I am sure of, though, is that I didn’t find a use for it until recently. That’s on me, of course: I probably could have used it while plotting out the novel I redrafted last year, but it never really occurred to me. However, that’s changed with a project I just finished working on, a freelance RPG-writing project. It’s one of those deals where there’s a clue …

Continue Reading

The Second-Hand Textbook

gordsellar6 Comments

Ah, cheaters… they shall ever be with us.  True story, this, and recent, too—from the course I taught in winter semester, which finished in late January. Names have been omitted for obvious reasons, and there’s a little follow-up on my philosophy regarding cheaters and how to deal with attempted cheating in a class.  Enjoy:

Continue Reading

Writing Stuff

gordsellar2 Comments

I haven’t posted about my writing, but that doesn’t mean nothing’s going on. In fact, as I’ve already mentioned on Facebook and Twitter, one of my stories from last year is a finalist in the AnLab poll for best short story published in Analog during 2017. The competition is stiff, of course, but that just makes it more flattering. (It’s my second year in a row to be a finalist in this vote.) All the stories are available at the link above: feel free to read them and vote for mine the ones you like best.  Beyond that, you can …

Continue Reading

Recent Reads

gordsellar0 Comments

It’s been awhile since I said anything about what I’ve read lately—I don’t think I’ve written a review post since this one I shared in September, in fact! One reason is that I haven’t managed to read as much as I’d like. Writing, a toddler, overtime at work… they all converge on me having less time to read, and even less to post about what I’m reading. Still, I have been reading, to be sure. I have also written a few specific posts on individual books, which got stalled out because of what a challenge it is to really do the …

Continue Reading

“Focus” in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

gordsellar0 Comments

So, Neil Clarke recently published the table of contents of the Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3, collecting his picks for the best stories of 2017. To my immense happiness, my short story “Focus,” which was originally published in Analog, will be included in the volume… and in very good company. It’s not just an honor to have my work appear in a Year’s Best collection by such a discerning editor, but to have it appear alongside work by some of the best authors around today—and some authors whose work I was reading back when I started writing …

Continue Reading