Write-a-Thon-A-Gain…

Though I’m keeping a low profile and all, I am participating in Clarion West’s Write-a-Thon this year. I signed up a little late, because I wasn’t sure whether I could really get much done during the write-a-thon itself: the timing, as always, is a little tough for me. (The first week of the workshop is always final exams week for most universities here in Korea, and in my current job, that’s followed by a four week long summer intensive course. On top of all that, our kid’s going to be in hospital next week at the end of the month, …

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

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 …

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At Last, A Use for Scapple

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 …

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So About That Novel I’ve Been Writing…

Having finished a draft I finally feel is, well, finished (in its way), I guess this is as good a time as any to jot down some thoughts on the project so far.  Those not interested in a look at the fumbling, stumbling, and very difficult process it took me to get to the end of my first possibly-decent novel draft ought to skip this post.  

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Ride the Star Wind available for preorder!

Hey, look at that:  The forthcoming Broken Eye Books anthology Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird (edited by ​Scott Gable & C. Dombrowski) is available for preorders now, over on Amazon.com! It will contain a story of mine titled “Vol de Nuit” that is, well, kind of existential Lovecraftian space horropera. Imagine a raw, bloody Space: 1999 steak mashed into a big plate of Lovecraft  I know, I know, I don’t usually write about spaceship fighter pilots blasting their weapons off into the silent void against implacable, inhuman enemies, though, well… when it’s a Great Old One …

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Sponsor Me and I’ll Kill Your 1730s Doppelgänger Horribly

Yeah, I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-Thon thing. The goal is to raise funds for Clarion West, the excellent SF writing workshop I attended eleven years ago. This year I’m working on the same thing I was working on the last time I signed up for the write-a-thon, though I am working on a new draft of it. A lot of the vague outline is the same, but some of the details differ: https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011840873119744 https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011993172484096 As I noted (in the full conversation with Kate, which for some reason I can’t seem to embed here), the evil plotting Habsburgs are out, …

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More Prodigal News… and a Blowfish in a Pear Tree

With the intensive courses I’ve been teaching, I haven’t had time to reflect much on 2016, or all the stuff that happened last year. (And since today’s my wedding anniversary, I won’t be doing it now.) I’ll have a little time for things like that soon—after my courses end and I get the grades uploaded, sometime next week or early on during the week after—but for now, some happy news: I’ve finally received my contributor’s copy of the December 2016 issue of Analog! Pretty exciting. I’ve actually had it for about a week, but have been too busy to mention it here. In …

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Korean SF Translations, and Our Current Workflow

So, my wife and I have been working on a couple of translations lately.  I mentioned, back in September, having finished up one of them. We just put the almost-final touches on the second one. (We sent off three questions to the original author of the second one we finished drafting, but otherwise, the translation’s pretty much done and just needs some proofreading before it’s sent off.) The two stories are: 레디메이드 보살 by Sunghwan Park (English title: “The Prefab Bodhisattva.” This is a story I’ve mentioned here before, as one of the tales adapted to the screen in The Doomsday Book omnibus …

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Martian Migraine’s Cthulhusattva ToC Announced!

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

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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