Tag: WRITING

Charles on the Cthulhu Festival of Film, and What We’re Working On

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I’m in the home stretch of the screenplay I’m trying to wrap up today–a project that anyway I’m not really supposed to be talking about for now, though hopefully at some point I can because it’s interesting, and relevant, and Lovecraftian, and set in Korea–but in any case, since I am busy and can’t discuss it anyway, here’s something else: My friend Charles attended the recent Cthulhu Festival of Film in Seoul a couple of months ago (at the end of February), and soon after posted his thoughts about the films and the event in general. I haven’t been able to …

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Launch Pad Workshop Opens for Applications

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I was swamped back in February, so I forgot to post about the application deadline for Clarion West, which was a couple of weeks ago, but for those who are working in a creative capacity–not just as a writer, mind you–the Launch Pad workshop is open for applications. Basically, it’s a crash course in astronomy designed for people who could use some training in the area to better handle related subjects in their creative work. In my class, we had mostly fiction authors (and not all of them exclusively writers of SF), but also a science comedy team. Screenwriters, film …

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Looking Back: “Erosion” (1999)

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In 2005, I hadn’t published much of anything, in any sense approaching a professional one. I mean, I’d gotten poems and short pieces into chapbooks, had published a couple of poems and a a small think piece in the university magazine were I did grad school, and a few short student articles in my undergrad campus newspaper; I’d even had a short piece of fiction included in a refugee awareness training program, though that was because my sister asked me to write something for the handbook she was compiling. But I had submitted a story to precisely one market in …

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New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

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For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

My essay is titled “Thinking Big: RPGs, Teaching in Korea, and the Subversive Idea of Agency,” and it deals not only with my own experience using RPG-like systems in language teaching, but also how RPG-like approaches to interaction might be just what’s needed to fix Korea’s utterly broken TEFL paradigm… and maybe to instill a deeper sense of agency in young people whose literature, education, and upbringing seem specifically to stifle that sense. But I’ll add that it’s just as much about my return to gaming as it is about the stuff mentioned in the title… and there’s a lot of other interesting stuff in there, too.

The WyrdCon Companion ebook is free to download from here.

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLVIII

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This entry is part 34 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, a few at a time. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. After a long hiatus, this post picks up again toward the end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called …

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Stranger Than Fiction

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Over the years, I’ve heard many people point out that truth is often stranger than fiction, that one is limited in fiction to writing stories in ways that actual people were not limited, such that if one wrote a story about such-and-such a real historical figure, nobody would believe it. I am pretty dubious about this idea, to be honest. Over the years, I’ve wrestled with how to do it, and–not that I’ve published any of the projects–I have a few stories I’ve been pruning and tidying and cleaning up lately which I think demonstrate how to do this. The …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLVI-XLVII

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This entry is part 33 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, a few at a time. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. This post continues with The Fifth Decad of Cantos (also sometimes called the “Leopoldine” Cantos), specifically Cantos XLVI-XLVII (and for more …

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Big News!

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I apologize for the lack of activity here. I have a lot going on, between working on several writing projects (fiction and scripts alike) and trying to get some stuff done around the house. In the process, I’ve let the Blogging Ezra Pound’s Cantos project slide a bit, though I do have a post about a couple of Cantos that is almost ready to post. But in the meantime, I’ll say a bit about the busy weekend. The biggest news is that over the weekend, “The Music of Jo Hyeja” got its World Premiere at the Los Angeles H.P. Lovecraft …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XLII-XLV

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This entry is part 32 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, a few at a time. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. This post (several days late, though that’s becoming a pattern this semester) deals with the first four cantos of …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XL-XLI

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This entry is part 31 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, a few at a time. These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind for a fiction project I’d like to write next year. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series. This post (several days late, as I was drafting a screenplay earlier this week) brings us to the end …

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