A couple weeks ago I did an interview with The New York Observer on the experience of shifting from writing prose to writing for games. The article appeared earlier this week, and has interesting comments from quite a few game writers, including a couple of my personal favorites, Rhianna Pratchett and Alex Garland.
Click upon thine poor faux archaic linkage, lords and ladies, lads and lassies!
THE HUNDRED (MORE OR LESS) GREATEST (MORE OR LESS) NOVELS OF ALL (SEE PREVIOUS CAVEATS, AND APPLY CONSISTENCY) TIME
Have you read more than 100 of these? If not, you must take at least 15 minutes to add 100 more or you will break this chain and everyone on Earth will die (eventually). Bother your friends and complete strangers too. No tag backs. Tag all your friends. Tag no one. Some will regret friending you, as you have me. Facebook may collapse under the weight of this astonishing venture, but I think it will agree that is a small price to pay for having friends.
1. Frittering Haights
2. Gone to Be Slaked Now
3. Sophy’s Curse
4. The Complete Wharfworks of Wharfham Wharfsphere
5. The Great Gallumphrey
6. Prude and Pruneface
7. Lay It on Thickly, Roofer
8. To Kill a Mockingjaywalker
9. The Bibul
10. I Walked with Jayne ‘Ere
11. Wharfhamlet
12. The Miserable Lesbian
13. Charles, Chuckles, and the Chocolate Chippendale
14. L41N14L
15. The Bed-Springs of Bed-Stuy
16. The Dunderbluss Hat
17. Down Boy!
18. Facts About Wasps
19. Li’l Prin’ess an’ the Ol’ Bu”ery B””
20. The Darkest Dark of Darkness
21. Adventures (all)
21. Five Books You Must Never Have Read
21. Wed, Wed, Charlotte You Must Wed
22. Van de Camp’s Ovaries
23. Finely Fairly Foully So
24. Whatever’s Left’s 4 U
25. The Cladded Clapboard Claddagh
26. I Spose
27. Germinal Faire
28. Whither Vanity?
29. Wither, Vanity
30. Chastity Intact
31. Christ and Carroll, Lewis
32. Makepeace Tanqueray
33. Odysseus Swallowed
34. Stoatula Unbound
35. My Terwilliger
36. The Morbid Hick
37. The Jarring Bell
38. Dimbulbs at Dawn
39. Jonesin’ for Dairy
40. Jub the Preferable
41. Soft Shoulder
42. Count on Monty
43. Floyd in the Time of Sclera
44. Curious J in the Night Kitchen
46. Same Old Same Old
47. Two Tales of A City
48. Mouse on Man
49. Dunny Brook-No-Harm
50. Sensible Pets (sometimes published as Sensible Pest)
51. Pilot Life
52. Manteca: The Lard Files
53. Atonally Intoned
54. A Sensitive, Handwrung Boy
55. We Didn’t Mean It, Said the Mob
56. Grable’s Stables
57. The White Women’s Wilkie
58. Perfectly Mercurial Albacore
59. War and More
60. You’ll Wonder Why
61. The Hype Handler
62. Shotgun Memories
63. A Very Small House
64. Wife Travelling Time
56. The Robbit
67. The Baby-Proofed Nightmare
89. Great Scott, Fatso!
90. A Little Slumming
91. Trendsong
92. Darken Not My Door, Darling
93. A Wind in The Hind Quarter
94. Angry, Angry Waters
95. A Case of Canned Karenina
96. Copperfraud’s Caseload
97. The Comicles of Norn (all)
98. The Comicles of Norn (vol. 3)
99. The Master’s Masterpiece
100. Lay I Mean Lie with Me
I have been a very bad blogger. I fear this format does not suit me as well for random ramblings as, say, Facebook. And I have not contrived a suitably coherent plan of attack to sustain the blog. What I intend to do, eventually, is make this trickle part of a more substantial website with links to various publications and things of interest. In the meantime,
Steampunk Reloaded is now available. This contains my story “Great Breakthroughs in Darkness,” along with a number of other reprints, and a great deal of original work in the steampunk vein. I was an admirer of the steampunk novels of Jeter, Powers and Blaylock, felt there was no way I could compete with them although I loved the circuitous sentences these sort of stories allowed, and only dabbled a little in imitation. By the time Gibson and Sterling had published The Difference Engine, and Paul Di Filippo had put out his Steampunk collection, I figured it was all over. Little did I know.
Now that Classics Mutilated is in print, Anna Tambour has posted a quite Tambourian look at “Pokky Man” at her blog, Medlar Comfits. Anna was the first reader of the story, and a staunch champion who convinced me not to rewrite it into paste, but to leave some lumps in. It is an honor to think she spent so much of her intense intelligence on this odd little story. But Anna likes odd things.
PS: If you buy the Kindle edition of Classics Mutilated, you’ll get two extra stories that aren’t in the paperback. But the bound volume is hefty and beautiful, and the illustrations by Mike Dubisch are fun in any event.
White grass grew like hair
on the scales of the old tree.
Bent limbs bore cherries black
as amethyst glass that burned white holes
in the white grass as the sun passed.
A fox shivered against the stony roots,
sick from eating cherries,
the only food any could find that winter.
So I brought it in.
Beneath the scabs and sucking ticks
I felt a heartbeat like two beads
rattling in a glass. I fed the beast
broth drop by drop from my fingers
till it was strong enough to lift its head
and lap at a thin gruel.
A white crow tapped at the glass,
spying the eyes of the fox
shining like cherries,
like coins to be stolen–but that was the fox’s life,
and it rose in self-defense and hunger
for the unhealthy bird, which lurched away
cawing.
I found the bird much later
on the grass beneath the tree,
white holes full of worms burned in its wings.
The fox sniffed the carcass while
market bells rang, which he feared
as though his pelt were luxurious.
The sound of a hunter’s gun had not been heard
in many months, but each of my heavy steps
frightened the fox.
“I nursed you,” I said. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
Winking lights from the cherry tree
blinded me and the fox was gone.
My story “Pokky Man, A Film by Vernor Hertzwig” is appearing in this collection, just announced for an October release. Joe Lansdale’s novella, Dread Island, will be published first as a standalone book, available at Comic-Con.
An amazing illustrated account of Dwarf Fortress.
Let me add that I have gotten partly through the detailed tutorial, may never actually play this game, but I still enjoy the stories it generates…and this is beautifully illustrated as well.
