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Tuesday October 7th is a night of The Living Dead at South Street SeaportAugust 27th, 2008I’m now planning to pop back to the East Coast for a bit in early October so I can appear at this:  Related Links: * The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams at Amazon.com * “The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley at the Pseudopod horror podcast Short Stories in Which Things Actually HappenAugust 26th, 2008I just noticed that Tim Pratt’s superlative story “Cup and Table” recently appeared on PodCastle. The story is sort of Arthurian legend meets X-Men. Go listen to it now. I like stories in which things actually happen, and I submit “Cup and Table” as an example of how this approach can really work. As I understand it, Tim sketched out the storyline as a potential series, then stuffed the whole thing into one short story for the Twenty Epics anthology (epic-sized stories told in short story form). The result is just an incredible frenetic denseness of creativity, and reading the story is like mainlining pure awesome. Of course, your mileage may vary. I seem to have people constantly telling me that there’s something wrong with my desire for brisk pacing and major plot twists in short fiction. When I turned in my story “Transformations” to one of my grad school creative writing workshops, the instructor’s first comment was, “This doesn’t work as fiction.” Huh? I thought. That’s strange, because I just read this story at the reading series last night, and everyone loved it. In fact, at one point I had had to pause for a full minute because I couldn’t be heard over the enthusiastic gales of laughter. “No,” the instructor went on. “There’s too much happening. We get this boy’s whole life from childhood to adulthood, and there’s this whole interstellar war. It’s too much.” Now, maybe this is a legitimate criticism of the story — the story is online here, so you judge for yourself if you want. But then she said something that really floored me: “A short story isn’t about things happening, it’s about capturing a single moment in time.” Now, I have no objection to short stories that are about capturing a single moment in time — though it had better be a pretty interesting moment — but how can anyone say that this is the only way that all short stories everywhere should be written? I’m constantly aghast at the way that so many “literary” writers are so narrowly read that they’ve internalized so many formulas they’re not even aware of. (Such as, a short story = “a work of fiction shorter that is a) shorter than a novel and b) in which nothing happens.”) This isn’t true of all literary writers, by the way. T. C. Boyle, of one of my favorite short story writers, writes story after story in which all sorts of crazy stuff happens, and it’s wonderful. But far too many literary writers do seem to succumb to this sort of groupthink. Which is particularly sad, I think, when the edict in question (”nothing happens”) seems likely to lead in most cases to self-indulgence and stultification. New Amazon.com Feature Allows Users to Suggest Search TermsAugust 24th, 2008I’ve always found it immensely irksome that when you type my name into the Amazon.com search box, no results come up, even though Amazon sells numerous anthologies that I’m in and even though those anthologies are all tagged with my name. Well, there’s a new feature on Amazon that addresses this. Now you can go to the page for a book and suggest search terms for which that book should appear. I would highly recommend that all authors do this for every anthology in which you’ve been published (and for which you’re not already listed as one of the authors). You can access this feature by scrolling down to the section “Tags Customers Associate with This Product.” The whole process takes forever to actually work its way through the Amazon system, but once it finally does, you’ll see this on the page for your anthology:  And then when you do a search on your name you’ll see this:  Nifty. Acid-Rave Sci-Fi Punk-FunkAugust 23rd, 2008
Clip from Bill Maher’s New Film Religulous: “You Don’t Have to Pass an IQ Test to be in the Senate”August 23rd, 2008A Conversation with an Anonymous Relative of MineAugust 23rd, 2008Here’s a conversation I had recently with a female relative of mine, who for her own good shall remain anonymous. Anonymous Relative: David! Why haven’t you written a story about me? I’m always telling you to write a story and put me in it, and you never do it! Woman Arrested for Failing to Return Library BooksAugust 23rd, 2008
Cory Doctorow and DJ Spooky at Comic Book Legal Defense Fund BenefitAugust 19th, 2008Anyone going/want to go to this?  New John Joseph Adams Anthology Seeds of ChangeAugust 14th, 2008
Recommended: Masters of Doom by David KushnerAugust 7th, 2008 Holy crap, this is a cool book. I can’t remember the last time I was so sucked in by a story, and I took only one quick break (to sleep) between starting and finishing it, which is unusual for me. (I’m typically in the process of reading 10-20 things at any given time, so it often takes me a while to actually finish anything.) Game Informer magazine rated this the #1 video game book of all time, and the book has also been optioned for film, and it’s easy to see why. This is the gripping story of how John Romero and John Carmack, two troubled young men, turned their love of computers, science fiction novels, Dungeons & Dragons, and horror movies into a piece of software, the game Doom, that became colossally popular — more widely installed than Microsoft Windows — and of how their long, fruitful collaboration imploded in the face of money, ego, and “artistic differences.” The book doesn’t exactly gloss over anyone’s faults, but it does bend over backward to provide context and explanation, so I came out of it a bit more sympathetic than I had been to Romero, which actually isn’t saying much. When I was in high school, my best friend was a guy named Pete. Freshman year we had sat at the same table in the lunchroom — the table of kids who spent the lunch period drawing illustrations — but at that time Pete didn’t speak much English (he’s Russian), so I didn’t get to know him all that well. A year or two later he heard that I could program computer games, and he sought me out and asked if I could teach him, which I did. While that was going on, Doom came out. It was, of course, the coolest thing that anyone had ever seen. The README file seemed to claim that you could play the game multiplayer, but it was absurdly difficult to set up. First of all you had to have two computers in the same place that were both fast enough to run Doom, which was not all that common, then you had to have a special piece of equipment called a serial cable that no one had ever heard of, then you had to futz around with command line crap to initialize different COM ports and who knows what else. I hadn’t seen anyone do it, or even heard of anyone doing it. But Pete insisted we try, so we spent a lot of time and finally got it to work. From that point on we were hooked. I remember one time my mom came back from a business trip and found me and Pete playing Doom against each other, and she said, “Wow, you’re both sitting in exactly the same places you were when I left four days ago,” and I said, “We haven’t moved.” I was joking, but just barely. Pete and I got insanely good at Doom. To brainstorm new tactics, I read book after book with titles like Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare and SWAT: Everything You Need to Train and Equip Your Team. I started building my own Doom levels, including a prison full of buttons and doors, in which the strategy revolved around sealing off different areas and ultimately locking your opponent in one of the many cells, where he could be disposed of at leisure. Then, like a fool, I gave all that up and went off to college. By that point, John Romero, one of the creators of Doom, had left id software, the company that made the game, and was starting up his own studio, Ion Storm. Pete planned to apply for a job as a concept artist. I thought that was ridiculous. Why would a company hire some kid just out of high school when they could easily afford to hire professional comic book artists? But I kept my mouth shut, and Pete applied for the job, and got hired, not as a concept artist (for which the company did in fact hire a professional comic book artist) but as a 3D modeler. For months after Pete told me this I was half-convinced that he was pulling my leg. I mean, he had no experience whatsoever making 3D models. But it was a weird time. John Romero had tons of venture capital money, and he was trying to throw together several massive development teams all at once. His split with id software had centered partly around the issue of whether he was spending too much time playing games instead of working, or whether his coworkers were spending too much time working rather than playing games. He was determined to staff his new company with people who were gamers first and foremost, and to that end the job interview revolved primarily around whether or not you could beat him at Doom. Pete did, handily, and therefore got a job. Obviously I was extremely jealous … especially since I had always been way better at Doom than Pete. During spring break of my freshman year of college I went to visit Pete at Ion Storm. Pete, who had always been mild-mannered and exceedingly deferential, now lived in a mansion, wore designer clothes, and when he opened his mouth a nonstop stream of profanity flowed forth. The Ion Storm offices, on the top floors of the tallest skyscraper in Dallas, were grandiose, with arcade machines, ping pong tables, a movie theater, a motion-capture studio, and over a hundred employees, almost all of them under 30. I was introduced to John Romero, which was a terrible letdown. Pete and I had practically worshiped him as a sort of demented, iconoclastic genius, and he had positioned himself as a rock star/god of the video game world. In person he was short, kind of funny-looking, and had the personality of a hyperactive 8-year-old. His laugh, which he deployed subsequent to saying anything at all, was a piercing hyena-like cackle. I immediately got the strong impression that no one at his own company could stand him, and I heard employees grumbling that instead of working he spent all day on eBay bidding on memorabilia about himself. We went out to dinner, in his fancy sports car (of which he owned something like eight), and he kind of acted like an arrogant jackass the whole time, irritating waiters and other restaurant patrons who had no idea who he was. He swore constantly, ceaselessly, relentlessly, and it seemed as if his whole nascent company had become a mirror of his own personality, with every employee screwing around and playing games and constantly trash talking. The most common salutation among employees was, “Hey, faggot.” It was like Pleasure Island, except with 20-somethings rather than children. After just a few days there I thought: Oh my god. If I had to spend more than a week here I would absolutely blow my brains out. And I saw then that Pete had adapted in the only way that he could: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Ion Storm was working on a game called Daikatana. I had seen a top secret design doc, which looked awesome, and I was dying to play the game. Pete had described to me the incredible AI — the fiendishly clever monsters who would hound the player over fields of boulders or through underwater caverns. When I arrived, I said, “Okay, let me see Daikatana!” Pete didn’t seem too enthused. He explained “We’re shifting over to a new engine, so there’s not all that much working right now, but … here, I think there’s one level you can play.” He loaded up a level, which was nothing special. And there were no enemies, no weapons, no game at all, really. I said, “This is all you have?” Pete said, “Yeah.” I said, “Isn’t this game supposed to be out for Christmas?” Pete said, “Uh, that’s not going to happen.” In fact it was years before Daikatana actually came out, by which point the game would have been obsolete even if it had worked, which it didn’t. The amazing AI that Pete had raved about was gone. The computer-controlled teammates who were supposed to follow you everywhere could barely navigate around corners or up ladders, which made the game basically unplayable. Apparently the guy who had programmed the awesome AI had quit, and his replacement couldn’t figure out the first guy’s code, so the company had to scrap that whole module and start over from scratch. Turnover was a huge problem at Ion Storm. At one point basically the whole development team quit en masse and left to start their own company. People in the industry used to joke that everyone who works in video games had quit Ion Storm at some point. So anyway, I know Doom really well, and I’ve met some of the people described in this book, but even if I knew nothing about the subject I think I’d really enjoy the book, because it’s just so full of wacky characters, crazy stories, and most of all because it really captures the exhilaration of being absolutely and totally focused on a creative project and knowing that it’s going to be great. (By which I mean Doom, obviously, not Daikatana.) The book really immerses you in a magical-seeming world where everyone reads fantasy & science fiction, everyone plays Dungeons & Dragons, and everyone is creative and obsessed. And as I mentioned at the start, I am a bit more favorably inclined toward Romero after reading this book. Doom definitely wouldn’t have been the game it was without his unique personality, much as I found that personality grating at close proximity. (Though who knows how much the money & fame had contributed to it by that point.) Romero was the guy who really liked to play games. Carmack was the workaholic who really liked the abstract challenge of programming. Without Carmack, Romero spent all his time playing games and fell way behind the technological curve. But without Romero, Carmack has released a string of technologically superb games that don’t really innovate and aren’t really all that much fun. It’s an interesting dynamic. Anyway, it’s all in the book. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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