Category: Writing
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Ozblogging: Ozma of Oz, Part 4
Episode Four: Extreme Makeover Edition Ozma goes into the Nome King's palace to find the transformed royal family of Ev, and immediately makes a terrifying discovery. The Nome King apparently hired Liberace as his interior decorator. Read the description and tremble: "The ceilings were composed of great arches that rose far above her head, and…
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Zut Alors!
I've been translated! My story "Balancing Accounts" is in the Autumn 2010 issue of Fiction, the French sister-publication of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The translation looks pretty good to my barely Francophone eyes, and I'm in some very august company. Merci beaucoup aux Moutons Electriques!
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How I Did It #4: “Train of Events”
"Train of Events" was the third story I sold to F&SF. I wrote it in 2001, and it appeared in the January 2003 issue. It's a time-travel story — or rather, it's a story set in a world where time travel is as common as air travel is in our world. A quick summary: Jeremy…
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Tales From the Archive: The Explosive Saga of DOC TOLTEC!
This isn't a published story. In fact, I wrote it as character background for a roleplaying campaign Brian Rogers was putting together. Brian was trying to create a superhero campaign with the feel of a real-world "all-stars superteam" comic book like JLA or The Mighty Avengers. These teams differ from groups like The Fantastic Four…
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How I Did It #3: Return to Skull Island
This story has a complicated history. By rights it ought to have been the first entry in the "How I Did It" series, because I originally wrote it back in 1995, but it didn't actually get published until 2001. It's written in the form of an article for a low-budget movie magazine — an article…
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Are We Helping?
I've lately been reading about the Inklings — C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and their buddies, who used to hang out together in Oxford to drink beer, eat ham, and talk about literature and religion. They functioned as a writers' workshop, not unlike the redoubtable CSFW which tolerates my presence. But lately…
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How I Did It #2: The Alien Abduction
"The Alien Abduction" is a pretty simple story: a group of animal-rights activists free an alien from a lab at Cornell University and flee with him to a house in the country. Then things start to go wrong. The narrator, Brian, is a local boy and chose the hideout, and his brother George turns up…
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Tales From the Archive: Secret of the Swamp
I wrote several Space: 1889 adventures for the late, great Challenge magazine during the 1990s. Since Challenge and Game Designers' Workshop are long out of business, I thought I'd reprint some of my old articles and adventures on this 'blog, as a service to anyone interested in one of the quirkiest, most amazing roleplaying games…
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How I Did It #1: A Diagram of Rapture
"A Diagram of Rapture" is the first story I ever sold professionally. It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April of 2000, and began my regular run in that magazine. If you haven't read it, here's a brief summary:
The Cambias Digression 