Myth, the Universe, and Everything

(Crossposted at Substrate)

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I went to hear Max Gladstone read at Enigma Bookstore in November. I was playing around with my camera's video capture, and I successfully recorded Max's section of the reading. It's about twelve minutes, and if you've not had the chance to hear Max read in person (or if you've not heard an excerpt from Two Serpents Rise,) check it out!

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Substraters are all over the Web (and our blog). Vlad Barash has posted a new excerpt from his WIP LukOL. If you like MMOs or music or both, make sure you catch the tidbits we've got up!

Next, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles is listed as a "great reads at a great price" for the nook!



If you haven't bought it yet, check it out!

Both Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead and Madeline's Song of Achilles were chosen as must read books in the Massachusetts Book Awards, which makes them both finalists for the award. Congrats, Max & Madeline!

You can also follow some of the Substraters on twitter:

• S. K. Gilman


• Max Gladstone


• Madeline Miller


• Thomas Scofield


• and me

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or at least a life that was far, far different), Nat Rowe introduced me to a lot of writer types he'd gone to Yale with. Not to be outdone, I sought out some writer types from Simon's Rock, and notadoor/S. K. Gilman and I joined the throng of Yalies to create a very awesome and fun crit group that hasn't met in far too long.

Or, rather, that I haven't attended in person in far too long. Almost everyone in the group relocated to Boston area, leaving those of us in Connecticut and New York to our remote attendances when possible. (That's me and Thomas Scofield, for what it's worth.)

But I have been thinking about Substrate quite a lot lately, in part because I got a fantastic rejection letter (I say this without a trace of sarcasm -- it was a full on critique from the editors) from Tor.com. I'll be giving the piece I submitted another look with the help of the Substraters, and will see if I can't find a good home for it once I've applied some additional feedback to it.

The other thing that has me thinking about Substrate is, of course, Max Gladstone's release of his debut novel Three Parts Dead, which I cannot rave about enough. I loved it as a manuscript, and the physical book is a beautiful product that is even nice to hold (as you can see I'm enjoying doing in the photo below).



So in honor of Max's publication, I cleaned up the old Substrate group blog, which had apparently been hacked by a Polish blogger. I'll be posting news about Max and other Substraters (as we have news to share) over at that blog, which does have a livejournal feed. You can follow us here at livejournal or over at Virgil & Beatrice.

And if you're in Bethesda, MD on Monday, you can catch Max at the Barnes & Noble doing a signing. More detail's on Max's page.

I am apparently not terribly inspired with thoughty* words lately, but other people are saying interesting things, and you should read them.

• I'm pretty sure I've raved about jeff_duntemann's work here before -- I've certainly done so other places -- which falls all over SFF land (mostly SF, but at least one in the F side of the equation). Some of his favorite stories of mine are set in his Drumlin world, and are fantastic examples of space westerns -- which he was doing before it was cool. He writes a bit about subgenre splicing here (and even gives a short mention to Cowboys and Aliens).


• Starting with my blog post last week about Castle, a very fun conversation started happening among members of Substrate about meta-fiction and interactive-fiction, continuing at Max Gladstone's blog and then over to substrater Vlad's page. They both provide examples of the kind of fictional-into-reality writing I was looking for, including the classic Borges on Borges piece. (You can follow Max at on the maxgladstone feed, and can apparently follow Vlad's comments, but not his blog, at vlad43210 -- once I get some problems with my account worked out, I'll be fixing that one.)


• Last, it's goblin release day! jimhines has just released his first goblin e-book, Goblin Tales, in which Jig the Goblin and his Fire Spider make their triumphant return. I bought my copy form my nook, but it's available at Amazon too, with Kobo, iBooks, and Lulu soon to follow. sartorias gave it an excellent review, which would have spurred me on to buy it if I hadn't already intended to.

Not much cooking on the homefront, aside from doing research to try to solve this mystery, writing reviews, copyediting, and playing peek-a-boo.

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*thoughty: a word meaning "thoughtful," stolen, not from Firefly like many of my pseudo-colloquial words, but from the Disney version of Robin Hood.

Today's guest blog comes from fellow substrater, Thomas Scofield, who is launching an exciting new interactive fiction project this month. I corresponded with Thomas originally when friends introduced us for purposes of forming a writing group, but didn't meet him the first time until I showed up on his doorstep with lyster, driving home from ICon on Long Island (after the last ferry left me with a very long drive ahead of me, instead of the short jaunt back across the Sound), and said, "Um, hi. We sorta know each other. Can I crash with you?" (Thomas had been expecting lyster -- I, however, was a surprise.) Then, despite the late hour, we spent a few hours talking about literature, gaming, and all manner of interesting and engaging stuff. In short, I discovered something I'd suspected from his e-mails -- Thomas is an intelligent and generous man who as engaging a conversationalist as he is a writer.

This month, Thomas is launching Adrylle.com, which he talks about in the post below. Check out both Adrylle and Thomas's home page, where he has several ongoing serials and shorts posted.

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a’drylle, v. – To slide or slip away. Source: The Oxford English Dictionary

I have a weakness for words, and have had for as long as I can remember. I’m particularly fond of odd, old, unusual or otherwise unused words. There’s something appealing to me about a word that’s been all but forgotten, like it’s a little secret that I and only a few others are party to. I like that. I like half-forgotten things. Mythic things. Because you can’t really be mythic if you’re remembered perfectly, can you? There’s always that element of mystery, or legend, of the unknown.

Or at least there is to me.

Adrylle is bound up in all of that. It’s a half-forgotten word that I’m using to describe a place made up of lost and forgotten things, people, places, ideas. At least, that is what it is on one level.

Adrylle.Com is, at the core, a hypertext adventure game, where you play the part of yourself, or a version of yourself, fallen through the cracks and forgotten. You find yourself in this new world of old and forgotten things, with its old secrets and new adventures. The world itself is made of words, right there on the computer screen, and a lot of those words describe (what will be) 120 in-game “locations,” like “The Darchives” (Dark-Archives) or “The Fairy Ring.”

Hidden throughout these locations (often in plain sight) are all sorts of standalone adventures, set in all sorts of worlds--be that the world of Adrylle or a world that exists only in that story. In the Darchives, for example, you can play out such stories as Rotmeo and Jujuliet (or, Romeo and Juliet and Zombies) or Titus Androidicus (a Bloody tale of Android vengeance). Or at least you will be able to play them out, when they are written and posted to the site.

There are secrets, too, hidden pages that you have to be clever enough or lucky enough to find. These hidden pages might have cyber-graffiti on them, from the winners of contests past, or secret little things, lost snapshots or fragments of text, maybe even pictures or other, stranger things in the future. We’re even working on a lay, the verses of which will be scattered across the site.

Right now it’s a labyrinthine and twisted labor of love. Of course, we’re all for sharing the geeky love, and there will be plenty of contests and prizes and giveaways linked to the site, its secrets and the stories embedded therein.

Right now, in fact, we’re running our first contest. The prize is a $500 gift card, which one lucky winner will be able to use to purchase a new eReader and a whole passle o’ eBooks to go with it. You can check that out here.

The whole labyrinthine mess can be found at http://www.adrylle.com.

Slip on over and visit us, sometime.

Wow, has it been that long?

Why yes, yes it has.

The holidays were fabulous around here -- lots of great time spent with family before the actual dates themselves and then lots of extra hours at work to cover the time I took off! We had some fun gaming in New York on the first with our characters from the 3.5 continuing Xen'drik Expeditions campaign (we couldn't just let it go when it stopped being an organized play game). Twostripe has ramped the karate schedule back up, and Bug is big enough in my belly now that I can feel her from the outside of my belly even when she's not moving. That, by the way, is wild. There's a little person in there! The editorial assistants are now eating grown up food ("We're not kittens any more, boss!"). And I've been copyediting, book reviewing, finishing up my Living Forgotten Realms Adventure (slot zeroes starting soon!), and doing reference writing -- my usual ridiculous pace of work. My big fun project for the weekend (besides crib shopping!) is creating a map of the kingdoms in Great Britain for the Viking Saga game. Since we're somewhere between 700 and 900-ish A.D., ambiguously, I have some great fun maps to play around with to help me decide. (New favorite resource: Anglo-Saxons.net.)

The other big news for the beginning of the year is that I've just gotten a Nook, and am in the testing phase to decide if I want to keep it. Much to my embarrassment (since I posted the assurances of a bookseller on several forums), the Nook does not, in fact, read .doc or .docx or .txt files, which was one of the primary convincing factors for getting it. (I had intended to use it primarily as a tool for 1) reading digital review books, and 2) keeping up with Substrate submissions.) The Nook does read pdfs natively, however, and there are plenty of free programs to convert files from Word to pdf. Next hurdle? It doesn't annotate pdfs yet (actually, it might -- there are differing reports from users on this, and I need to play around with it more; B&N just says it doesn't support the feature as yet). That's a hurdle for me, since I want to be able to annotate Substrate pieces to remember what my thoughts were while reading -- and want to be able to have other people do the same for me. (Twostripe has not yet given much response to my thought that he could, perhaps, read drafts of my manuscripts more easily on an e-book reader this way; he is a print guy.)

The reading function, however, works beautifully. I've had an overdue review for Flames Rising since, what, August? The book came to me as an e-book, and despite reading the first twenty-odd pages on my computer screen, and then printing it out to three-ring-binder in hopes that I'd actually read it in print, I hadn't managed to actually read the thing. With an e-reader, though the formatting is still a little wonky (the pages are about a screen-and-a-half, so every other "page-turn" is only a small portion of the screen), it's been a much easier read to digest. It's a short story anthology, and in the last two days, I've read the various introductions (there are three -- two nonfiction and one fictional) and three short stories (including the first actual fiction I've ready by Cherie Priest of Team Seattle, who I've been meaning to read for ages), which amounts to nearly a third of the book.

The Nook is easy to use, loads fast enough that I don't feel like I'm waiting, has decent wallpaper installed for when you put it to sleep (they recommend never turning it off), and seems like a pretty straightforward device. I'm enjoying the e-book reading experience far more here than either on computer screen or printed from a three ring binder, so it's a major coup in that regard (though whether it's better than any other e-book reader, I couldn't say). Since reading e-books for review was half of the point of buying it, I'm satisfied on that score. I'm still playing with the annotation function to see if I can make it work for the rest of what I need it for -- which will impact my final decision on whether I remain an e-book reader owner, wait for a model that does everything I want it to (the Kindle has a lot of the functionality I'm looking for, but doesn't natively read ePubs, and the conversion process for that sounds like a bigger hassle than .doc to pdf), or decide to purchase another of the devices on the market (despite what their flaws might be). In the mean time, I'm having a fun reading experience and generally enjoying using it, so I have no doubt I'll be an e-book reader owner in the future, if I don't end up keeping my Nook this time around.

I've been meaning to update my page for awhile, and it occurred to me today that there wasn't a way to contact me through the site, so all I was going to do was add that page and be done with it. There are galleys to proof, gosh darn it!

A few hours later, and the page is fully up to date. I'm quite pleased with it (despite that not having been on my list of things to do today). The Substrate blog is now linked to the front page, which means we really should get cracking keeping it updated! I hope you'll pop by and check out the site (and tell me if I accidentally broke anything while updating -- I am not an html magician, despite the Taru icon for today's entry).

In additional good news, the FTC announced that they didn't really mean book bloggers when they were talking about their new requirements. I think I'll stick with the safe side (and hey, I don't care if you guys know I got an ARC or won a contest or however I got my books).

One quick and important news announcement: Ransom: The Anthology is going out of print at the end of the month. Edited by Dylan Birtolo (eyezofwolf), the collection features my short story, "Don't Let Go," (which has, in short form, part of my treatise about religion, folk tales, and fairy tales), as well as a host of excellent stories by other authors. Get it before it can no longer be gotten!

It's been a slow week here at the blog, in part because I've been wrapped up in spending time away from the computer, relaxing. (That, in part, has been due to our air conditioner existing only upstairs, coupled with my reluctance to have a warm laptop on my lap.) In the meantime, I've been catching up on review books and library books I'm supposed to have finished and have fallen a bit behind on my own fiction writing -- some of which was supposed to be turned in to my crit group yesterday. (Luckily for me, the other two substraters with the same deadline also neglected to turn in their work, so I'm in good company.)

At any rate, while going through my library books, I picked up Everyday Immortality: A Concise Course in Spiritual Transformation, which I'd picked up off the shelf in the comparative religion section (Dewey: 204.2) and thought might hold some interesting thoughts for excerpting. Little did I know that it's similar, in some ways, to a Christian devotional book. The devotional readings I've done have primarily been short essays, or excerpts from the works of Christian scholars, coupled with Bible verses they illuminate. They're meant to provoke thought and consideration.

In Chopra's book, the intent is the same, but the method is different. On each page, he offers a sutra or koan, one simple sentence jam packed with possible meaning. He recommends meditating for five to ten minutes, reading a passage, then meditating on it thereafter. If it immediately makes intuitive sense, move onto the next sentence. Instead of being guided by an accompanying message, the sentences themselves are the message -- as is what the reader brings to them.

Chopra is a big proponent of what he calls the quantum mechanical body, and he relates new discoveries in science to a higher way of understanding the world. So, without further ado, a few sentences as thoughts for the day. (This guest blog excerpt is necessarily short, due to the nature of the book being excerpted.)

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Subatomic particles are not material things; they are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void.

Subatomic particles flicker in and out of existence depending on whether I am watching them or not.

Before my decision to observe them, subatomic particles are probability amplitudes of mathematical ghosts in a field of infinite possibilities.

When I make the choice to observe the subatomic world of mathematical ghosts, the ghosts freeze into space-time events or particles that ultimately manifest as matter.

My physical body and the body of the physical universe are both proportionately as void as intergalactic space.

The essential nature of my material body and that of the solid-appearing universe is that they are both nonmaterial. They are made up of non-stuff.

... and so I'm not here, but I did quickly post to the Substrate blog today.

I love traveling. I enjoy being in new places and seeing new people (or going to old places and seeing familiar people). Changes of scenery are largely good. But even I have limits, it seems, and I apparently hit them over the weekend. Allow me to paint you a map:

Thursday: Branford to Great Barrington to Branford.
Friday: Branford to Long Island (via ferry) to Brooklyn.
Saturday: Brooklyn to Branford.
Sunday: Branford to Cambridge to Somerville to Branford.

This, my friends, is a lot of time in a car, and not a lot of time being stationery.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a really excellent time with the students at Simon's Rock on Thursday. The myth conversations that started Thursday managed to continue on through the weekend (largely with banana_pants and lyster, who were kind enough to both listen to my myth geekery and contribute their own right back). banana_pants and I traveled down to Long Island together on Friday to go to I-Con, the science fiction convention that's usually at Stony Brook, but moved this year to be at three locations. The trip down was fine (although rainy), and the mist covering the island when we got there totally gelled with the stories I'd been telling about Manannan and the Isle of Man. (Having to wait an hour and a half in the mist before I could pick up my pre-registered badge was not the height of fun for my weekend, but banana_pants kept me company, and we met up with lyster in line, so the company was excellent. We also had a great time enjoying the parade of costumes and watching Yoshi give Yoshi-back rides to anime characters and other video game stars, including Wario, without prejudice.)

The point of going down to I-Con for me was in part to meet up with the Browncoats of NYC, with whom I've corresponded but not met in person, and largely to see editor Jamie Chambers, who I worked with on Serenity Adventures. Jamie, Cam Banks (also from Margaret Weis Productions), lyster, banana_pants, and I all went out to dinner and talked shop, then headed back over to one of the convention hotels and chatted with a bunch of industry folks before lyster and I headed off to Brooklyn to stay with friends (including a fellow Substrater). Jamie not only filled us in on a lot of cool projects that are upcoming, but introduced us to some folks who have also worked with MWP and White Wolf. (He also got a bit into the myth geek chatter with us; who knew he'd actually written his thesis in college about mythology? There are an awful lot of us myth geeks in gaming...)

Saturday was a short recovery day -- I had work at the library -- before we headed out on Sunday for Mythic Greece, in which our heroes finished their first major quest, delivering little Odysseus to Chiron for study. Now they've been cut loose from their first mission, given to them by the Oracle at Delphi -- only the Fates know what they'll be up to next.

At any rate, I'm mostly recovered now from all the travel and I even turned in some work early for one of my deadlines, so things are pretty well right with the world. How were your weekends?