Stories
I’ve been working on terrain for a zombie skirmish game for a while now. I decided to theme everything 80s style because – why not. And a big part of getting that authentic look is the advertising and pop culture references.
Here’s a couple of pages of movie posters, advertising, general graffiti and other things to give your zombie games an 80s flavour. Print ’em out, stick ’em on and get ready to run from the rotters.
Midnight Echo 19 was published just before Christmas, which includes my story ‘Track’. It’s just about a nice walk out in nature and definitely perfectly safe. Nothing terrible happens at all.
With a gorgeous cover by Tabatha Wood (who also has a ripper of a story here), the whole issue will inspire you to spend a lot more time out in nature. Or perhaps not.
You can pick up Midnight Echo 19 at Smashwords or Amazon.com
Way back in 2020, I write about using Visual Studio Code for fiction. Which I have been doing until this year. But I’ve found something that fits me even better.
It seems like everyone’s been talking about Obsidian recently. Or perhaps that’s just the YouTube algorithm. I think I first heard about it as a tool to for Dungeon Masters to organise campaigns, before falling down the rabbit hole of the roughly ten million plugins for it that will do nearly anything.
For the last six months I’ve been using it at work as both my daily to-do list and my wider personal knowledge store. And I’ve been using it for writing too. ‘Track’ was drafted with Obsidian, along with a bunch of other stories this year. It’s free, runs on everything, and is nothing but text files under the hood. Exactly my kind of tool.
I’m going camping in a few weeks. Will try and do as much walking around in nature as possible. Honestly. It’s like I didn’t get the message of Midnight Echo 19 at all. Take me to the beach! Take me to the country!
Sometimes I forget I have a website. Sometimes I forget for a long time. Sometimes I remember.
A couple of stories were published waaaay back near the start of the year:
“From Here” in Kaleidotrope is the end of a story. Figured it was best to start there, since we all know the start. It’s fairly short, and if anyone ever does a film adaptation, it’ll have to be a single take. Charles Payseur in Locus called it “an interesting statement on heroes, exhaustion, and care”. One day, when we can all go to cons and hang out in the bar together, I’ll tell you the secret origin story of this one.
“Three Past Desolation Cut” is not short. It’s available as an ebook from all the usual places, or you can read the whole thing at Lost Colony Magazine.
Armed with only three bullets, an old map, and a score to settle, Bonnie Murtaugh may be in the Splintered Man’s territory, but she won’t let anything come between her and vengeance.
I’ve always loved westerns and this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to write one of those Big Sky stories (that would be “Wyoming”, available in Everything Is Fine) . It won’t be the last.
That’s all I got for now. I’ll try not to be a stranger to my own site for so long again. But if I am, know it’s because I’m out walking under the Big Sky.
Back at the start of the year I realised something. My writing tools weren’t working for me.
I’ve used Scrivener for years. I’ve written a couple of novels and any number of short stories with it. But there was something about it that just didn’t quite suit me, and it took a while to figure out what it was.
I’m a software developer. I’ve been cranking out code since Apple II days. I grew up with green text on a black background. I don’t get to code as much these days. Mostly I draw boxes and arrows on whiteboards, communicating the plan to the people who are really going to do the work. But every now and then I still get the chance to crank out some code. When I do, I’m using tools I’ve known for years: Visual Studio, VS Code, Notepad++ and the command line. I know these tools back to front. Yeah, I’m one of those guys who still does all their Git work at the command line instead of using GUI tools. So I started wondering if I could use those same tools for fiction.
Visual Studio is an absolute monster of a product and it’s still the best Integrated Development Environment you’ll find. Visual Studio Code is Visual Studio’s little brother. It’s far smaller, takes less space to install, runs faster and works on Windows, Linux and OS X. And it’s free. If all you want is a solid text editor, VS Code will do the job. But it’s also got a very rich collection of plugins and extensions. Did I mention it’s free? Because it’s free.
So in January I started working on fresh stories using VS Code instead of Scrivener. And something just clicked.
I still don’t know exactly what it was. Perhaps because this was a tool I used every day at work, there was no ceremony to it. Perhaps it had got to the point where watching the Scrivener loading screen was telling my brain ‘Behold! The Genius is Preparing to Write!’, which immediately caused by imposter syndrome to kick in and my imagination to curl up in the corner. But when VS Code started the message was ‘eh, time to go to work’. Whatever the reasons, as soon as I switched to Code, words started flowing faster than they had before.
But great as VS Code was for kickstarting my writing, there were a few pieces missing. If I split a story into a separate file for each scene it was hard to get a total word count. I wanted to add target word counts for scenes and chapters too, and perhaps a way to compile all these pieces into a completed manuscript. I couldn’t find a plugin that did everything I needed in the way I wanted.
So I built something.
wtk is ‘Writer’s Toolkit’. It’s a minimal collection of tools designed to help writers who like to work with words the same way they work with source code. Wtk is opinionated, and designed to match the way I work. It’s open source and available here.
Writing fiction using programmer’s tools is definitely not for everyone. And even if you’re the kind of person who’s happier with vi than Word, wtk might not be your cup of tea. But if you want to use it, go for it. Hopefully it can help other people as much as it has helped me.
Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy Volume 1 is now available. “A Brighter Future” is reprinted there, along with many other brilliant stories. New Zealand speculative fiction is extremely healthy at the moment and I’m very pleased that Paper Road Press has committed to an annual anthology.
Trickster’s Treats #3: The Seven Deadly Sins Edition is out now from Things In The Well. It’s a very large collection of small things: forty-nine pieces of flash fiction based on the seven deadly sins. My story “Eternity Compound” is in the pride section.
I spent last weekend at Geysercon helping to run a particularly epic game. Three DMs, running three different tables simultaneously in the same module was a massive challenge but a hell of a lot of fun.
There have been a few requests for a copy of the rules, so here you go. It’s a very simple system – only a couple of pages of rules, designed to be fast and flexible in a noisy setting with people who may have never played before.
Thanks to everyone who came to play (and frequently died in interesting ways).
Something I should have mentioned a month ago (or perhaps I did and the post was lost in the time streams for a while):
Temporal Fractures: (mis)adventures in time is a new anthology from Specul8 Publishing. 13 time-travelling tales. All authors are from Australia and New Zealand except for one. You may have heard of him – a bloke called H.G. Wells.
My story ‘Starting Over’ is included, about two failed rock stars who travel back in time to try and prevent the assassination of John Lennon.
You can pick up a copy of Temporal Fractures at the Specul8 store
Do we have time for a song? I think we have time for a song.
My imagination seems to like hanging out at the dark end of the street, probably wearing a leather jacket and smoking in an attempt to look cool. But I’ve never written anything specifically Lovecraftian, at least not on purpose.
Until now.
I’m thrilled that my story ‘A Brighter Future’ is part of the latest collection of Antipodean horror from IFWG, Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud. This is a fantastic collection featuring a whole bunch of scary kiwis.
If you live in Auckland, you’ll already know that Armageddon is coming – 19-22 October to be precise. There’s a Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud panel at 3PM on Sunday. I’ll be there, along with some other fine folk. Come and say hi.
In this collection we find an Aotearoa with the proud history, myths, and legends of the Māori, and the impacts of the white settler’s later presence, and the blended society that encompasses both, but we see the shadow of other things.
Herein lies the cosmic horror of the Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos in an anthology featuring Lovecraftian tales from some of New Zealand’s finest speculative fiction writers.
Stay brave. Because here there be monsters.
Tales of terror by:
Debbie & Matt Cowens
J. C. Hart
David Kuraria
Tracie McBride
Paul Mannering
Lee Murray
Jane Percival
Dan Rabarts
Grant Stone
Lucy Sussex
Marty YoungIntroduction by Kaaron Warren.
Cover art and design by Steve Santiago, and skilfully edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira, and Bryce Stevens.
Do we have time for a song? I think we have time for a song.
Always Falling Up, my story of soldiers-as-a-service and insecure data centers first appeared in Use Only As Directed. But now it’s available to read right here. Hope you like it!
Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand is a new book of Flash Fiction, and it’s quite a big one: 200 small stories from 165 writers, including me.
Bonsai is available from Canterbury University Press. I’ll be at the Auckland book launch next week. Come and say hi.