Remarkable how much harder it is to muster the energy to blog when I don’t have lovely images lying around to fill up extra space.

You were probably starting to feel complacent and self-satisfied because I haven’t berated you about your carbon footprint lately.

Well, here I am to put an end to that.

This gulf oil spill thing is pretty depressing, no? It has put me back into that too-familiar mindset of paranoiac dread, wondering how I can wander around in my idyllic paradise taking photos of wildflowers and smugly watching the average miles per gallon meter on my fancy new cash-for-klunkers-mobile creep past 40, while out there in the world two thousand gallons of oil per hour are spilling into the Gulf.

Let’s just put that in perspective, shall we? Every year for the past 50 years, leaking oil pipeline in Nigeria has spilled more oil than the Exxon Valdez. Every year for the past 50 years. What are they (BP, Shell, etc) doing about it? Not a lot. Why? Because it’s not happening off the southern coast of the U.S.?

Meanwhile, my sister tells me, U.S. and Canadian concerns in the mountains of Guatemala strip mine for gold using blast streams of arsenic, which contaminates the water table, making it poisonous to all forms of life. And it all just flows downriver to the sea.

Then there’s the garbage patch. The 2.8 million tons of pesticides used every year worldwide. Those de-oxygenated ocean dead zones the size of New Jersey. The 3.7 billion dollar sunscreen industry (slather on, rinse off in ocean, repeat).

One starts to wonder why there’s any water in the ocean.

The only thing that’s working on our side, the only thing that keeps me lying on my back in the grass in the backyard eating soft serve with my legs up on the picnic table thinking of whimsical names for the clouds, is the fact that the earth is still, for the moment, bigger than we are.

There’s a certain little ditty that creeps up at the back of my mind at times like these and won’t go away–it helps me to remember I’m not doing enough, even when I really, really wish I could just get the damn thing out of my head. It goes like this (sung to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell”):

We’re f@¢king up the earth
We’re f@¢king up the earth
Hi-ho the derry-o
We’re f@¢king up the earth.

Everybody!

I’m delighted to report that another story of mine has sold to the good folks at Space and Time Magazine. They published my story “Ebb” last year, and now they’ve bought “The Very Strange Weird of Endart Sscowth.”

This story is an homage to Clark Ashton Smith, a great writer of the 20s and 30s pulp fantasy era, who is often lost in the shadow of his colleague Robert E. Howard and his pen-pal H.P. Lovecraft. It’s also very different from all my published stories to date–quite short, under 2000 words, and not quite so serious; actually rather droll, if I may say so myself.

The title includes an archaic usage of the word “weird,” as he once used it–an old Scottish one that means fate or destiny. Hence the adjective “strange” that I inserted before it, to show that this weird is a noun and not our more common adjective interpretation of that word. A strange weird, indeed. :)

Space and Time tells me that “The Very Strange Weird of Endart Sscowth” should see publication in late 2010 or early 2011. I hope you will find it droll as well. ;)

Wild columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, West-facing cliffs, Mt. Toby Reservation, Sunderland.

My camera died. Rest well, Sony Cybershot DSC-F717. You came from the factory with all kinds of defects, your autofocus algorithm was dated and finicky, but you were good to me. You let me recollect beauty in millions of colors. One time you pretended to be a handcannon to protect me from poachers. Curse the loose screw that killed you. I wish I had treated you better.

My old Powerbook G4 12″ has gone the way of the dire wolf and the dodo. Funes, you kept me alive. You ate through rechargeable batteries like a radio-controlled Mechagodzilla. Your touchpad didn’t work for shit, forcing me to wield a retro-aesthetically superheroic rubber ball mouse from my original iMac 233 circa 1998. I was ridiculously, unhealthily attached to you. I am beside myself at the prospect of letting you go—but all things must pass. With any luck, you will only sleep awhile and return from the shadows, like the coelecanth or the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Now I got me a handed-down white dual 1.8 MacBook, christened Ilom, for which I shall remain eternally grateful to parties who know who they are. It stands out less from the coffeeshop crowd than poor old Funes; on the other hand, it can run Illustrator and iTunes at the same time without destroying itself and has carried me forward into the video age. Will I ever learn to love it as much? That’s a question best put to Time.

“They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.”

—Robert Frost, In Hardwood Groves

Wow–over a month since I’ve posted. Basically, I’ve been swamped–writing new stories for the annual Odyssey alumni workshop in July, reading submissions and working on audio fiction podcasts for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and starting to clean out my childhood house (it’s like Schliemann’s thirteen levels of Troy in there).

The big news at BCS is the release of our new anthology, The Best of BCS, Year One. It has fourteen of the coolest stories from our first year, including ones by Richard Parks, Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, and Holly Phillips. It’s an ebook anthology (the future of publishing!), and it’s available for just $2.99 in the Amazon Kindle Store and at many other ebook vendors. All the details are here.

The coming months may be just as busy–more podcasts for BCS, a bunch of crit reading for the summer Odyssey alum workshop, planning my con trips for the rest of the year, and more down-home archeology (old AD&D modules and 1/72nd scale Luftwaffe night fighers…). I should have good news on the short story front soon, and hopefully BCS and the new anthology will keep gaining notice. The future beckons.

This is possibly the dorkiest thing you’ll read all weekend.

I make no secret for my love of rolling the funny-shaped dice, and since I've been missing the gaming group I left behind I decided to share with you all a list of characters played since 2005.


Skorzeny (Wushu): My friend Conrad Deitrick could rattle off games of Wushu like nobody’s business. If you’ve never gamed Wushu, pretty much all you need to know is that it is a Narrativist game where you get extra dice if you in some way incorporate the sound of pumping a shotgun (KA-CHICK) into the description of your character's action. For this game Conrad used Palladium’s MUTANTS DOWN UNDER sourcebook from THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES game.

Skorzeny was pretty much a copy of that guy with the gyrocopter from THE ROAD WARRIOR. He flew an airship. The airship blew up. He went in search of another airship with a band of furries. Somehow an army of robots got involved.

Fleshbox (d20 Mutant & Materminds): This was a modern-day superheroes game. I don’t remember the name of Fleshbox’s secret identity. His story was that he was a medic in Iraq, turned night-shift morgue attendant who got infected by some kind of alien nano-goo that transformed him into a weird amalgam of Mr. Fantastic and John Carpenter’s THE THING. (His initial concept was Mr. Fantastic but gross.)

He was basically a shape-shifter, and I loved flipping through the rulebook searching for superpowers to twist and make gross.

The Fright (Spirit of the Century): I love Spirit of the Century. It’s a great game for pulp action.

The Fright was an undead gangster who worked as the chauffeur for another character, a Lovecraftian Dr. Fate, named Dr. Occult. In other words, a meat-shield that went knuckle to knuckle with extra-dimensional blasphemous foes. He said things like: “Jeez. Will you shut your tentacled yap for a second, I’m trying to listen to the ballgame here!” and “Hey Doc, you want a sandwich?”

(In SotC each character has taglines and if you work the line into the game you get extra dice.)

Battlechimp (Spirit of the Century): A monkey in a battle-suit with the firepower of a tank and a robo-voice like Stephen Hawking. He enjoyed making fun of the “Lord of the Jungle” character played by Matt Cody. I don't remember any of his taglines, but I do remember it said "the only surviving member of The Simian Six" on his character sheet.

Hagan Selkirk (d20 Star Wars): I’m not a big fan of the Star Wars Universe and the less I know about it the better. (Really, Storm Troopers are just clones? That sucks.) My favorite iteration of the setting for RPGs was West End Games' version.

Hagan was a trigger happy, former Imperial recruit, turned Jedi-in-training. He was loosely based on Terence Hill's Trinity character from the Spaghetti Western series.



A curious fact: Whenever I leave town during an ongoing game, the GM takes great delight in turning my characters into villains. It happened in 2002 with my fur-coat wearing, staff-o-Power wielding, half-Elven rogue/sorcerer Lenehan, and, if the rumors are to be believed, it’s happening now to Hagan.

How many times do I have to say this? They’re not bad people. They’re just misunderstood!

John Dalt/Muzzlehatch (Homebrews): These characters weren’t as interesting as the systems they gamed in were: "Tombstone" and "Fortune's Fool" (both designed by Jay Stratton of Pantheon Press).

“Tombstone” was a “dead-in-the-west” game so violent and with a character mortality rate so high that my wife would ask “Did you get shot in the face?” every night when I came home from playing it.

John Dalt was a portly gunfighter. He got shot in the face.

“Fortune’s Fool” used a tarot deck instead of dice (maybe there were one or two) and was set in a fantasy version of 16th century Europe. Muzzlehatch was a Dwarven munitions expert. He blew things up and wore a voluminous coat and a sombrero.


Make of these what you will.

As everyone knows it’s a proven fact that one’s fondness for certain character-types in RPGs is the only true window into that person’s soul.