This Brain Blender is on "Flurry"

Wherein the author checks in with everyone about the state of things

Hello, and here’s a vaguely unsettling snippet of an image for my last Mörktober entry. The “make a grim fantasy thing ever day during October” project winds up this week, and I’m thrilled that I managed to show up every day. The thirty-one objects have been fabulous brainstorming for a project I want to do early next year. Right now, it’s called “SIGIK” and it’s an eco-RPG set in a fantasy world where the forest is not your friend. Well, unless you’ve made certain sacrifices . . . I don’t know if it will be full solo play or solo friendly, but I have a few months to sort that out.

Working on that while I’ve been wrangling the last bits of the DOOM + MADNESS Kickstarter plus the Maisiverse story have put my brain into hyperdrive, and yes, the brain bowl is sloshing over. I’m making lots of sticky notes that I can lose on my desk for months, which is the proper way to focus all this creative thinking.

I finished watching Scavengers Reign. If you haven’t seen it, you should. And let me know when you have, because I have thoughts. But mostly, what I want as a follow-up is a Youtube channel like Lo-Fi Girl, but it focuses on what [SPOILER] does during the day. With lots of diagrams and pictures.

And speaking of diagrams and pictures, I love Roger Strunk’s website design. Strunk is a graphic designer who occasionally shares what’s on his mind from a design standpoint, as well as doing some marvelous crate digging for 20th century physical design materials. An update from him is dangerous because it is always full of interesting things to go poke at. And for the love of God, don’t click on his Library page until you want to discover a whole bunch of design books you now have to have.

Recently, I’ve been driving around with Stanley Tucci. Well, the audio book of his new memoir, What I Ate in One Year (And Other Related Thoughts)¹. He reads it, which makes it only that much more delightful. And now I want to go eat a lot of Italian food. I suppose he would qualify that as a win.

Also on my desk is Luke Gearing’s The Isle. It’s a self-contained RPG supplement, and it’s been on my radar now and again, but there are a lot of things on the radar, you know? What tipped me over is this review from the Technical Grimoire which extols Gearing’s novelistic approach to the supplement.

I am, at heart, a hyperdiegesic² writer. I’m not sure distilling things down to bullet points and paragraphs that are meant to be skimmed is truly in my wheelhouse, but Gearing’s approach for The Isle (and some of his other projects too) suggests there is some wiggle room here. More so, if the project lends itself more readily to solo play . . .

And speaking of world-building, Near Earth Orbit’s new album, Divine Inferno, showed up this week, and it’s everything I love about NEO. Heavy on the guitars. Heavy on the voice. Heavy on the mood. Check out the videos for the first few singles.

I’ve been following them since their Garden of Delight days when they were the closest fix I could get to a new Fields of the Nephilim record. Their transformation into the Merciful Nuns was a step closer to the FotN vibe, but Artaud Seth’s voice wasn’t quite the same lupine growl as Carl McCoy. And then, Seth went full-on SF dystopia with NEO, and yeah, baby!

There’s a few more days to back Demagogue Press’s art ’n’ fiction book, Art Born Words. It’s a lovely edition of Steve Graziani’s macabre art, with accompanying stories and poetry by 19 authors. I’ve contributed two poems. I know. Brevity. Shocker. Anyway, the Kickstarter is almost at its final stretch goal, which would allow for a release party in Portland. Let’s get this one over the goal!

And an early note about another project that’ll I’ll be participating in next year. Claw Machine launches in March. I’ll remind you once or twice more, but you can certainly click on through to the KS launch page and save this project. These clicks help us get Kickstarter’s attention when we launch.

And finally, Crooked v.3 comes out tomorrow. It contains the latest Maisiverse story, wherein the team works on finding the next member of their crew. Naturally, things go awry.

1. That’s an affiliate link for A Good Book, my home bookstore. Did you know Libro.fm has an affiliate program for indie bookstores? They do. You should inquire if yours has signed up and get their affiliate link.

2. It’s a very academic word, I know. I recently learned it and felt very seen. If you’d like to wade through some scholarly talk about it, you should go read the section on world-building in Aaron’s Smith’s thesis “Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0.”

Interestingly, he wrote this in the spring of 2009, which was about the time that we were making the rounds with the idea that a room full of writers was a novel way to solve the conundrum of how to build a transmedia property.