july-angel Asks:
tazmuir Said:
Thank you so much for your Extremely Nice Words, which mean a great deal to me – making people feel things with a capital FEE is honestly the best thing I can ever hope to achieve. I figured your message was an extremely good jumping-off-point to note:
1. I’m so grateful for everyone who reads my writing and gets something out of it, even if that writing is the Animorphs parody I wrote when I was eleven years old that solely makes fun of the X-Files movie, a cultural touchstone that has not aged well;
2. I haven’t abandoned my fannish writing, and though TSG may not appear in the same format as before (I’m so happy fandom lately has taken to posting “What Would’ve Happened” outlines) it ain’t dead;
3. There are links in my ABOUT page to all my current work, though I gotta update it with a couple of reprints coming out that are nice and accessible. I am partcularly fond of the Pseudopod podcast done of a horror short story I did a few years back, “The Magician’s Apprentice”, read by the absolutely incredible Louise Ratcliffe;
4. Lastly, the reason why I have been inactive is because I have spent every spare moment of my last year that I could finishing up an extremely large project. I can only reassure you that this has been the inactive silence before a garbage storm of such huge and rubbishy proportions that it will make people reverent. I have been creating a huge trash receptacle, packed full of refuse. If you have ever enjoyed my bin leavings before, I can only assure you that this debris tub* is FOR YOU.
* I wrote a novel.
Hey! I have a story out this month in Apex Magazine! I’m really proud of this one, which I actually had the chance to workshop with my favourite author, Samuel R. Delany, while I was at Clarion.
If you like my work, please check this out and consider leaving a comment, buying the issue or simply re-blogging this post to support my work. Thanks~ <3
Lazarus & The Amazing Kid Phoenix / Interview With The Author
My skin was still charred when I first woke up. I raised my hands above my head and watched as it bubbled and leaked, as it grew pink — then brown — between the charcoal scabs. By nightfall I was covered in an armor of abscess. I spent six hours popping yellowed sacks of pus to reveal my new skin, baby-soft and unmarked.
“What do you remember?” the Old Man asked me when I could speak. My tongue was still numb from blistering, my eyes hazy and cheeks raw from where the skin had sloughed off in rubbery sheets. I didn’t remember, I tried to say. It wasn’t true — I saw glimpses of it in short, painful bursts. Tiny, knife-shaped headaches that ground through my skull like diamond. I remembered some ugly words and the grate of a lighter being clicked to life over and over again. I remembered tripping over my shoelaces and hearing a song somewhere in the distance, a hard grind of sax and bass. Funk was a false promise of kindness. Will it go ‘round in circles? Billy Preston was asking me. Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?
“I burned,” I told him. “They freaking burned me. I died burning.”
“A lot of things die burning,” Old Man Gasper said. “But not you.”
I know that if you’re following me, you probably know Jennifer for her fannish work, and I reiterate that her original work is jolly bloody good. So glad to see this in Apex.
Here I am again, interminably blogging about the intersection between horror, games and narrative! In my defense, there’s fewer people who speak more eloquently about this stuff than prunescholar, and because the ability of a game to provide horror with static art that changes very, very slowly or suddenly – well, that slipstream point of something being off is, in my mind, the heart of all horror. I do think that this underpins the scariest part of Stephen King’s novella The Langoliers, in which I argue that the scariest stuff is in the first ten pages and I am 100% right. Do give this a read.
nightpool Asks:
tazmuir Said:
Thank you so much! Everyone is being so lovely! I’m so happy now that I didn’t choke to death on a Cornetto when I was four.
I’m chuffed to announce that my novelette, The Deepwater Bride, has been shortlisted for a Nebula Award! I’m in very honourable company – Michael Bishop, Henry Lien, Rose Lemberg, Brooke Bolander, Sarah Pinsker – and the line-up in general is a bunch of heavy hitters. There’s so many stories I’m pleased to see on there, and I’d start listing them if it didn’t mean this post was a trip to Namedrop Café.
This means an enormous amount to me. I’m very proud and happy. I wish there were better statistics on how many New Zealanders have been nominated for the Nebula, because my pitiful research has only come up with Peter Jackson and Karen Healey; this feels doubtful, but if I really am only one of a handful of Kiwis thus far nominated I’ll discharge my duty somehow [she did not discharge her duty]. I’ve already thanked a bunch of people, but I’d like to also give a fervent bro-shake to @paratactician, @byzantienne, @furiroad and @cephiedvariable for their limitless patience as readers.
To underscore my dignified thanks, here’s a couple of furious tomatoes
My story, “Union”, is live in this month’s edition of Clarkesworld Magazine! You can check it out here, and I heartily recommend this month’s line-up in general. I’ve only managed to read Cassandra Khaw’s We Will Die on Mars and the reprint of Nebula award-winning Daddy’s World by Walter Jon Williams, but I enjoyed the hell out of both and I’m looking forward to reading the rest.
“Union” is a short-fiction piece of Kiwi-flavoured sci-fi and it’s got body horror, just as a warning. If that is your thing, this may be the sort of thing you like.
cinquespotted Asks:
tazmuir Said:
Thank you! I mean, I feel that this series has a lot to offer – I am certain the next logical step is a thematic comparison with, say, Lutz’s “My Father’s Long, Long Legs” – but if you can see its potential too I’m very pleased.
Hey! This is the first continuation of my series on micro-narrative in otome games. I’ll be tagging all the entries under the acronym for “Wizardess Heart universal narrative key” so that they’re easy to find. This post gets more into set-ups and typical tropes/character development that goes into otome, and also with the interesting abbreviation of worldbuilding that characterises the mobile branch of these games. It would be useful to read my introduction first, if you haven’t done so already.
More under the cut!
For those of you who have known me for a while, you may know that I’m really interested in game narrative, micro-narrative and industries created on shilling these things to the public. I like short fiction magazines; I like interactive fiction and narrative games; I like ARGs and Echo Bazaar, which don’t seem at first blush like bedfellows but are, I do think, part of a similar umbrella enough to be grouped together. I’m going to be doing a multiple-part series highlighting a game made for the market of the Teenage Girl – a market I am passionately interested in on heaps of levels – casually exploring otome, the common narratives of otome games, story incentivizations and the pay-for-chapter model.
More under the cut!
dwarzel Asks:
tazmuir Said:
I’ll illegally use this ask to do two things: first, to link to my interview in the F&SF website for “The Deepwater Bride” (spoiler-free!) and to link to Desmond Warzel’s “The Only Game In Town” which I found on Drabblecast and had not, in fact, read before. (Hoping you don’t mind the link.)
Hello! I did have a particular piece in mind when I talked about win-loss narratives and Lovecraft, but it wasn’t actually a piece of written fiction: it’s Lovecraft narratives as we’ve had to apply them in the world of video games and board games. Arkham Horror was the first one that sprang to mind, and I say this as someone who loves Arkham Horror a lot. If you’re not familiar, in Arkham Horror the entire point is to shoot increasing waves of Lovecraftian monsters and take down the Big Bad before the time runs out. It’s excellent. It’s also not scary, simply because it does predicate itself on the idea that the way to take down the Old Ones is through a boss battle. Arkham Horror is not scary in all the ways that, say, The Shadow Of The Comet or the glorious Anchorhead is; both games cleave to a more truly Lovecraftian idea of outrunning and slowing down evil, rather than a finality through bullets. (And having now read “The Only Game In Town”, I won’t say much about it, but I feel it gives much more narrative weight to prayers than firepower and thus escapes all of my criticism!)
I’d wanted to talk in-depth about weaponry in Lovecraft, text adventures and the red herring of the fight, but I realised that what everyone could be doing, right at this moment, is playing Michael S. Gentry’s “Anchorhead” which has a female protagonist and a huge reversal of the “save your wife” narrative, so the words have been blessedly taken out of my cake hole.