Richard Dansky's Blog, page 6
November 19, 2013
November 13, 2013
Projects, Projects Everywhere
So, time for a quick tally of various projects that have been published or otherwise escaped into the wild recently.
I've got a story in the Coins of Chaos anthology, alongside such mighty writer types as Gary Braunbeck, Seanan McGuire and Jay Lake. My contribution is called "Justice in Five Cents", which is kind of fitting, as the theme of the anthology is cursed hobo nickels. Don't know what a hobo nickel is? Here's your chance to find out.
I also have a piece in the upcoming New Gothic from the fine folks at Stone Skin Press. That one, "A Meeting In The Devil's House", features the same protagonist as my contribution to the Haunted anthology last year. That guy's starting to get around. On a more serious note, though, the anthology also features a previously unpublished story from horror legend Ramsey Campbell, which in and of itself is squee-worthy.
The review machine has fired back up over at GMR and Sleeping Hedgehog, with pieces In case you missed it, Russ Pitts over at Polygon did a very generous interview with me. Yes, that is my office in the pictures, and yes, it really is that color. The alternative was leaving it the colors we found it, which is to say lavender with pink trim. (Not happening).
Work on the upcoming Wraith: The Oblivion 20th anniversary edition continues. Quietly. Patience will be rewarded, I promise.
Meanwhile, you can look for me in Paris in December for Game Connection Europe, giving a masterclass in game writing on December 3rd and a lecture on myths of game writing on the 4th.
Which is as good a place as any to stop, I suppose. Until next time...
I've got a story in the Coins of Chaos anthology, alongside such mighty writer types as Gary Braunbeck, Seanan McGuire and Jay Lake. My contribution is called "Justice in Five Cents", which is kind of fitting, as the theme of the anthology is cursed hobo nickels. Don't know what a hobo nickel is? Here's your chance to find out.
I also have a piece in the upcoming New Gothic from the fine folks at Stone Skin Press. That one, "A Meeting In The Devil's House", features the same protagonist as my contribution to the Haunted anthology last year. That guy's starting to get around. On a more serious note, though, the anthology also features a previously unpublished story from horror legend Ramsey Campbell, which in and of itself is squee-worthy.
The review machine has fired back up over at GMR and Sleeping Hedgehog, with pieces In case you missed it, Russ Pitts over at Polygon did a very generous interview with me. Yes, that is my office in the pictures, and yes, it really is that color. The alternative was leaving it the colors we found it, which is to say lavender with pink trim. (Not happening).
Work on the upcoming Wraith: The Oblivion 20th anniversary edition continues. Quietly. Patience will be rewarded, I promise.
Meanwhile, you can look for me in Paris in December for Game Connection Europe, giving a masterclass in game writing on December 3rd and a lecture on myths of game writing on the 4th.
Which is as good a place as any to stop, I suppose. Until next time...
October 31, 2013
rdansky @ 2013-11-01T02:06:00
So every year we do up the house for Halloween, and every year we try to do a little more than the last. At first it was just a few lights, then an inflatable skull globe (courtesy of Marla Dansky and family) and spiderwebs and hanging skeletons and colored lights and a flying ghost and motion triggered beasties and, well, you get the idea.
The short version is that we are now "that house". You know, the one that's full of lights. The one that little kids yell "I wanna go to THAT house!" about. The one that gives frights and candy in equal measure. It's a pleasure to do it every year, especially since Melinda Thielbar and I get to share the holiday and the fun with Merrie Burnett and Steve Burnett and Luna Black and more, but, as the preparations got more intricate (and the Halloween stuff took up more and more of the shed), we wondered, just a little bit, if maybe we were overdoing it.
After tonight, we have our answer. Folks thanked us, again and again, for putting in the time and effort. For making something that the kids were excited to see. For doing something cool - especially with Steve in his Urban Yeti getup roaming the lawn. For being, for lack of a better word, That House.
One of the things I love about Halloween, and about trick-or-treating in particular, is that it's an excuse to actually meet your neighbors. To exchange five minutes of chit-chat while the kids (borrowed, in my case) run up to the doors and demand tribute of Skittles and Snickers, or to say hello and thanks to the folks kind enough to be handing out candy. And to talk with neighbors, and to hear them say they got a kick out of what we do, well, that meant a lot.
We've already taken most of the house down. The lights are packed, the blinking eyeballs rolled up and put away, the Halloween Tree dismantled and put back into the shed. Just a few fake spiderwebs remain. It's done, and it was glorious.
And if I said I wasn't already thinking about next year, I'd be lying.
The short version is that we are now "that house". You know, the one that's full of lights. The one that little kids yell "I wanna go to THAT house!" about. The one that gives frights and candy in equal measure. It's a pleasure to do it every year, especially since Melinda Thielbar and I get to share the holiday and the fun with Merrie Burnett and Steve Burnett and Luna Black and more, but, as the preparations got more intricate (and the Halloween stuff took up more and more of the shed), we wondered, just a little bit, if maybe we were overdoing it.
After tonight, we have our answer. Folks thanked us, again and again, for putting in the time and effort. For making something that the kids were excited to see. For doing something cool - especially with Steve in his Urban Yeti getup roaming the lawn. For being, for lack of a better word, That House.
One of the things I love about Halloween, and about trick-or-treating in particular, is that it's an excuse to actually meet your neighbors. To exchange five minutes of chit-chat while the kids (borrowed, in my case) run up to the doors and demand tribute of Skittles and Snickers, or to say hello and thanks to the folks kind enough to be handing out candy. And to talk with neighbors, and to hear them say they got a kick out of what we do, well, that meant a lot.
We've already taken most of the house down. The lights are packed, the blinking eyeballs rolled up and put away, the Halloween Tree dismantled and put back into the shed. Just a few fake spiderwebs remain. It's done, and it was glorious.
And if I said I wasn't already thinking about next year, I'd be lying.
October 30, 2013
Why I Hate Truck Commercials, Overplayed-During-The-Baseball-Playoffs Edition
A man.
A man and his truck.
A man and his truck and his son, who’s justifiably pissed off at getting mentioned after the truck.
A son who’d rather play computer games, which nobody actually calls videogames any more. This is just my personal opinion here, of course, but the fact that this is the terminology that’s getting used might be indicative of a broader communication gap between father and son, and the son’s interest in electronic entertainment might either be symptomatic or a reasonable response to a father who clearly hasn’t bothered to take an interest in the stuff his kid actually likes to do. But I digress.
A man and his son and a truck, all of whom get to jump into a river, except the truck.
And the stars, which presumably are visible from the lonely ranch house the man who owns the truck and has the son lives in, as evidenced from the start of the commercial, when we first see his suspiciously shiny and clean truck.
And a new convert, who has every reason to ask his father, “If this stuff is so important, how come you waited until I was, like, sixteen before you took me camping?”
The commercial ends before the man actually tries to talk to his son. Which is probably for the best.
A man and his truck.
A man and his truck and his son, who’s justifiably pissed off at getting mentioned after the truck.
A son who’d rather play computer games, which nobody actually calls videogames any more. This is just my personal opinion here, of course, but the fact that this is the terminology that’s getting used might be indicative of a broader communication gap between father and son, and the son’s interest in electronic entertainment might either be symptomatic or a reasonable response to a father who clearly hasn’t bothered to take an interest in the stuff his kid actually likes to do. But I digress.
A man and his son and a truck, all of whom get to jump into a river, except the truck.
And the stars, which presumably are visible from the lonely ranch house the man who owns the truck and has the son lives in, as evidenced from the start of the commercial, when we first see his suspiciously shiny and clean truck.
And a new convert, who has every reason to ask his father, “If this stuff is so important, how come you waited until I was, like, sixteen before you took me camping?”
The commercial ends before the man actually tries to talk to his son. Which is probably for the best.
October 20, 2013
Polygon
...appears to have an article on me in it.
Check it out now before they come to their senses and take it down..
Check it out now before they come to their senses and take it down..
Not Yeti
The other day my social media feeds blew up with the note that a British researcher had done some DNA analysis on purported Yeti hair and come up with an interesting result: that it actually matched the DNA of a 40000 year old polar bear jawbone from Norway. Following on that logic, the scientist proposes that the yeti is in fact a previously unknown species of bear, or that it's a hybrid between brown bears and polar bears than has set up shop in the Himalayas. And a depressing number of those notes - and of the news articles discussing the theory - were of the "ha-ha, you were wrong and there's no bigfoot" variety.
Which is depressing, for a couple of reasons.
Kind of a jerk move to respond to what you think is the crushing of someone's dreams with a Ralph Wiggum laugh, people.
It's one result. There's still no holotype. Let's get a holotype and some more data points before we declare this conclusive.
This is exactly how science - even cryptozoology - is supposed to work. Gather samples, test evidence, come up with a hypothesis. From where I sit atop a pile of Loren Coleman books, it's actually really cool that this level of scientific rigor is being brought to the question, and I look forward to seeing the extended research. Cryptozoology is all about finding unknown animals through research; correct me if I'm wrong, but that's potentially exactly what just happened here. And that's pretty neat.
If this guy is right, and the yeti really is a giant unknown bear, HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT? I mean, OK, not a gigantopithecus or whatever, but still. GIANT UNKNOWN POLAR BEARS OF THE HIMALAYAS. Send out David Attenborough, stat!
I don't see how anybody could really, in the long run, be disappointed by that. Except, possibly, the first one of Attenborough's camera guys to get eaten by one.
Which is depressing, for a couple of reasons.
Kind of a jerk move to respond to what you think is the crushing of someone's dreams with a Ralph Wiggum laugh, people.
It's one result. There's still no holotype. Let's get a holotype and some more data points before we declare this conclusive.
This is exactly how science - even cryptozoology - is supposed to work. Gather samples, test evidence, come up with a hypothesis. From where I sit atop a pile of Loren Coleman books, it's actually really cool that this level of scientific rigor is being brought to the question, and I look forward to seeing the extended research. Cryptozoology is all about finding unknown animals through research; correct me if I'm wrong, but that's potentially exactly what just happened here. And that's pretty neat.
If this guy is right, and the yeti really is a giant unknown bear, HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT? I mean, OK, not a gigantopithecus or whatever, but still. GIANT UNKNOWN POLAR BEARS OF THE HIMALAYAS. Send out David Attenborough, stat!
I don't see how anybody could really, in the long run, be disappointed by that. Except, possibly, the first one of Attenborough's camera guys to get eaten by one.
October 15, 2013
Coins of Chaos
So a little bird has told me that the Coins of Chaos anthology, featuring stories from luminaries like Gary Braunbeck, Seanan McGuire, Jay Lake (and they let me in there, too) is now available. Ever wondered what a hobo nickel was? Ever wanted to see 17 authors take a crack at the dark mysteries behind them? Now’s your chance, just in time for Halloween…
October 10, 2013
How To Become A Game Writer, at UbiBlog
Over at the UbiBlog, they let me hold forth every so often on the topic of game writing. The most recent post just went live, and it's an attempt to provide something of an answer to a question I get asked a lot: how does one become a game writer.
Read, and be enlightened.
Read, and be enlightened.
September 24, 2013
September 25th
So, 11 years ago, Melinda Thielbar and I bought a house together. We did this while I was in the throes of what turned out to be "Fifth Disease", which A)neither of us had ever heard of before and B)caused me to run to the other side of the room to avoid being near other, possibly uninfected humans in between scrawling my name on various documents. Melinda had just driven down from Chicago with two cats, her friend Darci Stratton and a carload of stuff, and they all crashed in my apartment - which was temporarily without water for the last few days of my residence there - while we waited to get papers signed so we could load up and move in. We'd found the house, which we still live in today, through the recommendation of our friends Mur Lafferty and Jim Van Verth, who said, "Hey, there's a house up the block from us that's up for sale, and it has a neat fence around the backyard. You should check it out." And we did, and we loved the insane cat door and the disturbingly plaid dining room wallpaper and all the other bits and bobs, and we bought it. Like I said, we closed the deal on September 25, 2002. We were not married at the time, as we'd decided that we could invest in marriage or mortgage but not both, and it was better to build equity.
September 25, 2003 rolled around. I spent that date in the last throes of recovery from surgery, a memorable experience that included discovering that my doctor was the brother of the starting quarterback for Ohio State at the time. (How did I learn this? When the duty nurse at the hospital - a few weeks before the 25th - finally listened to Melinda and noticed my temperature was over 102 and rising, they rushed everyone in. In the middle of the chaos, I distinctly heard the doctor asking if anyone had the Ohio State score. The things we remember...) I also learned that TRON is best viewed whilst hopped up on oxycontin, that Melinda had absorbed enough about baseball from me to be horrified when Jose Mesa came into a game, and that it was a bad idea to store your heavy birthday presents for your fiancee on a high shelf in a closet on the second floor when you're going to have surgery and be told by doctors you're not going to be able to stretch, take stairs, or lift anything heavier than five pounds.
September 25, 2004, I was in Paris, working on a game called Cold Fear. We had been planning on getting married - in North Carolina, not in Paris - at that time. We did things about being married. We reserved a site. We set up catering and whatnot. We planned. We made a guest list. And then we discovered that we didn't have hotel rooms for the guests, which would have been tricky, as the place where we were planning on getting married was on top of a mountain, 25 miles from the nearest other hotel, and not the sort of place you wanted to drive to at 5 AM for a sunrise wedding.
And then September 25, 2005 rolled around. 3 years to the day after we bought the house and started a life together in a legally-binding-but-not-yet-matrimonial way. That morning, we stood on top of a mountain, in the fog, with a 30 mile an hour wind gusting in. Waiters held umbrellas over a hammered dulcimer player, in case the rain started up. The chupah threatened to catch air and take four members of the wedding party with it over the cliff edge towards Lake Junaluska. Melinda couldn't hear her cue through the fog the first time they played it. The rabbi switched his place setting at the reception so he could sit next to Melinda's aunt Dolores Tennenbaum, whom he found fascinating. And the photographer split his pants.
Happy anniversary, my love. I wouldn't change a thing.
September 25, 2003 rolled around. I spent that date in the last throes of recovery from surgery, a memorable experience that included discovering that my doctor was the brother of the starting quarterback for Ohio State at the time. (How did I learn this? When the duty nurse at the hospital - a few weeks before the 25th - finally listened to Melinda and noticed my temperature was over 102 and rising, they rushed everyone in. In the middle of the chaos, I distinctly heard the doctor asking if anyone had the Ohio State score. The things we remember...) I also learned that TRON is best viewed whilst hopped up on oxycontin, that Melinda had absorbed enough about baseball from me to be horrified when Jose Mesa came into a game, and that it was a bad idea to store your heavy birthday presents for your fiancee on a high shelf in a closet on the second floor when you're going to have surgery and be told by doctors you're not going to be able to stretch, take stairs, or lift anything heavier than five pounds.
September 25, 2004, I was in Paris, working on a game called Cold Fear. We had been planning on getting married - in North Carolina, not in Paris - at that time. We did things about being married. We reserved a site. We set up catering and whatnot. We planned. We made a guest list. And then we discovered that we didn't have hotel rooms for the guests, which would have been tricky, as the place where we were planning on getting married was on top of a mountain, 25 miles from the nearest other hotel, and not the sort of place you wanted to drive to at 5 AM for a sunrise wedding.
And then September 25, 2005 rolled around. 3 years to the day after we bought the house and started a life together in a legally-binding-but-not-yet-matrimonial way. That morning, we stood on top of a mountain, in the fog, with a 30 mile an hour wind gusting in. Waiters held umbrellas over a hammered dulcimer player, in case the rain started up. The chupah threatened to catch air and take four members of the wedding party with it over the cliff edge towards Lake Junaluska. Melinda couldn't hear her cue through the fog the first time they played it. The rabbi switched his place setting at the reception so he could sit next to Melinda's aunt Dolores Tennenbaum, whom he found fascinating. And the photographer split his pants.
Happy anniversary, my love. I wouldn't change a thing.
September 20, 2013
Vaporware on sale this weekend
So my novel Vaporware is just gone on sale for 99 cents, this weekend only.
Consider the possibilities.
Consider the possibilities.
