Jim Nelson's Blog, page 5

The other meaning of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”

Last night, I saw a live performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at the San Francisco Symphony. One of the people I went with had never seen the original television cartoon—yes, it’s true.

Afterwards, she asked a simple question: “Why did Charlie Brown pick such a bad tree for Christmas?”

As we walked, we talked a bit about Linus’ speech at the end, and how the story asks about the “true” meaning of Christmas. This was all fine, but it merely danced around her question of the tree...

2022 XYZZY Awards now open for nomination

The 2022 XYZZY Awards for interactive fiction is now accepting nominations.

The XYZZY Awards is one of the oldest video game award on the books. It first started in 1997 and has been held yearly since. It’s often called the Oscars for interactive fiction. If you’ve played even one interactive fiction game first released in 2022, you can nominate a title and vote on the final outcome.

I have some skin in the game. My game According to Cain was released in 2022. It went on to place ...

The coming revolution in audiobooks

Marco Verch (CC-2.0)

In November, Amazon opened a beta program for Kindle Direct Publishing authors called Virtual Voice. It may be the biggest upheaval to independent publishing since Amazon launched KDP over a decade ago.

Virtual Voice uses synthetic (i.e., computer) voice technology to produce audiobooks. On first blush, that sounds like a pretty crappy experience—who wants to listen to a robot narrate a book? Know that automated voice technology has advanced tremendously in recent y...

One year later: When will we see Neuromancer on the screen?

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on this series.

A year ago I asked a simple question: Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen? This turned out to be an example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Honestly, I did not foresee this. The stories a year ago about an upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation of William Gibson’s masterpiece seemed more than promising. As I wrote:...

Everything old is new again

“Woman in brown coat,” Devon Rodriguez

Ben Davis of artnet news reports a story that sounds all-too-familiar these days:

A little more than a week ago, I wrote a review of an art show by the artist and TikTok sensation Devon Rodriguez, best known for live drawing subway riders. He is, by some measures, the most famous artist in the world, with many millions of social media followers. He did not like the review.

It went up on a Friday. On Saturday morning, I woke up to a tidal wave of a...

I, erotica writer

Illustration from Erotic Review for “At the White Sands Motel, 1956”

I once wrote erotica by accident. Yes, by accident. Writing and getting the story published is a wild tale.

If you know of anything of my output—my novels, my interactive fiction—that might surprise you. You’ve probably never read anything by me that remotely involves the sex act: No kinky sex, no ho-hum sex, not even missionary style. Generally, I shy away from that kind of thing. Getting it published in an erot...

“According to Cain” makes the 2023 Interactive Fiction Top 50

This morning I learned that my interactive fiction game According to Cain was selected for the 2023 Interactive Fiction Top 50. This is a poll run by Victor Gijsbers every four years since 2011, and generally attracts interactive fiction enthusiasts and authors (most of whom gather now at intfiction.org). The goal of the poll is to determine the fifty (or so) best interactive fiction games of all time. According to Cain placed 21st in the latest incarnation of the list, which is poste...

Has the digital revolution killed fiction?

by Elliot Brown (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Will Blythe at Esquire asks, “In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?”

Wearily, I started his essay expecting more of the same, and lo, finding it: Computers and the Internet, he contends, has done much to destroy literary fiction. By this point, I’m surprised any writer pursuing such a thesis would bother fortifying their argument with examples or statistics. Blythe does...

“According to Cain: From concept to completion” video now on YouTube

The recorded video of my NarraScope 2023 talk—”According to Cain: From concept to completion”—is now up:

Or, watch it on YouTube.

Published 29 August 2023. Last updated 28 August 2023.

The Christopher McCandless mystique continues

Kat Rosenfield at Unherd claims she knows why men are no longer wild: “Our sense of adventure died with Chris McCandless.”

I last wrote about the mythology around Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in 2015. Rosenfield’s article motivated me to survey the situation once more.

I won’t summarize here Krakauer’s book or Chris McCandless’ life and death. My earlier blog post (“Into the Wild and the continued fascination with Christopher McCandless’ death”) covers both. ...