Jim Nelson's Blog, page 6

What’s going on in my world?

It’s been awhile. Although the web site has been mostly quiet, I’ve actually been juggling a few projects and staying busy.

First, I am working on a new novel, which I hope to have mostly finished before the end of the year. It’s a bit of curveball compared to my past work—an absurdist caper comedy shot through with gallows humor. I’ll share more details when the manuscript shapes up and the final book comes together.

Second, I’m developing another interactive fiction video game...

NarraScope 2023: According to Cain

I’m speaking at the upcoming NarraScope conference in Pittsburgh. My talk is titled “According to Cain: From Concept to Completion.” I’ll discuss writing my latest interactive fiction, from its meager origins as a rough idea for a short story, to its final form as a video game about an alchemist determined to solve one of the Bible’s oldest mysteries.

According to Cain placed sixth in the 2022 Interactive Fiction Competition, and won Outstanding Game of the Year (Player’s Choice) an...

Charles Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives

Charles Baxter

What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?

Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?

In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down...

It finally happened

I’m an inveterate Wordle player. When I wake up, I’ll open the app and try to finish the game before rising. I’ve played nearly two hundred rounds so far, which is by no means a long span of time compared to other Wordle fanatics I’ve seen online.

Like most ardent Wordle players, I have my start word, that is, my initial guess which is intended to locate as many common consonants and vowels as possible, in order to make better-educated guesses in the next turns. I went through a fe...

Seen at my local library branch

At my local branch of the San Francisco Public Library I happened to notice this little surprise on the New Arrivals shelf: A fresh copy of , all prepped and ready for checking out. (Here’s the online record, if you’re interested.)

If you’d like to read my books and haven’t yet, keep in mind your local library may have an online suggestions program for acquiring lesser-publicized titles like Baskerville or Bridge Daughter. Check your library’s web site, recomm...

Why won’t Google include my Sherlock Holmes copyright post?

In January, I posted about my research into the history of the copyright status on Sherlock Holmes. Although many news outlets rang in the New Year with proclamations that Sherlock Holmes was now free of copyright and in the public domain (“Now anybody can write a Sherlock Holmes story”), I pointed out that they’d made similar proclamations in 2013 (“Finally, Sherlock Holmes is now in the public domain”) after a 7th Circuit court decision castigated the Doyle literary estate.

Indeed,...

According to Cain at the 2022 IFDB Awards

The 2022 Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) Awards polling has completed, and According to Cain did well! It won Outstanding Game of the Year (Player’s Choice) and Outstanding Game Over Two Hours (both Player’s and Author’s Choice).

It placed second for the Outstanding Game of the Year (Author’s Choice), missing a tie by a single vote, and second for Outstanding Game in an Uncommon System (both Player’s and Author’s Choice).

You can view the full results at the IFDB. The announc...

2022 IFDB Award polling closing soon

Quick note: If you’re an aficionado of interactive fiction, and you played at least one interactive fiction game released in 2022, head on over to the Interactive Fiction Database and vote for the IFDB Award. There’s a lot of categories, but no fear, you can vote in as many or as few of them as you like.

(With one proviso: You can only vote in the “Author’s Choice” categories if you’ve authored an interactive fiction game and it’s listed on IFDB.)

Read over the voting rules, creat...

Sherlock Holmes, footloose and copyright-free

[Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer or an expert on copyright law. If you have legal questions, go talk to a pro.]

Source. (CC-BY-NC 4.0)

You may have heard that the United States copyright on Sherlock Holmes expired with the arrival of the New Year.

You may have also heard something similar ten or so years ago (such as this 2013 news story). Why are we going through this again in 2023?

You may also wonder how a character created in 1887—136 years ago—could have been copyrighted up u...

Hell freezes over: Netflix adapts “White Noise”

White Noise promotional photo

While I’m mildly optimistic about the announced adaptation of Neuromancer to Apple TV+, I found myself…stunned? aghast? tickled?—when I heard Netflix has adapted Don DeLillo’s White Noise to its streaming service. As I wrote on Mastodon and Twitter:

White Noise is not the kind of book one associates with popular entertainment, nor its author as the kind of person to acquiesce to its adaptation.

This merely touches the surface of my reaction to Netf...