Writing

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

- Stephen King, “On Writing“

I’ve written a lot of stuff over the years; this page is a collection of those pieces of text that I’m particularly happy with, or that carry special meaning to me. The categories are, like most categories, little more than convenient bullshit. This page is always a work in progress.

Fiction

• The Oneiropolis Compendium: A growing collection of stories about the Lands of Dream.
• Fuck Vampires: A short story written with a sledgehammer.
• Letter to the Editor: A brief submission to a flash fiction writing contest.

Screenplays

• Melinoe (at Amazon Studios): A science fiction story that is not quite what it appears to be. This now links to the second draft; for reviews, look at the first.

Games & Game Design

• The Bolshevik in the Borderlands (at The Escapist): Some people may not want to hear it, but there are some great mainstream games out there.
• Second-Hand Elf (at The Escapist): Why have so many fantasy games given up on imagination? An article against the enslavement of the Elves.
• The Game That Ate The World (at The Escapist): The bittersweet story of how Phenomenon 32 was made.
• Give Me An Axe, I’ve Had Enough Of This Puzzle (at The Escapist): Astonishingly, I’ve been published by The Escapist. This article is about puzzles, obstacles, and the difference between the two.
• Annotations to “Over Games”: A response to the “Over Games” presentation by Tale of Tales and a defense of computer games as a form of artistic expression.
• Game Design Aphorisms: All of this is true. Especially what you disagree with.
• My business is to Create: Roger Ebert and video games: Some brief thoughts written down during a controversy that occured when film critic Roger Ebert said video games couldn’t be art. He later changed his mind and said that, since he doesn’t want to play them, it’s basically none of his business.

Politics

• set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings: A call to action. Stand up for democracy before it’s too late.
• Collaborators: Some thoughts about the people who continue to deny the facts even in light of the latest Wikileaks documents, and about our responsibility to stand up for justice.
• The Greek Situation (at Enemies of Reason): An attempt at dispelling some of the nonsense floating around about the situation in Greece in early 2010. Guest blog for Enemies of Reason.
• BoingBoing And Propaganda: A small but clear example of how facts can be twisted into propaganda.
• 9/11, or How Urizen Plays His Game: Written eight years after 9/11. Not much has changed since then.
• Heroism at Command: Why do we insist on “supporting the troops” no matter what the troops are doing? What are they really dying for, and what are we doing when we honour their deaths as sacrifices?
• Beware the Belching Moose: What’s the real source of global warming? Well, some people would like us to think it’s moose.

Art & Philosophy

• Harold Bloom and the Death of Art: Easily the most controversial thing I’ve ever written – a disagreement with the Mighty Decider Of What Is Good To Read, His Holiness Harold Bloom. His worshippers did not take well to this one, but they haven’t managed to kill literature yet.
• stross, to (v.): A new word for your dictionary! Invented in “honour” of Charles Stross, who is very good at talking about things without knowing the first thing about them.
• Art Without Teeth: Enough with the cowardice and abstraction of what we’re told is real art.
• Privileged Despair: An attack on Eugene Ionesco, pretentious moron extraordinaire, and his notion of what the real problems in life are.
• Χρυσόστομος: Written on the feast-day of the criminal known as Saint John Chrysostom, destroyer of the Temple of Artemis.

Film

• Can we please review video game movies with our brains switched on? (at Commentarium): An analysis of how most reviews of Prince of Persia repeated the same irrelevant nonsense, derived not from the film itself but from a series of clichés that always pop up when it comes to video game adaptations.
• The Underrated Mr. Donner (at Commentarium): In praise of Richard Donner, a truly underrated director whose films are full of artistic detail and a deep feeling for humanity.
• The Matrix and Geek Culture: This is entirely too brief, but I’m putting it up here until I write a full article on the subject. The fashionable hating and anti-intellectualism that has made the two Matrix sequels – both superior to the original – so very unpopular is both disappointing and dangerous.
• M. Night Shyamalan and The Happening: Again, this needs to be replaced by a proper, more detailed article on the work of Shyamalan, but the subject is important to me. His films are not without flaws, but the way they’ve become the targets of so much hate is deeply, deeply disturbing.

Life

• Ελένη: The story of one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, of her accomplishments and her struggle against the stupidity of the people who ran our school.