29 August 2019

It’s Not Pretty This is not going to be a pep talk or have a quick fix bullet list in how to get better. This is the grim reality of the feeling of hopelessness many of us face when we finally finish. Today I want to talk about transitioning from PhD to normal life. Because…

13 August 2019

On a winding road through the Pennines, halfway between Sheffield and Manchester, there’s a tavern rather originally called the Halfway Inn. In the face of such razor wit, the locals have taken to calling it the Disappointed Virgin.

9 August 2019

Terry didn’t shy away from giving horror a face. In many of the Discworld novels the reader can watch him struggle with coming to terms with how Joe Plumber can become lead torturer for the Inquisition.

19 July 2019

“You’re a F*cking Failure” A year into grad school I realized that academic writing killed my ability to do fiction writing, and vice versa. So I had to make a choice. That was over five years ago. A month and a half ago I finished the culmination of my Masters/PhD and sent it off to…

31 March 2019

The first team that Darren introduced me to, Pat Ryan and CiarĂ¡n O’Brien, were working on a dungeon crawler in Twine and said they’d need some content when they were done coding it. It was about a warrior in search of a glorious death, they said. Naturally, I was intrigued. So after a quick chat with my teammates, they set back to coding combat and dungeon loops and I sat down to come up with something to write.

25 August 2015

In honor of spending the next few days at PAX Dev and PAX Prime, I thought I’d go on a little rant on that which shapes everything I think about and everything I do: narrative. The transcript of my presentation, “The Future of Video Game Narrative: Player, Agency, And Negative Space Storytelling,” can be read…

19 December 2014

Update – 24 February 2020: As the original blog post containing the entirety of the interview is no longer in the NSC:CE website, I have provided a full copy of the interview, only slightly updated, here. It is part of my Archetypes in Myth and Writing series. My dear readers who do not follow me…

27 October 2011

Updated 4 September 2020. Originally posted 27 October 2011. The schooner Equator, now derelict in an Everett marina, was once chartered by Robert Louis Stevenson (of Treasure Island fame) and was in large part the inspiration of his South Seas Tales. The Schooner Equator Drive north out of downtown Everett, Washington, on the West Marine…