Category: Writing

  • Wearing A Dead Man’s Sandals

    Sandals on Grass with Blanket Corner

    I’ve come to appreciate summer wear late in life. For years I was one of those folks who wore the same outfit day after day, regardless of season: black jeans, black socks, black shoes, button down shirt. It had something to do with believing that I was not the kind of person who cared about clothes, and so preferred to think as little about it as possible. Of course I was hot in the summer, but for some reason that was better than changing my routine. Instead I walked the streets in the nighttime to get some outdoor time, pretending I was the last lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse.

    Today I write to you dressed in a pair of shorts that doubles as a swimsuit, a safari print shirt, and a pair of strappy sandals. When I walk down the street, I feel the summer air on my skin. When I walk through the park, I feel the contours of the earth under my soles. And I owe some of that to Jeremy, AKA Spider, a man who gifted me his sandals after he died.

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  • Parallel Play

    When I describe what I do in co-organizing Toronto Games Week, people often say that it sounds stressful and like a lot of work — as opposed to writing or creating stuff, which people think sounds like fun. But they’re both fun in certain ways, stressful in others. 

    When my organizing schemes are going well, I wonder to myself: why doesn’t everyone want to do this? It’s so fun! I’ve always felt my creative side and my organizer side were complimentary, but now I’m almost wondering if I may have become an artist so I could be a better arts community organizer.

    More on that subject later — but Toronto Games Week starts Thursday, so here are my top picks for you rated with difficulty levels…

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  • Professor Jim

    So it turns out that “I don’t want to teach” is just another example of The Joy of Being Wrong, a series of self-limiting beliefs that I’m crossing off one by one. Turns out that with the right conditions I like it quite a bit and I will probably do more of it when opportunities present! In the meanwhile, I’ll be helping organize Toronto Games Week, prepping my next graphic novel for publication and keeping my antenna up for interesting collaborations or jobs. If you’re interested in my teaching experience, here’s the full story…

    This fall, the fall of my 51st year, I went back to school. I had always been fairly determined not to teach, but this September after being laid off from my game industry job and after being encouraged by some old friends who worked there, I ended up in front of nearly a hundred first year students in a lecture hall at York University.

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  • An Abandoned Punk House

    Is there a thing you know you should do, but don’t? With me, for years, it was paper prototyping. Paper prototyping is the process of sketching out a game design, literally, with pencil and paper, and then playtesting the design ideas you have before you ever sit down in front of a computer. Instead of a computer modeled character you can use an action figure. Instead of generating a random number you have dice throws. Most games have many mechanics that can also work in a board game context, though there’s obviously lots of gamefeel related aspects that need to be digitally tested.

    It’s the same as the filmmaking principle that “paper is cheaper than film”, that ideas in a paper script can be added and removed and problems solved far more easily than after a scene has been shot. I would never dream of shooting a short without a script, but it took a familiar motivator to get me creating my first paper prototype:

    When it’s hard for me to do something for myself, I can often do it to help someone else.

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  • Holding Hands with Anticipatory Grief

    Illustration: Gavin McCarthy

    I was led to Men’s Work, as it is sometimes called, by my brother-in-law. He kept putting opportunities in front of me. More often than not I would sidestep them politely. Sometimes I would pick them up, quickly decide they weren’t for me, and set them back down — like the time I went to his men’s emotional support group meeting. As genuine and warm as everyone was, well, I was already doing therapy wasn’t I? The hugs and hippie philosophy was fine for other guys, just not my jam.

    But back in the summer of ‘17, one of the men in the Mankind Project was hosting a Father/Daughter weekend.

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  • Life Is Bigger

    I didn’t get a circle A tattoo, but I might as well have.

    One of the most influential things I discovered in books was anarchism: the idea that we could live without rulers. That it is our responsibility to resist the concentration of power in any single entity, be it corporate, governmental, or religious.

    It’s a worldview that’s helped me understand the world and make decisions ever since I was seventeen. I was in the market for a new moral framework since Christianity was no longer working for me. My Catholic all-boys highschool was a stifling environment that I had been immersed in for years, but I remember the precise moment of my disenchantment: a grade twelve religion class taught by a gym teacher who didn’t even try to answer the questions I had.

    In a way it was similar to why I set down fantasy novels in favour of science fiction — the hand-waving magical explanations weren’t as satisfying as complex rational ones. So I yanked out the RELIGION cartridge in my brain and chunked in the POLITICS one.

    And there it remained for 30 years. Until now.

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  • Nurturing, Or How I Like Starting Fires

    Like lots of teenagers, I was obsessed with fire. I never smoked, but I always had a lighter. I would singe my (recently acquired) arm hair just to revel in the terrible smell. I had a pocket-sized can of hairspray I used as a mini-flamethrower, and one day after school I used it to set my World Famous canvas backpack alight. I used the charred remains for months until it fell apart.

    At the age of fourteen, it was incredibly compelling to make wild things happen.

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  • The Limits of Self-Discipline

    I started to make movies out of spite. I had a number of exciting conversations around adapting my first novel that came to naught, and was left with an unsatisfied feeling. This idea of making a movie had been awakened in me, and then abruptly shut down. I’d never really seriously considered it before, but now the idea was a grain of sand in my brainfolds.

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  • The Cost of Avocado Toast

    Dude, I was part of the precariat before it was cool.

    I have been putting little income streams together for decades now while most of my peers got regular jobs. I’m well suited to it, I like the variety, and most importantly, I chose it.

    Not so the Millennials.

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  • I Have A Guy in My Head

    My first novel launched twenty years ago today. To mark the occasion I’m publishing the first of a series I’m calling the Fallow Essays, reflective pieces on art and cultural production from the vantage point of having spent two decades walking this path. Each will be accompanied by a recorded conversation with an artist peer.

    ***

    I have a guy in my head.

    I call him Niles. Picture a hulking acne-riddled teenage loser with a punk rock haircut, a white denim duster jacket and big boots, walking down the street muttering to himself angrily.

    For decades, when I heard Niles behind me, I’d walk faster. Or cross the street to avoid him. I resent Niles, and he despises me. Or at least it seems like it. I’ve never talked to him.

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  • Writing Every Day: Experiment Conclusions

    credit: Jonathan Wyke

    I’ve never written every day. When I write novels, I write 1250 words 4 times a week — each session generally taking 3-4 hours — which gets me to 100,000 words in six months. When I’m writing I write on a schedule, but often I go months without writing fiction.

    Just to try out a new approach I decided to write a complete story in an hour every day. For a month I posted a daily story to Twitter, Medium, and Wattpad. Now I’ve also published them as a free ebook in .epub, .mobi and .pdf formats with a cover featuring Jonathan Wyke’s excellent illustration above. Below I share some of my qualitative and quantitative results. (more…)

  • Hour Power and a Free Graphic Novel

    ancientmars-web

    Each day for the past two weeks I’ve been writing a story in one hour, taking a screenshot of it, and attaching it as an image to a tweet — they’re generally a screen long and definitely a violation of Twitter’s 140 character limit. It’s fun to scope a story to super short pieces, explore whimsical sci-fi ideas, try different tones and styles, and spend a moment or two with some characters.

    The other day me and Sean were over at Mathew Borrett’s place and he showed us how he’d ported some of his mind-blowing HyperNurnia series created for 2D display into virtual reality. A few minutes after I took off the Oculus goggles I knew what my one hour story was going to be that day. Above is the landscape that inspired the following story, click to enlarge and if you have a VR headset and the wherewithal here’s the stereo file. After the story, deets on how to get my graphic novel, Therefore Repent!, for free.

    David watched his son rock back and forth in his chair and knew it was just a matter of time before he fell over and hurt himself.

    “Harry,” he said.

    His son stopped, stared at him defiantly. “What?”

    “You know what.” (more…)