Continue This Blog

While it sort of feels appropriate that a blog about the process of tailing off and abandoning projects should be tailed off and abandoned rather than closed definitively I am pretty clear now that I will not be posting here anymore. As with most of the projects I've talked about here this should not be considered a bad thing, but merely just a thing which says or doesn't say certain things about the state of how we live our lives. As a project, I am just no longer interested in it. Which is not to say that I no longer find it interesting, I just have other things to be doing.

On the other hand, this project was certainly formative and a bit of a testing ground for various versions of my blogging voice. There are quite a few posts which are not very good, but there are also some I am still very pleased with. Reading through them I can see certain positions which I would no longer hold, and others which I have since refined or developed. Nevertheless I thought, as a way of ending a project that became about escaping the gravitational pull of the expectations of the past, a post which singularly fails to do that would be particularly apt. So, please find below some links to my favourite posts, the ones I still think are the most worth reading a few years down the line.

It also serves well as the first post which any future visitor might see.

Becoming a Tory What happened when I went to public school.

Marzipan 2 I-10 I put up over the course of the blog an entire unfinished manuscript for an attempt at left-wing, character-based fantasy. Simultaneously I talked about what it means to shed the once certain belief that all you need to succeed as a writer is to try, as well as an image of my future that will never come to pass. There's a lot of it, and a lot is very scrappy to read, but I think this is the best distillation of both the fiction and the reality of my life.

Marzipan 2 II-8 Meanwhile this chapter just has sex and death in it.

Jade Empire and Baldur's Gate Borking narratives in choice-based games.

Snake Agent/Wicca Cultural appropriation.

Fallout Finished things that still feel unfinished.

Star Wars Extended Universe (Books, Only)

I have got some unresolved completionist issues. I was going to link some of the words in that last sentence to specific posts in this blog, but then I realised, actually, that I'd have to link to everything I'd written so far, as well as every one of a potentially infinite number of future posts (if you take a many worlds* theory to heart, which says that every time I write a post a (possibly infinite) number of possible worlds branch off, each containing a possible post that I didn't write that time) that I haven't yet written. I suppose I could have made every letter a separate hyperlink, but that would have been unwieldy, ugly, and still wouldn't have taken future posts into account.

Writing About the Riots

After watching the brief but spectacular outburst of violence and thievery that broke out first in London and then across the country last week, and in common with most people on the Internet, I had a strong urge to write about it. Initially I fired off some thoughts on twitter, and I still stand by those as a gut reaction to the information available at the time, but a blog post (or at least a Things I Failed to Do blog post) requires a more measured look at the totality of the information. Additionally, a TIFTD post requires the ability to turn any given situation or subject into a long and rambling self-directed diatribe.

McHunterson and the Ninjas of the Seven Seas

The post I was planning on and had started writing this week doesn't look like it's going to happen. Basically, I'm too depressed at the moment to write it, so it'll have to wait a week or two. This is exacerbated by the fact that it paints me in a good light, unlike most of my posts which show me up as the randomly firing spite-machine I am, or like to think of myself as being, or something. Instead you get another entry from the recesses of the 'writing' folder on my hard drive.

I honestly can't even remember what I was going for when I started this, except that I was obviously intending to use even more adjectives than was my usual, already adjective heavy, style. I think it was around the time when I thought that if I practised bashing out generic fantasy I might be able to wangle a gig writing tie-in novels for games companies and thus maybe forge a route for myself out of the career dead end my previous belief that writing novels would be fun and profitable had landed me in. This is the sum total of the work that I did on that, then.

McHunterson and the Ninjas of the Seven Seas

Part One: Pirates of Doom

The sea surrounding the sloop churned remorselessly, washing drowned sailors against the ship’s bow with a rhythmic regularity that was horrible in it’s dark, remorseless insistence.

Sorting out the Formatting on The Last-but-One Post

A rather meta entry (also, very short), but I've been stupidly busy the last couple of weeks editing, designing and laying up a best-of comic collecting about ten years of Underfire Comics short stories. Its still not finished, but should be by the end of this weekend. As such, my plan to wrestle with the way that Blogger has formatted around 30 pages of already badly formatted text (I wrote the script before I really understood how to use tabs effectively) was pretty much a non-starter.

I suppose the fact that I've posted this entry probably means that I have in some way resolved myself of the responsibility of ever going back and sorting out the formatting. Is that how it works? Does admitting failure mean that you don't have to try to rectify it? I hope not - I'm not a Catholic and this isn't supposed to be a confessional box. I know for a fact that this blog needs to have a bit of time spent on the design and a general bit of tightening around the edges. I shall put it on the to-do list.