I'm a sharing mood. Here are two bits from Something Wicked. They're very long, so they're going behind a cut tag.

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Mr. Dick, Zombies; Mr. Burroughs, Zombies; Zombies, Phil and Bill

Another (eep) 2000 words about zombies, this time thinking about genres and the virtues of humanity.

It's been far too long since I wrote anything for the Something Wicked blog. Well, um, I fixed that today, with a post that's two thousand words long. In it I explain about changing my mind on the question of whether there's good fresh stuff to do with zombies right at the moment.

Something Wicked: Fresh thoughts about zombies

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I commented early on that one of the things I really wanted to do was treat cosmic horror without Lovecraft being at the center of it. Not in all ways - I'd be an idiot not to quote from the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu", for instance, and I'm not an idiot, so I did. But in some other ways, yes. Here's a keyword intended to do a thing that I've ( Read more... )

So now, after various 1-to-1 exchanges, I have this nagging feeling I'd really enjoy running a HeroQuest campaign in which chimerical monsters (you're not a gorgon, you're the gorgon; you have no species, though you may have a family) try to defend the ancient ruins you share with many other such creatures from amoral loot-seekers and immoral ( Read more... )

 More discussion time! Jeff Richard and I spent some time last night talking about possible "mundane" survival horror settings, pitting characters against human adversaries. We started with deep-cover spies whose cover gets blown, and passed on to spies or others in the midst of the central African wars of the '90s (influenced by my wanting to read ( Read more... )

 Woot! Outline draft done and off to publisher and co-author for review. Happy me. :)

 The blogging continues.

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I’m a big believer in minimizing the need for exposition, in setting things up so that the characters’ progress through the game world shows them what’s going on bit by bit without the necessity for a bunch of discrete lecturing. I’ve also drifted in the direction of feeling that the progress itself is the story, or ( Read more... )

 Copied from the Something Wicked blog:

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K.W. Jeter isn't as widely known as he should be, even though at least one of his inventions-the word "steampunk"-has ranged far and wide.  (Jeter invented the word, tongue very much in cheek, to refer to the Victorian fantasies that he and friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing. See ( Read more... )