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Work In Progress
Part of my day job as a software guy involves consulting on process, and while I'm pretty situational and eclectic and mix-and-match in my approach, among the various agile methodologies, I'm quite fond of Kanban approaches. And a common tenet of Kanban approaches is "limit work in progress".
So it's kind of ironic, if not problematic, that in my artistic life I live in a sea of unfinished, un-abandoned things, particularly at the moment. I'm not totally convinced that this is necessarily a bad thing -- software development and in art are somewhat incommensurate magisteria -- but on the other hand, enough is enough already. Since the novel is done, here's what I've been working on:
| First draft not done | Collecting feedback & revising |
Stuck, after getting feedback | Basically done, unsure how to ship | |
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| Fiction |
Sargasso,YA nanotech SF romp, with Paul Melko
"Birdsense", a tale of evolutionary alternate history
"The Trouble With Danny", a down & out ex-lavanaut in 2150s Malmö
"Motherless Men", a sex-positive matriarchal sword & sorcery story of intrigue; Annalee Newitz thinks it's structurally a Western
"Ever Since", absurdist undergraduate post-apocalypse
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Reef Six, a novella about the ageless and durable wanderer Siob,salvaged from the excised parts of Resilience
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"Adaptation", a post-bodyswap/soul-displacement-portal-fantasy story of reintegration
"The Tree of Life", more on Talmudic scholarship and zombies, but with serious downbeat contemporary psychological realism |
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| Games | Elul in the Shtetl, a Zorklike text adventure set in the fantastic shtetl
Shtetl World, a grandly complex tabletop RPG, radical dreidel-based Apocalypse World hack with dreidels, set in the fantastic shtetl
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Tohu vaBohu (a.k.a. Formless and Void), a Fluxxlike competitive card-based tabletop RPG in a Calvino mood Matchmakers, a card game of shtetl matchmaking, which I am helping Ethan Ham with
Sing Your Heart Out, a karaoke freeform LARP/tabletop hybrid in a Glee or Pitch Perfect setting, which I am at this point mostly turning over to Jamey Harvey |
Dream Apart, a rules-light GM-less tabletop RPG, reskinning Dream Askew, and set in the fantastic shtetl
U.G.R.R., a collaborative strategic board game centered on the abolitionist activists of the Underground Railroad |
One of us! One of us!
I mean...I found a fragment of my writing in an unexpected place. I have no standing to throw stones.
Posted by: Kat at June 6, 2017 05:56 AMWhile undone, unfinished, undefined, it exists in its quantum state of Hugo Winner/Heresy. In the universe next door, we are lauded. In the universe next door to that, we are hunted as dissidents.
Posted by: Paul at June 6, 2017 01:22 PMhere's my boring and non-meta-self-referential comment, but My vote is for Motherless Men.
Posted by: Janet at June 6, 2017 04:52 PMI have sometimes created a Trello board for personal life because otherwise I will overload myself with various projects. Although, managing the Trello board in the most optimal fashion becomes somewhat of a project itself.
Without knowing much about the each of your fiction pieces, Adaptation sounds intriguing...
Posted by: Priscilla at June 7, 2017 03:37 AMA text adventure? Ooh -- I'm always interested to see more of them from authors I've read in other forms. What language are you using?
(I've written a handful of small text adventures in Inform, which I love.)
Posted by: Caleb Wilson at July 17, 2017 09:56 PMCaleb, I'm also using Inform!
Priscilla & Janet, your votes are duly noted! :-)
Posted by: Benjamin Rosenbaum at September 14, 2017 02:31 PMSpeaking of software development vs. writing, are there any good resources out there for comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of different work-process-method-things for different types of work?
Posted by: Brent at January 21, 2018 09:58 PM