Fiction
I’m in the process of sorting through my works of fiction. I’ve written several novels, a novella, and a number of short stories, many of which are available online if you dig a little. I’ll be adding a selection of them here after I’ve had a chance to go through them.
I’ve written several novels, as well as a number of shorter works, which have currently been nuked off the internet while I rebuild my site. Maybe some will make a return, like my epic series of short stories in which the pursuit of the ultimate rhyme causes the downfall of civilization. Or that story where a guy and his ex-girlfriend come across a bunch of penguins and then everyone disappears, because I’d been reading way too much Murakami at the time.
Non-fiction
I’ve occasionally found myself writing non-fiction or working as an accidental journalist. These are some of the more noteworthy entries:
Why Parents are Abandoning Vancouver
Any discussion of young professionals leaving Vancouver inevitably ends up being a rant about the cost of real estate. This isn’t that. Lots of people living in Vancouver never have any intention of owning property, but end up driven out of the city anyway. Parents in particular have an incredibly hard time surviving Vancouver, and it’s a plight that’s been largely ignored these last few years. This article ended up spreading far and wide—in the first two weeks after the article went live, it was shared almost 2,000 times on Facebook.
I Love Vancouver, But It Doesn’t Love Me
An article about our decision to leave Vancouver, a city we loved, but whose flaws were so huge that staying became impossible. This article took on a life of its own, quickly spreading on Facebook before being picked up by several media outlets. It clearly struck quite a nerve, and led to a lot of discussion (and, judging from the comments people have left on it, a lot of soul-searching).
Island Bound
Kind of “I Love Vancouver, But It Doesn’t Love Me Redux”, Megaphone wanted to publish their own version of the article where I expanded on some of the issues raised in the original.
From Zork To Halo And Back Again
An in-depth look at storytelling in video games, and the role other mediums played in its evolution.
Interactive
Computer-aided storytelling is something very near and dear to me, and I’m always interested in how the medium can be used in new and interesting ways. I’ve written several IF engines in the past, including the Python-based Grendel (which you can find below), and I’ve had enough people show interest in this stuff that I thought it was worth posting online for other people to peruse.
Story generator
A study in storytelling and morphology, generating dynamic stories based on Georges Polti’s “The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations” with aspects of Joseph Campbell, David Adams Leeming, and Phil Cousineau’s mythology patterns.
Natural language parser
Brutally outdated, given the ready availability of industrial-strength solutions like NLTK, spaCy, and Google’s recent Parsey McParseface, it’s still a good example of how to quickly make sense of basic English commands (like you’d see in many text games–“take the hat”, “eat the hat”, etc).
The image at the top of this page is based on a photo by Charlavail Effron, who graciously let me use it on the website for my story Hanna Buys the Farm