Purchase

Author: Karlo Yeager Rodríguez

Annotations to Crap Books II: Son of Crap Book

This post is a bit late, but I got invited back to Podside Picnic to continue my conversation with Pete on what we jokingly call "crap books". This time, we circled back to talk a little bit more about the influence of D&D and the Satanic Panic on what I'm calling my genre (mis)education. Again, the latest episode is free to listen here if you haven't yet, and I also had some follow-up posts with annotations that build upon that first episode. Because the crap books conversations tend to flow, I may misremember stuff, so of course I'd name the wrong title of Leiber's Lankhmar books. I mentioned Swords Against Wizardry or Swords Against Deviltry, when the one I meant is simply called The Swords of Lankhmar. My interest in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was spurred by my friend César lending me the books, but I don't remember if this was...

August 15, 2020
Horror, Memoir, Reading, Uncategorized
, , , , ,

Update: Clarion, Curious Fictions and Ghost of Tsushima

This is the last week of the Clarion Write-A-Thon and I'll be honest: I am happy that I have several stories ready to revise and polish, but glad that as with all good things, it is coming to an end. That's not a knock; simply that I'm not sure I can keep up with that same pace for a longer period of time. It was good to stretch, to get out of my comfort zone and see what I can accomplish, if pressed. In the end, I'll have five new stories to get ready for submission, plus one that I haven't started yet. I missed my mark only on Week Four because the prompt (which I'll paraphrase as, "imagine a recipe for an impossible dish and write a story about it") didn't spark an idea until far too late, and even then, it's a full-length story and not flash. I'll...

July 26, 2020
Memoir, Writing
, ,

Updates

As I'd mentioned in a previous post, I've been participating in Clarion West's Write-A-Thon. As a part of that, I also joined their writing challenge to finish a flash fiction story every week based off writing prompts. I've now completed three flash fiction pieces, and hope to complete three more before the Write-A-Thon's complete. One of the last prompts was a list of words, where "axolotl" was included. This immediately brought to mind the supremely weird Julio Cortázar short story, Axolotl which I then used as an inspiration. I'm pleased with what I came up with and can't wait to revise it and get it ready to submit. After reading my story recently, a friend reminded me about the Blood Sea of Istar (from the Dragonlance Chronicles I'd talked about on Podside Picnic and on my follow-up post). It was a weird moment for me, realizing how this area of Krynn...

July 11, 2020
Fantasy, Narration, Writing
, , , , ,

Annotations to My Podside Picnic Interview

This is a bit of a companion piece to my most recent appearance on Podside Picnic talking about "crap books" that got me reading science fiction and (mostly) fantasy. My first two years of high school were consumed by reading anything Dragonlance I could get my hands on. That included the initial "Chronicles" and the subsequent "Legends" that I mentioned on the show, but there were so, so many Dragonlance anthologies and other stand-alones that followed I couldn't follow all of them. I remember reading what seemed to be a baker's dozen of anthologies that had Tanis and Company going on so many adventures before the events of Dragons of Autumn Twilight that I wondered exactly what level the heroes were when the first book in the trilogy started. With all those stories, it couldn't possibly be 1st level. A couple that stand out even now as charming subversions of the...

July 1, 2020
Public Appearance, Reading
, , , , ,