Chariot: Actually Running the Thing

 (A guest post today by my friend Tim Groth. Tim has been one of Chariot's most enthusiastic supporters and cheerleaders and his account of running it was so fascinating that I asked to post it here. With his story of magickal AI and hijacked Atlantean propaganda, I think Tim completely gets the sort of atmosphere I wanted the game to have. And I think his game had heart, and heart is sorely what this sort of pastime needs.

You can find links to the various outlets that stock Chariot here.

Tim's words start after the cut.)

Written in Water 20: Beard-Hater

Bearded men and ideologies unpopular with the establishment, eh?

In June 363CE Julian, the Emperor of Rome, led a cavalry charge against a defeated Persian army. Only shortly before, Julian had won a victory outside the walls of the Persian capitol Ctesiphon, making his campaign in Persia the most successful the Romans had ever managed.

Maybe that made him reckless.

A strap broke on his breastplate; he shrugged it off, threw the offending piece of armour away.

And a spear came from nowhere, and lodged in his side, and he fell, and that night, in his tent, Julian died, discoursing with his comrades about the immortality of his soul, as Socrates had.

And the Roman army found itself far from home with no leader, and no clear route home.

And that was how Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome, died.

Written in Water 17b: Adapting the Golden Ass

Note strategically placed sticker on shrinkwrap.

As a postscript to my piece about The Golden Ass, I recently got hold of Milo Manara's comic book adaptation of The Golden Ass, recently reissued in English. Because someone made a comic book version of The Golden Ass. And I like European comics.

It's... disappointing.

In reviewing Manara's book, I'll mention a depiction of a rape, along with objectification and misogyny. If these things upset you in any way, or might bring back things you'd rather not think about, best move on.

Choriamb

─ ˘ ˘ ─

Of course, we never touch. We're disciplined now
And the metre of you and me constrains us.
We are structured and formal, bodies in line.
Now I know the circumference of your neck -
I shall buy you a leather collar, in black.
On the plate by the buckle I shall engrave
Your name, set in a fancy, elegant script
And when no one is looking, it shall be yours.
You shall put it away then, keep it secret,
Take it out on occasion, wear it alone
Sometimes, think about me, and rhythm, and pain.
Of course, we never touch. We never transgress.
We keep two beats between us, our choriamb
Set in every line, ecstatic, restrained.

(Note: A choriamb is a metrical unit of four syllables, a stressed syllable, two unstressed syllables and a stressed one. This poem is written in elegiac hendecasyllables, a strict metre used by classical poets, among them Catullus, in which every line contains a choriamb.)

Dan and Me

It's hard not to want to punch him.

(Note: What follows is old. It was written around 2008 during the height of Brown's fame. It's one of the first really popular performance pieces I wrote, so much so that I began to despise it, since every single time I got up to the mic, someone would say, "hey, are you doing the Dan Brown poem?" It's clunky, and yeah, deliberately clunky because it apes terrible writing, but the danger with aping terrible writing is that you might end up writing something terrible. 

The Da Vinci Code was the reason I left a book club. This, this, this, book, OK, let's be accurate at least, actually made me angry, it was so offensive on every level. The only good thing that came out of it – apart from the softness and absorbency of the pages – was that Brown's book actually goaded Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh into suing him for plagiarising Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which he totally plagiarised, or would have, except you can't plagiarise the plot of a factual work, and it put Baigent and co in the position of losing unless they admitted it was fiction. Which they couldn't. That, I admit, was beautiful.

Note for foul, heartfelt language. I have never truly wished ill on an author, but Dan Brown made me come close. Also, yes, I do believe I am a better writer than Dan Brown. However, that is a very, very, very low bar. In the end, it's a meditation on the perennial jealousy writers who want to be good feel towards terrible, terrible writers who sell millions of their books. It could be Anne Rice or EL James or Wilbur Smith or whoever, really.)

Something's Got to Give (August Edition)

OK, look. I'm adulting right now. The school holidays continue and there's a point where constant childcare makes writing impossible, and my punishing blog schedule finally comes to a place where I have to press pause. I'll be back Sunday.

The Truth About the Truth About Sappho

The fiction that I'm now calling The Truth About Sappho is a collection of stories that I began properly in about 2004, although parts of it go back a decade before that.