Oh God This Is My Life Now Paperback Now Available

It’s been a long time coming – partly because Amazon initially shuffled my book together with someone else’s like Jeff Golblum and that random housefly – but the paperback of my 2023 Flash Fiction Month anthology Oh God This Is My Life Now is finally available for purchase! You can find it at Amazon UK and Amazon US among others, or at Smashwords (or pretty much any other store of your choice) if you’d like an ebook.

A screenshot of the product page for Oh God This Is My Life Now on Amazon, showing it under the title "SOUTHERN LEGACY RISING: BOOK ONE: FATE INTERVENES" and in the "Thrillers" category. The cover complete with dismayed banana face is correct, however, which clashes significantly with the serious blurb about a US senator and whatnot. The whole thing's a mess, would be the main point to take away from this.
As of yesterday the problem still isn’t entirely resolved across the board, but I assure you I have managed to buy a copy of the book myself and it was printed correctly.

To give the book a bit of a boost, I’ve put together the customary quirky video explaining that it’s actually quite hard to sum up the 31 very different stories included in any of these anthologies, but hopefully doing so in a way that gets across the overall vibe of the thing. (Spoiler alert: the theme of the front and end matter in this one is “screaming.”)

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April Fools in a Post-Truth World

April 1st is my favourite day of the year.

That’s not a joke. I’ve done something or other for April Fools’ Day every year for the past decade or so, and some of these things took weeks of work (or at least planning). Here’s a little list (with portions of the descriptions encoded in ROT13 where I think knowing the trick from the start might spoil it):

  • 2013: The Crowd Scene – a full book consisting almost entirely of the word “rhubarb” repeated over and over again, with little Easter eggs scattered throughout.
  • 2014: Spring Rain – an interactive fiction piece gung vgfrys pbagnvaf na Ncevy Sbbyf cenax.
  • 2015: Rainbow Bears’ Playtime – an RPG Maker game jvgu n whzcfpner.
  • 2016: Project Proteus – an interactive fiction piece gung vf npghnyyl bar bs sbhe qvssrerag vagrenpgvir svpgvba cvrprf fryrpgrq ng enaqbz. V yngre erivfvgrq guvf vqrn sbe zl VSPbzc ragel sbe gur lrne gjb gubhfnaq naq gjragl-guerr naq znantrq gb jva gur Tbyqra Onanan bs Qvfpbeq jvgu vg.
  • 2017: Project Pythias – supposedly a neural network that’ll generate stories in my style. It is in fact a combination of randomly generated outlines of new stories and summaries of existing ones from Flash Fiction Month 2012. (Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate that I did this half a decade before the current “AI” hype?)
  • 2018: Project Procrustes – an interactive fiction piece juvpu srngherf n punenpgre perngvba flfgrz, ohg erdhverf bar irel fcrpvsvp punenpgre ohvyq gb pbzcyrgr vg.
  • 2019: Cookie Cracker – it’s Cookie Clicker, but clicking the cookie reduces its structural integrity and when you break it bees fly out. (This one later got me headhunted by a mobile games company.)
  • 2020: I Am a Reclusive Author – a blog post announcing my intention to become a hermit having become famous enough for that to be a meaningful choice (and insisting that people stay far away from me in a manner consistent with the social distancing measures of the time).
  • 2021: Project Ptocheia – an art piece that claims to be a bold new creative endeavour but is in fact a small selection of looping videos of me begging for money with annoying kazoo music playing in the background. The itch.io page also offers “certificates of patronage” for those who give me at least a dollar, and a “Limited Edition JPEG of a Potato” for those who give $20 or more. (Act fast if you want one of those, by the way – there are just 400 left!)
  • 2022: Twinedle – a Wordle game made using Twine ohg gung nyjnlf bssref gur fnzr – engure cerqvpgnoyr – jbeq gb fbyir. V’ir orra zrnavat gb hcqngr guvf gb cebivqr bgure jbeqf jura vg’f abg Ncevy svefg ohg unira’g tbg nebhaq gb vg.
  • 2023: Rainbow Bears Fun Maze – revisiting Rainbow Bears’ Playtime ohg raqvat ba n fhecevfvatyl cbfvgvir abgr qrfcvgr nccrnevat gb or whfg nf qnex nf gur svefg bar.
  • 2024: Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME! – a chaotic platformer game with a leaderboard ohg fpberf nffvtarq ragveryl ng enaqbz.
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Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME! – Final Scores

My little competition is over! Here’s what the leaderboard looked like at 12:00 noon exactly:

A screenshot of the leaderboard for Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME! The top three scores are: PIPISKA: 161718.12 GDeyke: 135591.72 DamonWakes: 130385.92

If you were suspicious of the fact that I launched Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME! on April 1st specifically, you were right to be. The scores are, in fact, completely random. While I hope the game is fun to play, nothing that you do actually generates any points. Whether you run around wildly, carefully position bonus guys, or simply don’t do anything, you’ve got just as good a chance at the high score as anybody else. The numbers you see at the end are simply generated while the delightful little slot machine jingle plays.

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Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME!

I’ve got a new game to share with you, and while I don’t want to oversell it, I am 100% confident in titling this one Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME!

A screenshot of the game - a platformer - showing the protagonist collecting a coin while various other items fall from the sky. An enemy worm chases along behind the player.

It has a pounding metal soundtrack and plenty of possums. What more could you want?

This was largely an exercise in adding “juice” to a game – particle emitters, nifty visual effects, sounds to give feedback for every action – so the gameplay isn’t anything particularly revolutionary. I imagine most people will figure everything out on their own pretty easily.

I feel as though I often don’t do enough to promote the things I make (largely because I want to get started on the next thing right away!), so this time I’m trying something a little different. I’ve got a Steam key for Hollow Knight left over from a Humble Bundle, and I plan to give it to the holder of the Super Hyper Awesome Game: EXTREME! high score (or at least the highest placing player I can get hold of). All the details can be found on the game’s Itch page, but the key thing to know is that I’m pretty much running this little competition for today only. I want to get the game off to a good start, after all!

DRM-Free 2023 Writeup

Near (though not quite at) the start of 2023, I decided to avoid paying for anything with DRM on it for the entire year. If you don’t know what that means then that post will offer a detailed explanation, but if you just want the short version, DRM (Digital Rights Management) is any tool that allows a company to control what you can do with the stuff you’ve “bought” from them. In practice this typically means you’re not really buying it at all: if you look at the small print when paying for ebooks from Amazon or games from Steam, you’ll find that what you’re getting is not the product itself, but a license to it that can be revoked pretty much any time.

Back when I started my little DRM-free experiment, I wasn’t 100% sure how it would go. I figured that I might even make an exception if a particularly tempting Humble Bundle came along. I’d like to be able to say that I ended up exceeding expectations and never once gave into temptation, but instead I think the most meaningful way to look at this year-long project is to start with the occasions I sort of gave in:

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I HAVE THE BANANAAAAAAAA!!!

Okay. So, a while back I announced that I had an entry in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition: Who Iced Mayor McFreeze? Remember that? Remember the noir murder mystery in which everyone is candy? The follow-up to 2022’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear?

That was a decoy.

Or rather, that was a sincere IFComp entry but it was not my main focus this year. No, this year I had other plans. You see, ever since 2001 IFComp has handed out an award to the entry with the highest standard deviation: that is, the entry that most divides opinion. The name of that award? The Golden Banana of Discord. If you know me, you’ll know that bananas are sort of my thing. Naturally I’ve wanted the Golden Banana for some time now, especially having very narrowly missed out with 2020’s Quest for the Sword of Justice. Seriously, that thing would have been a banana-winner in 2021 or 2022 – it got edged out by just one marginally more divisive game (Little Girl in Monsterland) that particular year.

That brings us to the entry I sank most of my effort into this year: DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, entered under the pseudonym “Hubert Janus.”*

*Hugh for short.

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New Game: Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?

It’s that time of year again! IFComp – the Interactive Fiction Competition – is in full swing and my entry this year is Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?, a follow-up to last year’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear?. Both see you take on the role of Bubble Gumshoe, a street-smart broad with a hard sugar shell but a soft centre who’s also the finest private eye sniffing out mysteries on the syrup-slick streets of Sugar City.

The cover image of Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?, featuring a Polaroid-style photograph of a crime scene: a mangled pile of blue ice lies just beneath a vicious-looking machine, with a single googly eye staring up from it.

Both are parser-based games (meaning you type “take key” or “smoke cigarette” or “eat Mayor” to do what you want to do), but I’ve tried to take on board feedback from last year’s event so this one takes a different approach to the actual mystery involved. I don’t want to get into exactly how the approach differs this time around – partly because I’m hesitant to offer commentary that might influence votes while the competition is being judged, and partly because I fear it might spoil the challenge for one of them – but early reviews seem to suggest this one is going down well for much the reasons I hoped. At least, I’ve seen a couple of people praise the new direction but nobody lament the departure from the old one.

On the topic of judging, it seems worth taking this opportunity to mention that if you want to get involved in the competition, you yourself can be a judge! All the important details can be found in the competition rules, but the key thing to know is that you only have to play five games (though you can rate more if you want). It’s not a matter of poring over all 75 of the things. So if you fancy checking out Who Iced Mayor McFreeze?, you’re a full 20% of the way to being a judge!

To Be Taken Seriously

A few months ago I mentioned that I’d submitted a piece of fanfiction to Fragile Things: a Centaurworld Zine, which was taking pre-orders at the time. (If you’ve never come across Centaurworld, by the way, that post also offers a bit of an introduction to it.) Fragile Things is now in print, and I’ve got my copy (plus all the awesome little extras: the crowdfunding campaign was hugely successful so there’s quite a bit of bonus merch).

If you didn’t get in on this while it was available as a pre-order, there’s still a chance to buy leftovers! The full bundles are no longer available, but at the time of writing that’s just because the little Horse pins are out of stock: everything else (at the time of writing) appears to be available for purchase individually. Naturally that includes the zine itself, which is also available as a PDF if all else fails.

I wasn’t originally planning to share my own contribution online since I figured it would take away an incentive to buy the zine (with 50% of the proceeds going to charity), but the organisers are actually encouraging us to share our work to help with publicity, so you’re getting it after all! The one thing I would say is that you should absolutely not read this if you haven’t seen Centaurworld itself. For one thing it’s absolutely crammed full of spoilers, and for another it really won’t make a whole lot of sense. I don’t write fanfiction often, but when I do it depends heavily on the original work.

So with that little heads-up out of the way, here’s my story from the zine!

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New Game: Blue Light

Back in 2020 I wrote a story for Flash Fiction Month titled Blue Light: it’s a stream-of-consciousness piece about a guy who gets lost in the Paris catacombs and discovers (or at least starts to believe) that the blue light from the phone screen he’s using to navigate is making the skeletons restless. I’d originally planned to turn that idea into a game, but the need to come up with a story for that particular day of Flash Fiction Month meant it ended up becoming a short story first. However, I’ve now finally got around to making the playable version I initially imagined!

The game – which you can play online right in your browser – presents exactly the same scenario as the short story, but you’re in charge of where you point the phone screen and it’s up to you to navigate your way out of the catacombs in a way that doesn’t see you constantly flashing your light in the faces of the skeletons in the walls.

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The Unsettling Escapades of Captain Birthday

Flash Fiction Month 2023, Day 31

“Help!” shouted the old lady in the burning building. “Help!”

“Oh no!” said a random bystander, clapping his hands to his face Macaulay Caulkin-style. “Is there nobody who can help?”

“This looks like a job for Captain Birthday!” announced a spandex-clad hero, appearing out of nowhere to strike a dramatic pose beneath the window. “Stand back, citizens!”

Then he whipped out a gun and shot himself in the face. Continue reading →