Writing, crit, life etc. from Em
In addition to getting the coveted Warp Door feature for my first Plano project, I recently contributed to Manifesto Jam 2026 ! You can read my NO MORE CRAFT manifesto here . I was glad cecile decided to run it this year because they’re, imo, an expert at writing sharply opinionated texts, and it made a bit more of a splash this time (more on that later…) I still feel a connection to Manifesto…
What a year! I was able to have a sizable holiday break and didn't travel at all during it, either, but I still feel kind of wiped out. I lost a tooth ! I got my first (three) tattoo(s) ! While I didn't make any big, visible moves like I did in 2024 with releasing my novel (which is now available as an ebook ), I do feel like I kept kind of too busy. I finished writing/revisions on a subsequent…
This blog post is a slightly refined version of thoughts I've been feeling out in local-only posts on timetheft.social . Part of these thoughts/frustrations obviously come from trying to sell stories/a novella with sexual-but-not-sexy content in the current insanely competitive paid SFF publishing market (though if you are interested in that, hiiii); so yeah, maybe my work does just suck lol.…
GIGF returned this year, bigger than before, and in a new venue, the Barras Art and Design center in the middle of the Barras market. And it was crammed! The venue had a great bustling energy all day like the market just outside, and all the talks and workshops were in high demand, so I skipped some which I knew would be popular (like V’s Downpour workshop ), to make sure everyone got a go. It…
Wouldn’t it have been interesting if instead of delisting anything tagged “adult,” “NSFW,” or “erotic,” regardless of whether it was commercial, PWYW, or free, itch.io had decided to avoid payment processor scrutiny by pausing payments for everything that has a set price? Of course, by now it’s too commercialized as a site for this to work, but it’s not like there’s no precedent for this. I joked…
See, I will read your newsletter posts, if you don't use Substack! I found this one by W. David Marx to be thought provoking, though I don't agree with all of it. I ended up feeling like breaking it down a little though, because I feel like aspects of the argument he makes are interesting/original enough. Generally I'm pretty comfortable saying that narratives of cultural decline are basically…
I have been Bagenzo's guinea pig for some forthcoming features of Strawberry Starter , and now that they're all tested and ready to go this blog has some fun new parts! The main thing is: Mini-Feeds YES, you can now keep up with the short reviews of books I'm reading , my gig diary , and my experiments with tarot draws and interpretations (most recently using Suzanne Treister's fascinating Hexen…
I got a tattoo two weeks ago today! That's right, on April Fools! I was anxious in the days leading up to it because I have a lot of anxiety around pain, or even just anticipating pain or unpredictable sensations, but it ended up being a really wonderful experience. Here's the design: To keep the monochrome theme of this blog consistent, I'll simply link to where I've posted the finished version…
Sorry that every post is my tits lately; obviously I've been feeling some sort of way about them. It's been a year since I got a radical breast reduction surgery after wanting to do SOMETHING with them for at least a decade. And I can say it has basically been completely lifechanging (positive). I wrote this zine about it shortly afterwards, combining the hang ups and anxiety preceding the surgery…
I am Charles Baudelaire. There is a noticeable shift not strictly represented by ambient temperature, more in the light and air, how people look at you when you're walking around, a split second longer smile, and, on your part, a crawling exploratory randiness for legs and ass, not even necessarily revealed (it is still cold after all), that announces the possibility of Spring. This takes place at…
First of all, for those who have been waiting, my novel More Bugs is now available as an ebook from the publisher! Because it's published through a UK-based micropress, and also due to Brexit and shit, getting print copies outside of the UK was sometimes costly or complicated in a non-ideal way. Based on how I read, I'm still biased towards the paperback, which I think is gorgeous due to the…
Hi... January felt like such a long and chaotic month. Even putting aside world events (lol), Glasgow has been dealing with insanely crap weather, I broke a tooth on a piece of popcorn that's going to have to be pulled while I was playing Phantasmagoria , and as of this moment the water to our flat is hopefully being restored after being out all day yesterday. The train station nearest our flat is…
As the new year rolls around and I’m stuck in the no-man’s-land between holiday obligations and actually going back to work, it seemed like a good idea to take stock of the past year. The biggest thing is obviously: my book came out! Becoming a published novelist, getting to hawk my wares at Cymera and Worldcon, and, of course, getting wonderful blurbs, reviews and messages from people who read…
It's been about three weeks now since my debut novel, More Bugs , officially "came out," though in many cases this means copies are still travelling through the postal system, making their way to smaller shops, sitting in people's to-be-read piles, etc... In one sense it's been huge and exciting: my first big festival event! Reviews and ratings starting to come in! Seeing my book face out or on…
I'll cut right to the chase and reveal what has been in the works for the past three years or so: my debut novel will be published by Knight Errant Press, and is now up for preorder . Even if you've mainly liked my critical writing and essays, I think my general sensibility is fairly consistent across fiction and non-, and there's hopefully enough intrigue to tempt you... The extremely sick cover…
Things have been quiet here, I haven't written a personal post in a few months, but mainly because I've been super busy in the new year! When 2024 rolled over, I wrote down four resolutions for the year in my planner: Get my ear pierced Get The Surgery Finish my second novel Pick up rollerblading again Now it's April, officially a third of the way through the year, and I've done the first two! I…
2023 was a mostly internally-developing year for me. Shifting to longer-form, fictional writing for the most part, alongside having a full time day job, meant that most of my time writing and editing was for things that are still a long way off and not announced yet. It feels slow, but compared to short form writing, it means I'm still doing a ton. There are a few things worth highlighting though!…
What's wrong with art today? A growing number of essays and general complaints are taking this question to the source: the audience. Or at least that seems to be the primary focus of these pieces; the most compelling problem is the uniform psychological profile of the audience, who is "baby-brained," censorious, prudish, squeamish and reveling in their own political ineffectuality to go beyond the…
Stephen was showing me some Backrooms videos earlier today, and it was interesting to me how they kind of borrow from both Unity horror games (as, I've argued, the predecessor genre to walking simulators ) and found footage horror (with its deliberate blurring of sources, the real vs the fictional, and often multimedia character ie Noroi ) as sort of omnivorous, uniquely post-digital approaches.…
This article is very stupid but I think useful in that it articulates the angle of fundamentally reactionary, sex-binary-conformist feminism in a clear way by applying its two contradictory stances on gender nonconformity... to the same person (Radclyffe Hall), arguing that A) Gender nonconforming women are functionally men, or want to be men, are doing "toxic masculinity" or are only…
It's that time of year again! I round up my reading list on my masto account as well, but I still enjoy looking back at what I enjoyed or didn't, and reflecting on broader trends in what I'm reading. Alasdair Gray - 1982, Janine Chris Kraus - Torpor Alessandro Delfanti - The Warehouse Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge Akiyuki Nozaka - The Pornographers Jeanne Thornton - Summer Fun JO Morgan - Pupa…
My partner and I came to a sort of collaborative epiphany last night. A not-insignificant part of the appeal of generating art from large data sets seems to be, weirdly, producing visual content without the trouble of subjectivity or desire creeping in. It's kind of like this classic John Baldessari painting: ...though I guess you would have to add "large breasts trending on artstation" to the end…
I really liked this article . It's easy to pounce on the cliches of any literary trend, and many examples of articles doing so, and well, are cited in the article itself. But I think this one very clearly ties together some threads on why, despite allegedly being amidst a banquet of sexually frank writing, a lot of it leaves me cold and unimpressed! Two things, mainly, I feel like I want to…
It's been a while since I wrote, and I'm at the phase where just thinking of how long the days were for the person writing 3 months ago could make me froth with envy, lol. I have fortunately been reading much better novels in the meantime, which I will mostly keep discussion of for the end of the year book round up post. I think it's a relevant life update though, to say that I've started Against…
1982, Janine is such a hot, tender, intense, Modernist novel because it is the rough, crass, slippery back and forth of the self turned against itself, the self with no options, or only bad options, the self that denies itself or acts against its desires. It expresses this mostly through the medium of pornography, or, no, imagined pornography, a lurid soup of the worst genre excesses with telling…
I have mostly been enjoying the novels I've been reading alongside working on my own; standouts include Torpor , Bleeding Edge , 1982 Janine and Summer Fun . However this one was so bad and I could go on about it so long that it didn't fit in my masto account's #books thread . So here it is, for all lovers of hatchet jobs: #books -- Pupa - JO Morgan: I am not happy to give this one an almost total…
“Well, if we ever want to know where all the bodies are buried,” Sean cut in, “We’ll ask Kathleen. Since she’s been with the company ever since the start.” Delivered in his droll meeting voice, this phrase made my ears prick up, and I tabbed back out of what I was doing into the Zoom call. Everyone else, a 12-grid or so of familiar faces from similar angles in similarly poorly-lit, cream-walled…
Vault 819, Underground is obviously an insane, near future sf 1982, Janine pastiche, though I appreciate it's probably not obvious if you haven't read the novel. Written by Alasdair Gray following his debut Lanark , the book was fractiously received at the height of the so-called "porn-wars" era of regressive feminism because the main character's interiority is mainly conveyed through narrating…
I suppose I didn't have a ton to say after my last post... Honestly things have been the same for a while here, but not necessarily in a bad way. Glasgow winter is still rough, so damp and dark and cold, but I'm hanging in there. February was actually kind of a packed month for me, surprisingly. Since mid-December I have been consistently working on revising the novel draft I produced during…
If there's one thing that's more irritating than being asked to write for a site for free, it's when sites that insist on going on existing, despite their fees likely coming out to an equivalent of sub-minimum wage when divided over research time, writing, the editing process, and the additional costs of being a freelancer, make a big self-indulgent fuss about how THEY pay writers, as if it's some…
A simple one, what it says on the tin. I round them up on my masto account as well, but wanted a way to list them all together and make some broader observations about what I've been reading! Max Haiven - Revenge Capitalism Jenny Hval - Paradise Rot Jenny Hval - Girls Against God Hiroko Oyamada - The Factory Chris Kraus - Summer of Hate Elif Batuman - The Idiot Gregory Sholette - Dark Matter…
A lot of people who make "creative work" broadly (contemporary fine art, writing, videogames, etc), especially those operating at the highest, most extraordinary levels of success in that area, retreat to an apologetic mode either in their work itself or when discussing or presenting their work. "Novels/videogames/art/etc don't/can't 'do anything.'" But the simple formula for the moral value of a…
I did it! Over the course of November I took a story idea I had around 12,000 words in draft and notes for and built it up to a full draft of around 65,000 words. Last year around this time I finished up the first draft of a visual novel script, and was talking about my intention to return to fiction writing after taking a break from academic work and job applications. Since then, I've finished…
Domino Club is back! This is a bit of a postmortem of the game I ended up making this time, as well as an update on what I'm working on now, mainly my NaNoWriMo project. The Game: 10,000 SEX ARSES STUCK AT CALAIS The game itself takes about 5-10 minutes to play and runs in-browser, so what follows will probably make a lot more sense if you just play it now . The title is from a joke tabloid…
I've always kind of conceptualized myself as someone who has pretty obvious periods of high productivity and accompanying fallow periods. It's always disappointing to feel stuck in a long one, which I have for the past few months, but in hindsight I always realize how much they help me build up to periods of getting a lot of inspiration and a lot of work done. I have been slowly working myself…
Just what is it that makes today's wives so ubiquitous, so dead? The wife in a wife game does not have to be strictly dead, though she is always locked in a state of subterranean regard of her own animate corpse. This is a sort of death that has to be experienced over and over, unfortunately, and we feel properly maudlin about it even though the sentence "What should be a romantic evening with…
(Click for musical accompaniment) "I can't believe I've always had such awful taste..." This week, my brain has been furiously consumed with the release of Fairy King Oberon on the JP server of my favorite mental poison, Fate/Grand Order. His personality and play style can only really be described as "humorously bastardous" and the character art by manga artist Chica Umino is so beautiful and cute…
I have like a half hour of not much to do at the end of the evening now, so I suppose I'll rattle off another post. I got a shout-out in Marina's talk as the "most prolific zonelet," after all!! (please, I invite anyone to steal my crown) Work goes well! I got my first paycheck and cleared my probation period! They seem to be impressed by my work, which, since it is so XML heavy is definitely in…
I'm feeling a bit shy about this! Over the past few years I've written tons of fanfic under a pseudonym but this is the first time in a while I've completed a whole draft of a piece of original fiction writing that does not have being made into a game with visuals and music and everything to distract you. Anyways, I am still figuring out my comfort level on where/how to share this (I mean, uhhh if…
Or: first week at the new job midweek report I say this to bring it into the world. The idea is floated by a disnovation.org essay about the aesthetic illegibility, weirdness and “failure” of many shanzhai mobile phone models (accompanying their larger exhibition project on the subject), but only when compared to the sleekness and increasing uniformity of mainstream smart phones. Shanzhai is a…
Flickguy (warning: decidedly non 1 bit content ahead) has been a runaway success (imo) over the past few days. There's already a ton of different guymakers (as you can see in the background) and even some versions that incorporate modifications and hacks like this 1 bit setup (phew!). It feels like it's been around for a lot longer than it has (I have to keep reminding myself, just over a week),…
It was my birthday on Friday! I'm now 30. (gaah haha) I had a really good day, actually! While the morning and early afternoon were a bit crazy because I had to squeeze in facilitation sessions for helping most of the speakers for an online showcase I'm helping to run set up their presentation rooms and test any features they were planning on using, I got to bow out early to go get vaccinated!!…
April was the month of Glasgow Zine Fair! Plaintext Distro tabled digitally, and after printing and shipping costs was able to make a donation to Remade Network , which teaches repair skills, refurbishes tech for the Glasgow community, and distributes free PCs to isolated individuals as well as local social initiatives. Thank you to everyone who made our first digital zine table a huge success,…
Obviously the argument that like a lot of the recent PS1-style indie games are only working in the spirit of and not the actual limitations or material conditions of PS1 developers is fairly pointless but I think it does reveal some interesting tensions around history and style in videogame discussions. A lot of the discourse in favor of "better" or "more authentic" PS1-style graphics tend to be…
I've been watching some horror films that play with the imagery of paganism/satan worship/cults recently and they're, well, as uneven as any horror genre. I love the goofy renfaire manifestation of the "divine feminine" cult in The Love Witch , and The Lair of the White Worm is just delightfully horny and chaotic with young Hugh Grant AND Peter Capaldi. I found The Devil Rides Out to just be…
I was so busy between my last post and now that I thought I might have brought burnout on myself just by thinking/posting about it. lol. Alternative Ecologies Jam went well! It was a bit more stressful than the others I've run because just about as soon as it started I had a strong sense of how much shorter 3 days was than a week. So naturally, we got less entries and they came in a cluster at the…
Over the past week I did a guest talk on alternative game-making (and related activity) tools for a class my friend Claire leads, and another talk and Q&A about DIY online networks and spaces for GAIA . I'm filling back up my reserves now in the few days I get between another job interview and running a writing jam at Now Play This ... On the one hand, it's really amazing how different online…
In the interest of speed, more consistent appearance,and just plain showing off, if you have a peek at my CSS for this site, you'll notice that all of the background textures are now generated with Base64 code rather than tiled images. This cool thing is possible thanks to Patternify by Sacha Greif and is based on the dithering patterns provided by Strike. Thanks also to candle for giving me the…
It's almost a quaint, even nostalgic detail to appear in a romance story nowadays: they email each other! Amidst the improbable and effortless successes and so chilled out as to be content-less discussions of class in Sally Rooney's Normal People , the emotional involvement of sending emails, while only briefly mentioned, was one of the few things that struck me as “real” in the book. Fortunately,…
The squad, the group chat, the enfants terribles wherever they are, girlboss mentors and whisper networks, the found family, et cetera. In a hypothetical context where you were grown in a tube and any other sort of activism, collective action or social infrastructure besides your nuclear family (who has to like you) and the people around you who happen to like you, doesn't exist on your radar,…