The Witcher – One of the few times you don’t need to read the book first
Back in 1990, Polish author published a short story collection whose title, in English, was The Witcher. In 2008, someone translated the first of a series of novels in that universe into English. In 2007, CD Projekt produced a video game version. And in 2019, the...
What Has Nine Lives and Is Stuck in a Loop?
A premise does not a story make. This one comes up time and again in Author Scrapheap. A lot of times I come up with a story idea that’s really just a tiny premise with possibly a thin plot notion attached, almost like an apology note stuck under someone’s windshield...
Incoming Transmission: Space Stations Are Hard Enough to Fix…
If only the antenna wasn’t the first thing broken. Incoming Transmission is a co-op puzzle game wherein a team tries to complete a set of repairs to a space station. One player is given the details of a mission to accomplish, then broadcasts that to the repair crew on...
Genetically engineered plants
Your Garden Center Doesn’t Carry THESE (yet…) Maybe you wanted to add a pop of color to a living space or just enjoy tending to living things and watching them grow. But people have been keeping indoor plants for a variety of reasons since ancient times. One of the...
12 Monkeys: Time Travel Cranked to 11
The Army of the 12 Monkey was just the start Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie, 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was a looping time travel romp of causality and predestiny, ultimately ending in tragedy (sorry if that’s a spoiler of a nearly 30-year-old...
Endless Blanket Fort
Who doesn't love a blanket fort? …maybe when it's like Labyrinth meets Coraline. So, I’ve always loved the notion of the "X wishes" story. You’ve got the "learned a lesson" endings, the "didn’t need wishes after all" endings, the "you’re horrible and your wishes are...
Diablo: Point, Click, Loot, Repeat!
Though others came before it, 1997’s Diablo redefined and became the exemplar of the Action Role-Playing Game (ARPG) genre. ARPGs are notable in that they focus the gameplay around combat and character power while tending to downplay or deemphasize narrative...
SciFi contact lenses – the biggest monitor is the smallest
Early in Terminator 2 we are privy to a view from the terminator’s perspective. Cast in villainous shades of red, it shows an augmented reality overlay of the world, identifying objects and individuals and providing some analysis of what is on screen.New developments...
Year 10 of My 5-10 Year Overnight Success Plan
Well, it happened. Ten years ago January, we released Firehurler. It was the first book in my first series, with the second well into its draft, at the time. The Twinborn Trilogy never became a blockbuster hit, but the series did OK. The reception was reservedly...
Legion may just be the weirdest corner of the X-Men Universe
In 2017, a show called Legion premiered on FX. It was set in the X-Men universe, though you’d hardly know it unless someone warned you in advance (or you knew X-Men comics well). The main character is David Haller, a patient in a mental facility, struggling with...