Hi, moongazers! Here’s what’s new:

• I spent two weeks reading applications for Viable Paradise 2026
• I went to 4th Street Fantasy and was on my first panel!!!!
• I have not yet worked on Viper this month
• Therefore I started YET ANOTHER PROJECT oh god what is wrong with me

Current Phase

​4th Street Fantasy! The whole week before the con was one long anxiety spiral, but the panel itself was fun. Arkady Martine moderated, and I was not intimidated at all. (This is a lie. But Arkady was an excellent moderator and made it easy to talk.) The panel was about empty spaces in fiction, so I talked about the Backrooms a little, and Morrowind a lot, and afterward was accosted by someone who wanted to talk about Morrowind even more, which is its own form of success.

That panel also inspired a new project, sparked partly by discussing Rose/House. Parser-based interactive fiction tends to organize itself around a map, usually indoors—a cave or house. I prefer houses, because as Rose/House says, “A room is a kind of narrative.” So I started writing a game about a professional estate liquidator forced to contend with a smart house AI.

I'm trying something with the POV. Usually parser IF addresses the player character directly: "You are in an open field west of a white house. There is a mailbox here." Then it offers a blinking cursor: will you commit mail fraud by typing OPEN MAILBOX, or simply GO EAST to the house? But here, I want the player to act through the estate liquidator, but to receive information filtered by the AI, so we wind up controlling a character whose thoughts we can only infer. Weird! But not unprecedented. I'm hoping that gap invites the player to construct the narrative, instead of being dragged along by a character's opinions.

Looking Ahead

Between Viable Paradise slush, 4th Street, and the shiny new game, I barely touched Viper this month. But I picked it back up this morning, and I'm hoping to have it query-able by Halloween. My daughter starts preschool in *checks countdown app* eight weeks, and after that I’ll have two entire daylight hours every weekday to write. It’s going to be amazing. Probably not as amazing as I hope, but Halloween is four months away. Surely I can finish in four months?

See you next time the moon's full!