Writing

Stuff that I have written.

A Sunday Poems update

 Posted by (Visited 7139 times)  The Sunday Poem, Writing  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 062015
 

CUFA7Z4UYAAbQruAs hopefully you know, I released a little book of the poems that I have been posting here on the blog on Sundays.

Today Motherboard did a little piece on it:

I think next time I should make a game that has the poems in it, and I bet it would be seen by a much larger audience. Why should these things be tied down into traditional media and release methods? Why couldn’t we commingle them much more? If you were doing the game adaptation of that poem about network optimization, what the heck would that be?

Of course, it also got plenty of exposure from BoingBoing’s feature on it, which included several of the poems and illustrations. Gaming sites like Massively Overpowered and The Ultima Codex wrote about it too. All of this coverage is quite out of the ordinary for poetry, I suspect, which mostly gets covered by sites about poetry.

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My new book: Sunday Poems

 Posted by (Visited 9140 times)  The Sunday Poem, Writing  Tagged with: , , ,
Nov 082015
 
The cover of "Sunday Poems"Starting in 2005, game designer Raph Koster decided to post a poem to his popular blog every Sunday. Ten years later, this is a selection of eighty of those poems, accompanied by gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations and illuminating endnotes.

These are verses written to an audience that didn’t necessarily care about poetry; verses about whatever was happening that week. They comment on the news, on his children’s homework, on books he was reading or music he heard. In them we voyage across the world, or deep inside apples; we see a toddler become a pterodactyl, and clouds become mundane water vapor. We see sonnets written in computer code.

These are poems for everyday people about ordinary things made extraordinary.

…Sustained and sustaining enthusiasm, joy, play, and wit at work… A richly varied world saturated with myth and stories.

— Hank Lazer, poet and author of The new Spirit and N18 (Complete), on Sunday Poems

After years of threats, I finally made it happen. Sunday Poems is my new book, collecting many of the poems published here on the blog in the Sunday Poem tag, as well as a smattering of others. Sunday Poems is available right now in paperback, and is available for pre-order on Kindle (and those are both Amazon affiliate links). I will be working on getting the book to more digital services in the coming days.

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Practicing the creativity habit

 Posted by (Visited 9044 times)  Art, Game talk, Music, Writing  Tagged with: ,
Dec 032014
 

In the wake of posting up the video of my talk on “Practical Creativity,” I got this:

What a great question.

First, I have to admit I slack off a lot. 🙂 But, here are some ways in which I practice, or have practiced it. You might notice some commonalities across media.

Hope you’ll bear with me, because I will get to games last.

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The Sunday Poem: London Squall

 Posted by (Visited 7064 times)  The Sunday Poem
Sep 072014
 

londonsquallLondon squall, Islington gusts,
Wash the Barbican clean.
Tidy households in tiny flats
Open windows, let out cats
As raindrops stop and shatter
And rental bikes go clattering
Down Clerkenwell streets.

Puddles, unavoidable mess,
Are temporary consequence.
Each lost leaf in King’s Square
Is labeled where it fell.
London squall and Islington gusts
May discomfit, yes. But we will not
Permit them to disrupt.

– Outside a café, London, Aug 2014

May 112014
 

It has been a very long time since I posted a Sunday Poem. That is because it has been a long time since I wrote a poem. But here is one that popped out the other day.

047500-rounded-glossy-black-icon-sports-hobbies-people-woman-runner Afternoon Joggers

The way they run, struggling against invisible wind,
Great gusts in their chests buffeting them
Like hurricaned pines.

These flagellates billow out each afternoon,
Tilt up slopes I cannot see, at windmills I will not.
They sigh in each night.

This is their duty to themselves, their dream
Of spasms and joints and jolt, their Sisyphean journey
From wind sprints to wind sprites.

047485-rounded-glossy-black-icon-sports-hobbies-people-man-runner

This, however, saves you from the one that my mom found today, that I wrote for her for Mother’s Day in the third or fourth grade. 🙂