Scientific American offers up a short survey of apocalyptic visions to supplement their September issue, which I haven’t seen yet. Did your favorite apocalypse make the list?

Meanwhile, Web Urbanist offers up another slew and a half of apocalyptic visions, with lots of great (and horrific) imagery to back it up. I’ve had this tab open for more than a week. I just keep going back to it as I make notes for Razed.

We’ve had very little luck selling RPG books on eBay lately. Rather than go slowly through my back catalog, I’m dumping box after box of books onto the Internet for quick liquidation. The goal is to get these books out of my house. If they can go to good homes, so much the better. If they have to be donated or recycled, then so be it. I’m selling most for just a smidgen over shipping costs, just to make sure I don’t actually lose money getting rid of these. This is a sad part of a book’s life cycle, but it’s the way things go, I guess.

Here’s the complete list of books for sale. It’s a doozy. (You can also click on “Books For Sale” above.)

This sale will go on for about three weeks. Then I’ve got to donate, recycle, or pulp whatever’s left. We’re leaving our house and I can’t pay to move all these things again.

If you want a bundle of books, I’ll cut you a good deal. Remember, please, that even with USPS Media Mail books can be pricey to ship, and you’re paying shipping.

Look at this list of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories from Wikipedia. It makes me feel hardly qualified to have my own vision for a post-apocalyptic world, for Razed, looking at how many of these stories I haven’t read or watched. Granted, it’s one hell of a list, and I’m not sure that I need to see Transmorphers before I’m qualified to use my own imagination, but still. Staggering.

How many post-apocalyptic stories do I need to consume before I’m ready to conjure my own and, more importantly, inspire others to conjure theirs? It’s obviously a ridiculous question. The goal of Razed isn’t to allude to the maximum number of apocalypses. The true answer, I think, depends on how real can I make the apocalypse seem during play, and how viscerally scary — and freeing! — can that apocalypse be made to feel in the text.

So that’s my goal right now: to be visceral.

Apparently, back when Vampire developer Russell Bailey’s writing career felt new to him, I told him to “Be Fucking Mamet.” That meant something different to me back then than it would mean now, but I don’t doubt that I said it. I said a lot of things. Rusty’s quoting that line in his post, today, about how crime novelists don’t get women, and it’s a good one — very Russell Bailey. (The post is notable, too, because of what it says, and doesn’t say, about the canceled EVE RPG.)

Rusty’s absolutely right that Vampire must be, on some level, crime fiction. And, of course, that can mean a lot of things. Earlier today, Chuck Wendig was saying that The Wire is a model Vampire: The Requiem chronicle (or set of chronicles), and he’s right, too. I used to tell people that The Shield was an archetypal Vampire game, what with its layers of loyalties, its constant lies, and its underlying involvement in the illicit trade of something illegal — in The Shield it was often drugs or prostitution, in Vampire it was the Blood.

So, yeah, as much as Requiem is gothic — and that’s a theme easily circumvented by the individual Storyteller — it’s definitely crime-fiction-style storytelling. It’s a game about monsters that commit crimes to survive. Their very existence defies one of the only strict laws of living: Thou Shalt Die.

Anyway.

Rusty’s post also reminds me: The naming of the clan books may be the best work I did at White Wolf. It’s something I remember being proud of, at any rate, for whatever pride is worth.

Something like this week, Family Games 100, the new book of game essays from Green Ronin and editor James Lowder, should be debuting at your local store. Like it’s older sibling, Hobby Games 100, this one looks to be a combination of guidebook and straight-up good-time. Authors of all stripes brought essays touting favorite, distinctive, or memorable family-friendly games for you to peruse. Looking for a good game to try playing with your folks or your kids? Open the book to virtually any page and get a recommendation.

This time out, I nabbed a spot in the book, too. Right next to my beloved Crossbows & Catapults, you’ll find my essay on Cranium — I played it while selling copies of it at Starbucks, back when.

Want a complete list of authors and games? Want a peek at Mike Selinker’s essay on the game Set? Want to order your copy right now? (You do.) Head on over to the book’s webpage and get clicking.

Penguin Books Great Ideas Series

The first book of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (at least in the Penguin Great Ideas edition I got for Christmas) is a collection of passages in which Aurelius lists people he has learned from, and what he has learned from them. I thought this a fine idea, and a ready source of blog-worthy material. So I’m setting out to write a similar collection of passages, focusing on a different person each weekday in January, until I run out of weekdays.

Please resist the temptation to wonder where you are in this project. I am writing these as I am inspired to do so, by people’s blog posts and correspondence—this is not a list of the Top 22 Most Influential People in my life. Don’t be offended if I don’t mention you.

That, in fact, almost stopped me from writing this series: the fear that you’d be offended if I forgot you. But I’m trying not to be hindered by those kind of fears in my writing anymore. I hope you’re not offended either.

I have even created a new category for these posts, so you can find them easily: persons admired.

On with it, then.

Looking back at my review of Finch, I realize that I left out a lot of my actual feelings on VanderMeer’s work building the world of post-war Ambergris, and building Finch’s story. Here’s what I didn’t say.

Finch is sometimes hard to read if only because it is so unflinching in its depiction of a battered and oppressed city. If only because it is sometimes so grim in its dread for the future and regret for the past. VanderMeer treats Finch, the main character, terribly, hurting or humiliating him at almost every opportunity.

We go with Finch through the city of Ambergris in search of information, and VanderMeer measures out our servings with an incredible control — we so often get morsels when we want to feast. I was hungry to know more about the city, more about Finch, about the past and the future and the day-to-day lives of Finch’s cohorts and contacts, and VanderMeer offers enough to keep the pages turning and the story moving. Sometimes we’re right at the dangerous edges of reader knowledge. Too far this way and we feel stymied, too far that way and we get ahead of the detective. Either way makes us impatient.

VanderMeer steps on the borderline a few times, but he’s always in control when he does it, I think. He’s daring us to get ahead of Finch sometimes, and wonder what might be real in this new era of Ambergris. Some of us have read more fantasy fiction than Finch is forced to live in, so we make jumps and accept facts that Finch wrestles with.

I was so sure I had the case figured out, except that I didn’t trust Ambergris — VanderMeer’s city is a cruel and many-faced thing. I wasn’t sure if the mystery would be more literary or more fantasy, and I knew that solving the mystery wouldn’t end the story. But I had no idea how big the book would end up making the truth. Finch is no detective yarn, no episode in an imagined police series. It’s a big story seen from over the shoulder of a man living as a detective, a man who reminds us as he reminds himself, I am not a detective.

I doubled back through the book again and again, looking at it as a pivotal piece in the history of a fantastical city, looking at it as a commentary on foreign policy and tribal relationships, looking at it as a character study, and it works as all those things.

But it’s worth noting that I was able to escape the book to do that backtracking, that I was looking to take the pressure of life in Ambergris off of myself, that I didn’t always want to move forward with the story as much as I wanted to move laterally through Ambergris, to explore. Following Finch, the man, was sometimes sweet agony.

When reading Finch, look at how often things are described as being two things at once, as smelling sweet and foul, as being both red and blue, as being both present and absent. Things aren’t easy to reconcile in Ambergris.

VanderMeer knows that when we visit Ambergris with him, we can see only what he shows us, and he’s often offering us agonizing glimpses of more. It’s not meant to be an easy tale. But it’s a good one.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

The LA Times review of Finch spoiled the hell out of the book. I’m not going to do that. I’m not a big believer in writing reviews that summarize. That said, this review summarizes the setup of the novel and, I hope, gives a sense of how much I enjoyed poring over the choices the author made with the language in the book. Writing spare, fractured prose isn’t as easy as Finch makes it look.

I should also let you know that I was gifted a copy of this book by the author.

I read the first third of this book three times. Just to study the language. Just to get my hands on the machinery of Jeff VanderMeer’s world-building approach and puzzle out how it worked. VanderMeer’s uncharacteristically spare language summons up a rich vision of a city past the brink — Ambergris — and explores a handful of characters razed and remade by the city’s bloody history. He uses simple prose to create rich, textured visuals and nuanced, emotional characters with just a few deft encounters. It’s good.

This third (and final?) outing to Ambergris casts the city as a post-war wreck reminiscent of The Third Man’s Vienna, full of shadows and lies, or modern Baghdad, layered with centuries of conflicts political, ethnic, existential.

It’s all seen through the lens of detective John Finch, who insists he’s not a detective. Finch works for alien and mysterious fungus-people called the gray caps, which have control of the city via a brutal and Byzantine architecture of occupation. Finch travels through Ambergris, tangling with spies and nefarious thugs, not because he’s a brilliant detective (he isn’t), but because the gray caps will snuff him out if he doesn’t make daily progress on his investigation.

The case? A human and a gray cap are found dead inside a city apartment, bent and broken as if they’d fallen from a great height.

From that beginning, with a literal handful of clues, Finch follows arcane sigils, secret passwords, and fungal technology from one harrowing encounter to another. At every step, as Finch wises up, he gets more and more beaten down. His tale is sometimes nasty, sometimes beautiful, and always right on the edge between the mundane and the insane. It’s a great and surreal odyssey through a fantastic world.

This is my new favorite VanderMeer book, I think.

Don’t fret the earlier books in the Ambergris cycle if you haven’t read them yet, though — this story plays fine on its own. Think of the previous two books — City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword — as historical fiction set in the same city, if you want. Finch is a fine place to start.

Cut straight to the chapbook:

• Haiku Year: A 72-page pocket-sized paperback (POD)
• Haiku Year: A 72-page ebook (PDF)

Last year, just after Thanksgiving, I set out to write a  haiku per day for a year. I called the project Haiku Year. I made it a little more than three months and composed a little over 100 poems.

As I prepare to try the project again, I’ve collected the 105 poems I wrote last time into a little chapbook, along with a few short articles about the project and its poems. This little book, also called Haiku Year, collects every poem from the website, a few bonus haiku from the project, and a few pages of articles about the project. I offer it here for you to (a) buy, as a little pocket-sized paperback book, or (b) to download for free.

Let’s talk a bit about pricing.

The paperback costs eight dollars and change. If you buy the paperback, I get two dollars out of that, and you get a nifty little book. I also get to see that sale tallied up, which is nice.

I’m giving the ebook away, just to get it in front of people. If you download the free ebook, I don’t get any money. I won’t even know that you got it or how many people have chosen to download the thing. Thus, if you do download the book, please consider also leaving a little review on Lulu or a comment here on this post. It’ll help me know if anyone has actually seen it.

If you go so far as the read and enjoy the book, maybe consider dropping a buck or two into my hat via the donation button above. Your donations will help me spring for coffee and trips out of the house, both of which will help me write more and better haiku during the second year of the project. If you choose to donate, thank you in advance.

And Wil Wheaton went the sanest possible route with his Sunken Treasure and Memories of the Future, and just found someone crazy to do all the layout. (C’mon, it’s Wil — I shouldn’t have to tell you to buy his books, you should already have them.)

Ariana Osborne — she of Warren Ellis’ website, web forum, and various books — writes about how to design or do layout for books to be published through Lulu. She has just done the book design on Warren Ellis’s first POD project, Shivering Sands, after all. Her advice is good, especially where it amounts to telling you to stop fretting and just make your thing.

I am the “someone crazy” who did Wil Wheaton’s layout on those two books, however, and I used InDesign to do it, so perhaps I’m ill-fit to be giving advice on not using InDesign. Hold fast, though, because I’m going to do it: You don’t need InDesign to publish your book. Get excited and make things.