If you don’t know, the XYZZY Awards are given yearly for interactive fiction. They’re sometimes called the Academy Awards for interactive fiction.
I was blown away to learn that According to Cain won Best Game and Best Implementation for 2022. Cain was also nominated for Best Writing, Best Story, and Best Puzzles.
I’m floored. In 1999, when I first became aware of the interactive fiction community, I wondered if I could write a title that could win the IF Comp or the XYZZY Award.
To place sixth in the IF Comp was more than I could have asked for. (I was happy to make the top twenty.) To win Best Game for the XYZZY Award is, in some ways, a fulfillment of a twenty-four year personal goal.
Baskerville is my take on the Arthur Conan Doyle classic. Told as a journal penned by the original’s villain, it relates his life story from a pauper’s childhood in the Empire of Brazil to life on the run in Panama and Costa Rica. He lands in England determined to confront his family and claim his place at Baskerville Hall. All the while, he lays out his plan to settle a score with Holmes and Watson, whom have taken him for dead after their confrontation on the bogs of Dartmoor.
A review copy of the novel is available to NetGalley members upon request. Please note, I’m currently seeking NetGalley members who actively review and crosspost to other sites (Goodreads, Amazon, book blogs, etc.)
This blog launched on the first of August, 2014. It was not a big year blog-wise, but I still managed to put out eleven posts (one of which I’ll return to later this year). Worried I would run out of ideas, I devised “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books,” a series where I discuss the books and authors that have left a deep impression on me. (So far, I’ve only managed to finish twelve of the twenty writers. To look at it another way, this writing project is still generating blog posts ten years later.)
Those last months of 2014, my focus was fixed on the finishing edits of Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People, the first book I put out under Kindle Direct Publishing. The novel’s opening line (“The Petrenkos were barbecuing people”) was first typed by me in 1999. After fifteen years, countless drafts and rewrites, and a couple of near-misses with agents who were interested but couldn’t get behind the book, I gave up trying to find it a home. I even considered giving up on writing altogether. Thankfully, I reconsidered, put it on Amazon, and began working on my next novel. (The whole tortured history can be found at The Tusk.)
But my favorite blog post from that first year is without question “B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the first entry in my Twenty Writers series. Oddly, it’s one of the newer books on the list, in the sense that I had read it only a few years’ before (whereas most of the other books on the list I discovered earlier in life). Sierra Madre made an indelible mark on me. It made me think about why an author writes a book, and not merely how—but I was doubly fascinated by the mystery surrounding the identity of its author.
It turns out that while the book and John Huston’s movie are incredibly well-known, the true identity of the author has been largely shrouded in mystery to this day.
Hal Croves, 1947. Taken while on the set of John Huston’s adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart speculated Croves was actually B. Traven.
I love a good literary mystery, and the mystery of B. Traven is one of the best of the 20th century. While researching the blog post, I read numerous online sources and articles, two books on the subject, and even scoured old editions of Treasure, including the rather optimistic (and rather incorrect) introduction to a 1963 Time-Life edition which declared the matter of his identity settled.
One notable outcome of the blog post was former Chief Executive of BBC Broadcast Will Wyatt reaching out to me via email in 2015. Wyatt wrote and developed the BBC documentary B. Traven: A Mystery Solved and its companion book The Man Who was B. Traven, titled The Secret of the Sierra Madre in the United States. (A transfer of the BBC show can be found on YouTube.) Wyatt’s gracious email pointed out that no one to date has refuted his theory of Traven’s identity. By utter coincidence, I had just weeks earlier discovered a copy of the UK edition in one of the last great used bookstores, Phoenix Books of San Luis Obispo. (I’ve long intended to write a post about The Man Who was B. Traven, but never followed through.)
Coincidentally, as I was writing this post in late December, Wyatt again reached out to me via public comment. He once more defended his work, but also challenged the other theories of Traven’s identity, most of which are based on speculation or hunches. Due to his comment, I’m updating the 2014 post to better explain Wyatt’s research, which was previously only alluded to briefly.
Perhaps not reading your book first was a mistake on my part, but I, a mere fan of Traven’s books, and writer of the occasional novel that does not sell in high volume, did not intend [the 2014] post to be the final word on Traven’s identity.
Rather, this post was intended to cover the breadth of the theories out there, farfetched or otherwise, and to give a general feel for Traven’s most likely background. I also wanted to explain why I find so much inspiration in Traven’s works, especially The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Alas, all this came too late for the original 2014 post, which relies on Michael L. Baumann’s B. Traven: An Introduction (1976). Baumann treats the question of Traven’s identity as a mystery of literary analysis, which lines up with my interests in the subject. As a German-speaking German-American, Baumann discerns that Traven’s work was most likely written in that language and then crudely translated to English for an American audience. He also offers a clear-eyed interpretation of the themes and political bent of Traven’s novels.
Since I wasn’t interested in proposing a candidate or “solving” the mystery, Baumann was a good primary source to work from. I only wish I could have delved more deeply into the breadth of the Traven theories proposed to date. The tornadic multiplicity of names and initials and pseudonyms linked to Traven is bewildering, fostered by Traven’s generous use of them to cover his tracks.
My fascination is not to keep the mystery alive, but to turn the mystery around and face the mirror at the reader, to give a name to the insatiable curiosity Traven inspired—to remind us there was a time when authors shunned publicity (“the creative person should…have no other biography than his works”) rather than relentlessly strove to build their personal brand.
True story: I started blogging before the word “blog” was coined. In 1995, I created a web site known as Ad Nauseam, where I sporadically vented about the software industry, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the World Wide Web. Like most blogging efforts, I ran out of steam after a few years, and set it aside.
In 2014, I returned to blogging. I told myself this new blog would be different. I wanted a web site to showcase my books, sure, but I also wanted to blog with a focus on writing, literature, and film. I also strove for a softer, more positive tone. No ranting, no finger-pointing (although I do get my hackles up now and then). I’d rather write on things I’m passionate and positive about, under the assumption that there are others out there with similar passions.
Over the next year, I will feature one or two blog posts a month from the past decade that I think shine a little brighter than the rest. The first look back will come in January.
I won’t say this blog has been a smashing success, but after ten years of chugging away at it, it’s in a good place. I’ve put out over two hundred blog posts, with over 100,000 views since I began tracking them in 2015. I’ll discuss more milestones and notable high points (and low points) as the year progresses.
Looking forward to seeing you in 2024. Happy holidays.
Last night, I saw a live performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at the San Francisco Symphony. One of the people I went with had never seen the original television cartoon—yes, it’s true.
Afterwards, she asked a simple question: “Why did Charlie Brown pick such a bad tree for Christmas?”
As we walked, we talked a bit about Linus’ speech at the end, and how the story asks about the “true” meaning of Christmas. This was all fine, but it merely danced around her question of the tree.
What I said next sprung from me. It wasn’t something I formulated or ever considered before:
“Charlie Brown recognizes something familiar in the tree. It’s been overlooked and doesn’t seem to have much to offer anyone, which is what he’s experienced in life. At the end, the other kids see the beauty in the tree, and in decorating it they’re appreciating Charlie Brown too.”
I don’t claim this is a deep insight, or even an original one, but it came to me all at once. I watched the TV show as a child in the 1970s, and rewatched it countless times over the years, and yet I’m still finding meaning in this Christmas tale.
The XYZZY Awards is one of the oldest video game award on the books. It first started in 1997 and has been held yearly since. It’s often called the Oscars for interactive fiction. If you’ve played even one interactive fiction game first released in 2022, you can nominate a title and vote on the final outcome.
As mentioned, if you played even one outstanding interactive fiction in 2022—parser, choice-based, any story-based game at all, really—you can vote. I encourage you to head over to the XYZZY Awards site and nominate your favorites for the next round of voting. The deadline is December 16th.
In November, Amazon opened a beta program for Kindle Direct Publishing authors called Virtual Voice. It may be the biggest upheaval to independent publishing since Amazon launched KDP over a decade ago.
Virtual Voice uses synthetic (i.e., computer) voice technology to produce audiobooks. On first blush, that sounds like a pretty crappy experience—who wants to listen to a robot narrate a book? Know that automated voice technology has advanced tremendously in recent years, to the point that people have trouble distinguishing between it and a human voice.
It’s tempting to go into my thought process over the pros and cons of synthetic voice audiobooks. At this moment, I’ll just say I find the possibility alluring.
I’ve done audio in the past. I recorded Everywhere Man at Fantasy Studios, a dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was quite expensive and exhausting. A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to hire a voice actor to record Bridge Daughter. I was put off by the terms dictated by every actor who responded to my call for bids. Both experiences impressed on me the risks of producing my own audiobooks, risks of both cost and rights.
Synthetic voice audiobooks eliminate a lot of the question marks. If I’m reading the Amazon announcement correctly, a KDP author chooses a voice from a catalog of voices, previews a sample, and names a sale price. My guess is, the final audiobook will be ready in a few hours. Audiobooks created with synthetic voices are labeled as such on the Amazon market and may be previewed, so the buyer knows what they’re getting.
It sounds like a no-cost, risk-free offer for independent authors. I’m more than curious. Unless Amazon botches the roll-out—a possibility, they’ve botched things before—I predict we’re going to see a Cambrian explosion of audiobooks on the Amazon market soon enough.
