I'm writing books

Plural there.

Up, Down, Left, Right - Volume Two

The sequel to Volume One, naturally, that was mostly experimental. I had no idea what sort of response I'd get and it was slow at first. Over the months it has gathered views and interest culminating in the exposure gathered from my Curse of Half-Life 2 musing piece. The current views sits in the thousands now, which makes me a very happy chap.

Volume Two has the sub-title of And now for something completely different... not because I've been devouring Python recently, it's partially because of that, but because I'm going from introducing 'games are art, ya kno?!' to the whole 'interactive storytelling' thing.

This includes: the middle-man narrative, methods of storytelling in video-games, literary classics, blank slates, David Cage's fucking stupidity, saving the world and my own personal stories of video-gamekind's effect on me.

It comes out August 3rd, which is the three year anniversary I started writing. Mother of fuck why have I not been hired yet?

(the reason is most US sites, who pay the best, just so happen to have a '18' limit. I tried signing up to write for Flixist a while ago and I got rejected because of my age, which happens QUITE a lot, but unlike the other places they also said to hustle with them on my 18th birthday so god knows what'll happen next year. I'm only sixteen right now)

(anyway)

(I use brackets now.)

(Brackets are cool.)

Tears In Rain/ The Unicorn: A Political, Philosophical, Cultural, and Historical Exploration of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).

What?

I watched Blade Runner for the very first time back in November. Yeah, guilty of not living up the 'lifelong nerd' title and all that. It blew my mind and brought Philip K. Dick into my world. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep now happens to be my favourite novel of all time and the film itself is my second favourite of all time; barely beaten by Kubrick's Space Odyssey.

So what is Tears In Rain/The Unicorn?

It's 300 pages on Blade Runner.

Its links to Reaganomics, the rise of Thatcher, the new new world, the dying Cold War and the modern transfer of power from west to east.
Its links to Greek philosophy, the forever question of 'what it means to be', the line of morality and of defining humanity.
Its links to the history of science-fiction, its powerhouse into forging sci-fi as a more artistic expression of usual ideals reserved only for dramas, why Star Wars sucks in comparison and how it compares to Do Androids Dream?
Its links to the eighties, that weird period when technology overthrew mankind and a cowboy was in the White House.

In short, one giant exploration of everything Blade Runner means, could mean and its importance in the history of mankind's culture.

There was something else I was going to do instead, but that all changed. Maybe I'll save that for another tale, another day.

Fuck it we'll do it live.

I was going to write Mojang: The Story of Minecraft with interviews of Molyneux, Mojang, 2 Player Productions, Gearbox Software and so on and so forth. One giant month of touring the world, funded by Kickstarter, interviewing everybody with a whisper of Minecraft. It was going to change my life, 2 Player Productions were completely on board with the idea and I was ready to start running around to write 300 pages on a single-video-game and its reflection of the entire history and future of video-games.

Mojang declined citing the fact that the press were circling them like sharks. It was a shame, I was more than ready to go and really wanted to do Minecraft some justice. The documentary will likely do that but I wanted to put my own stamp on things. Shame, kinda, except now you'll be getting 300 pages on Blade Runner.

So what about pricing?

Absolutely free.

.PDF and Kindle.

For both books.

Up, Down, Left, Right - Volume Two - August 3rd
Tears in Rain/ The Unicorn - First week of September

Progress done so far:

Volume Two's research is finished, getting ready to starting writing/editing for the whole month of July.
Tears in Rain is still requiring some research to be done, need some funds for that, will probably sell off a few things. Other than that, we're safe when it comes to this.

The books section on my blog will update when each of them comes out and check out my general blog for new updates. I find it difficult working with bbcode so expect Blogossus updates quicker than these ones.

I said I'd be absent, and I kind of am. There's a game critique corner coming up on my Destructoid blog on Saturday but other than that I'm too busy to do anything.

Back to revising I guess.

Much love.