Category: Writing
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 5: The Horrors of Eternal Life
Welcome back to this series on immortality and perfection! If you haven’t read the previous articles, check them out below: Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection Part 2: Fractals & Infinity Part 3: Swordsmanship & Perfection Part 4: Alchemy & the Magnum Opus In Part 4, we conceptually linked the attainment of perfection to the…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 3: Swordsmanship and Perfection
Welcome back to this article series on perfection and immortality! In Part 2, I talked a lot about fractals, repeating, self-similar patterns that have a complex relationship with perspective and infinity. I noted that the more one delves into fractals, the more often one encounters paradoxes, such as the Coastline Paradox. As you might remember…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 2: Fractals and Infinity
In Part 1, I talked about the overlapping ideas of eternity, perfection, and immortality and the seeming paradox of making something perfect: “…making perfection a reality seems to evoke the mathematical concept of the asymptote— ‘a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it.’ One can approach perfection, but the closer…
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The Narrative and Worldbuilding of Bloodborne: Part 2
If you haven’t read Part 1 of my Bloodborne analysis, read it here. In it, I give an abridged summary of Bloodborne’s plot and take a closer look at the key elements of the narrative, including the Hunters and the Great Ones. To restate, much of this analysis is rooted in The Paleblood Hunt, but…
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The Narrative and Worldbuilding of Bloodborne: Part 1
For most people, the narratives of FromSoftware’s games are (understandably) treated as kind of a joke. I don’t think anyone denies that an incredible amount of time and care is put into building these stories, but when unearthing them involves deciphering the purposely cryptic description text of a necklace hidden in some god-forsaken niche in…
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Making ‘Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim’, Part 2: Narrative
Welcome back to my ongoing series of posts on my game demo project “Black Heaven: a Necromantic Dating Sim”! If you haven’t read part Part 1, go read that first, you animal. This time, I’m talking about narrative—outlining the story, figuring out the characters, and writing the opening scene. Because Black Heaven is just a demo at this stage, there…
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Making ‘Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim’, Part 1: Concept
I haven’t finished a novel in at least two years. It’s a pretty shameful thing for someone with a degree in Creative Writing. It’s even more shameful for someone who originally wanted to work in book publishing. Instead, I’ve been playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, VA-11 Hall A, and Mass Effect (among others). I’ve…
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Highlights from GIFCON 2017 and my trip to Scotland!
Hey, so you probably heard I was asked to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Conference on my 2015 project, The Rats in the Walls. The talk went great, and I’ll be publishing the full text soon, but in the meantime I wanted to give some of the high points of the trip. First off,…
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I’m Going to GIFCON This Week!
After a month of preparing, I’m heading to Scotland on Monday to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention on my Rats in the Walls project! You can check out the details of the project here, and read an excerpt from my speech here. You can also check out the promo video Alex Sherman and…
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New Essay in Clarkesworld Magazine: “Frodo is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic”
I’ve said this before: magic should not be science. Magic can be systematic and internally consistent, but it shouldn’t be reduced to a human tool, like astronomy or chemistry. A lot of writers and worldbuilders don’t seem to understand the difference–didn’t Arthur C. Clarke famously say that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?” But there is a…
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I’m Going to Be a Speaker at Glasgow International Fantasy Convention!
Last month I saw a post on the SFWA website calling for papers and presentations for GIFCON, the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention, and decided to submit a presentation on my Rats in the Walls project. Now, I found out I’ve been accepted–I’m going to Scotland to be a speaker at the con (March 29th-30th)! “The…
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The Occult Triangle Lab Reading List Vol 4: The Mind of a Psychopath
This is Vol. 4 of the Occult Reading List, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week. Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.…
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The Occult Triangle Lab Review: Ubik by Phillip K. Dick
I first heard about this book when reading through Philip K. Dick’s biography, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which took its title from one of the more chilling lines in Ubik. It seemed to have everything I could ever want: existential crises, meditations on eternity, entropy, and the human spirit, and a mind-bending journey through an illusory…
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The Occult Reading List: Zen, Martial Arts, Annie Lennox, and Tickets to the Moon
I have a bad habit of reading, listening, and watching too many things at once, and at the end of every week I end up with a new list of fascinating things to check out. I thought it would be fun to share some of the stuff I’ve read and listened to in the past week, including…
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The Occult Triangle Lab Review: I Am Alive and You Are Dead by Emmanuel Carrere
This past week I finished I Am Alive and You Are Dead, a biography of Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the inspiration for Blade Runner) and The Man in the High Castle. Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963, and ended up being the namesake of his own sci-fi award. I’d read Do Androids years…
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Hypnotica: New Short Story and Sketches from Joel Clapp
9 months after its inception, my new short story, Hypnotica, is out for submission to fantasy magazines! If you want to learn more about the inspiration behind it and how I fleshed out the magic system in the story, you should check out the posts DREAMWAVE: FANTASY WRITING, QUANTUM THEORY, AND DAFT PUNK and NARCOMANCY: MORPHINE, LUCID DREAMING, AND…
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My New Essay in Clarkesworld Magazine: Paradise Lost
Yesterday my new essay, Paradise Lost: A History of Fantasy and the Otherworld, was published online in the July Issue of the Hugo Award-winning Clarkesworld Magazine! This marks the culmination of a conversation that started four or five years ago, when I was standing in my driveway at night with my friend Joel Clapp. We had just finished…
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ERGODICA, Part 2: Interdimensional Necromantic Blues
New, from Chris Mahon’s Occult Triangle Lab: interconnections between Kierkegaard’s existentialism, Buddhism, immortality, Kabbalah, fractals, Godel’s Incompleteness theorem, and a piece of experimental literature about an interdimensional necromancer trapped between two infinities.
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Ergodica: House of Leaves, Puzzle Boxes, and Experimental Literature
Like a clock tower sniper, you study House of Leaves, but you don’t copy it.
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The Crownless King
Headless gods, self-surgery, and living forever: an excerpt and some sketches on a necromantic theme, ‘the crownless king.’
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Worldbuilding: Morrowind and Vvardenfell
No one liked Cliff Racers, but Vvardenfell was one the greatest fantasy worlds ever built.
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The Occult Triangle Lab Review: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
The Eye of the World had 270 pages to give me a reason to keep reading. It failed.
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The Occult Triangle Lab Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The Occult Triangle reviews the cryptographical masterpiece by Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.
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Narcomancy: Morphine, Lucid Dreaming, and Binaural Beats
Serial Experiments Lain meets Neuromancer and Inception.
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Dreamwave: Fantasy Writing, Quantum Theory, and Daft Punk
Bringing together brain waves, four-on-the-floor beats, and de Broglie waves.
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High Resolution: Worldbuilding and the Small Details
I have a fascination with the metal buttons on pay phones, the pixels on old Zenith televisions, the writing on IV drip bags, and the lettering on manhole covers.
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Worldbuilding: True Names, Binary, and Mathematics as Magic
Fleshing out my magic system takes me on a journey through binary, computer coding, and metaphysics.
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Don Quixote and Evan Puschak’s “Middle Earth and the Perils of Worldbuilding”
The Occult Triangle Lab responds to The Nerd Writer’s video criticizing fantasy worldbuilding.
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The Rats in the Walls: New Date
The Rats in the Walls has been rescheduled for May 24th, 10 AM. Follow the hashtag #ghosttrain and subscribe to the Rats at @kilroyisgod to watch the conspiracy unfold.
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The Rats in the Walls: Word is Spreading.
Word of the Rats in the Walls is spreading–read two of the new photo essays about Kilroy, the Rats, and their ever-deepening conspiracy.
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Rats in the Walls: Lotus Scavenger Hunt
Starting today, you can find black origami lotuses scattered around the East Village, accompanied by WANTED posters of Kilroy, spokesman for the Rats in the Walls.
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Rats in the Walls: New Summoning Circles and Wanted Poster
The Rats in the Walls keeps rolling with new summoning circles and posters of the infamous Kilroy.
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The Worm Ouroboros, The Rats in the Walls, Kilroyisgod
The Lovecraft-inspired Twitter piece “The Rats in the Walls” has made it to the second round of judging for the Twitter Fiction Festival.
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Kilroy Sightings
This May, “The Rats in the Walls,” a Lovecraft-inspired piece of Twitter fiction, will debut as part of the Twitter Fiction Festival. Once it begins, it will not stop. Watch the Rats come out of the woodwork. This April, report any sightings of the man pictured below to the handle @kilroyisgod, with the hashtag #ratsinthewalls. …
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The Rats in the Walls: Preview Pt. 2
“And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats – the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion – the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs,…
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“The Rats in the Walls”: Lovecraftian Twitter Fiction
“An occult graffiti crew called the Rat Pack has stolen four NY subway trains. Their spokesman, the bizarre, lyrical, and masked ‘Kilroy,’ is now taunting the police and the MTA, spouting cryptic manifestos and posting strange photos. Readers are ‘recruited’ by the MTA and NYPD to unravel Kilroy’s messages and learn the origins of the…