Bringing My #Amreading List Down to 100

After working on it for over a year, I've finally done it: Brought my "to read" list on Goodreads down to 100 books.

"But Forrest," you say, "why do you suck and why are you such a loser that you limit your to-read list? You loser . . . who sucks."

There are several reasons. Here are a few.

1. Someday, I will die. I don't want to leave an overly long "to-read" list behind. It's just rude.
2. My list serves, simultaneously, as a long-term buy list and a short-term "get this from the library or buy it on the cheap and read it soonish, like within the next three years or so". Some of those long-term buy books are very, very expensive, and I really do want to own a copy. So if my list is filled with a plethora of books I might want to own, I could be spending money on them, rather than saving up to buy the books I know I want to own.
3. Which brings me to the next point: Every book is a new, undiscovered adventure, but I've been lost in the wilderness (seriously, truly lost, where I-might-not-make-it-back-alive kind of lost) a couple of times and know the value of a good map. I consider book reviews as maps by those who have gone before me. Some of these people I trust very much, but everyone makes mistakes and everyone has differing tastes. So I like to read from a variety of "maps" (i.e., reviews) in order to make a well-informed decision about what I am going to read and what I'm going to bypass. Keeping my list to 100 books forces the issue. If I think I want to read a book, that means I might have to jettison one from my list to keep it under 100 books. Which one do I really want to read the most . . . really?
4. I write. A lot. Novels, short stories, book reviews, and role-playing game supplements. I love writing. And I love reading. But I don't have time to do as much of both as I'd like. And reading is so much easier than writing that I need to limit myself with the amount of reading I do.
5. Just because a book didn't make the list this time around doesn't mean it will not make it on the list down the road. There are a lot of books floating around on Goodreads. If a previously-jettisoned book (jettisoned from my once huge to-read list) finds its way back into my feed and I am taken in by it again, then maybe I should reconsider it. Again, though, limiting the list makes me really have to think about it.
6. I physically own about 20 of the books on my list at any given time. I'm usually reading two or three books. I'm hoping that keeping the list to 100 forces a little better "burn rate" of reading and reviewing. Again, if I want to free up space on my list, the best way to do that is to read the books I already have physically in hand. Besides, I have a practical side that hates to keep things around that I'm not using. In some ways, I'm kind of an anti-hoarder.
7. Which brings me to my last point: In some ways, I'm kind of an anti-hoarder. I live in a small house quite intentionally. I'm forced to only keep those things that are essential. My wardrobe is small, but unique and, for the most part, well made. If I had my druthers, for example, most of my shoes would be doc martens. Alas, I only have two pair now. Those suckers are expensive. But they are beautiful and comfortable and they last forever. Shouldn't my book collection be the same, physically and virtually? Why live a lie?

There you have it. I know many readers who would consider me a spartan tightwad who hates books. They couldn't be further from the truth. I LOVE books, but I have an addictive personality, too. I could spend all my money and time on books and just bury myself in them, but I've tried that before and I just wasn't happy. Give me the best of the best and let the others fade away. My self-esteem isn't reliant on being attached to stuff, not even books. Besides, I have one of the best public library systems and one of the best university library systems in the world in my backyard here in Madison, Wisconsin. You can't ask for much more than that. Well, you can, but you might be greedy and ungrateful. I don't have time for greed. Leave that to the politicians. I'll be content with being content.

Beyond the Silver Scream Cover Image

Here is the cover image for Beyond the Silver Scream, a 0-Level "funnel" adventure compatible with Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. +James V West is responsible for this awesomeness. It definitely captures the spirit of BTSS - an adventure that starts in your local movie theater in the late-'70s, but leads you and your high school buddies far afield in time and space! James claims that the guy with the fingerless gloves is based off of Judd Nelson. I think it's actually a teenage me. That should tell you something about my teenage years . . .

My hope is to have this adventure all printed up and ready to roll (or photoned-up for those who would rather have a PDF) by the time Garycon rolls around. Those who have seen the manuscript and/or play-tested it have had some good things to say about it. Hopefully you will, too!

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If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Null Singularity

Null Singularity by Steve Bean
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For me, writing and tabletop roleplaying scratch two sides of the same creative itch. As I've examined the two hobbies (neither pays enough to be a profession . . . yet), I appreciate the creative freedom that each allows. I consider writing a very "open" individual creative act, one in which I can let my imagination run free. If I use the excuse of "poetic license," I can write whatever I want, rules of grammar be damned. At least for myself. Of course, there is an audience "out there" that I need to think about for works that I'm planning on having pub(lic)ished. Even then, my own wild flights of imagination fuel the writing.

Tabletop roleplaying is, or should be, in my style of playing and game-mastering, an "open" group creative act. Rules are there simply to adjudicate situations which characters do not fully control (e.g., combat resolution, "finding" of secreted doors or traps, etc). In other words, the game master facilitates the players as they cooperatively (NB: This does not mean "without internal conflict") "tell" a story where the outcome is not entirely known until the moment dice are rolled to determine the consequences of a particular course of action.

Of course, like any other group activity, you'll sometimes have someone who spoils the fun.

Sometimes, it's the game master herself!

We call this, in the Roleplaying Game (RPG) world, "Railroading". A Railroading game master pushes player characters into situations where they have to follow certain plot points in a certain order so that the story can be completed in the "right" way. Needless to say, this tends to stifle players who value, above all else, the right to choose their own character's actions. There's an old adage among game masters that "it doesn't matter what you plan as a GM, the players are going to screw everything up in the first ten minutes anyway". The character is, after all, hers or his, not the gamemaster's. Some systems (rightfully, I think) eschew the term "game master", instead using "judge" to reinforce the idea that the person in charge should be impartial, more of a facilitator than a dic(k)tator. The literary equivalent is the overbearing editor who simply will not allow the writer any creative freedom, who dithers with the author's work so much and in such a specific way that the author's work is no longer his own.

But there are instances where a writer works under self-imposed constraints in order to "squeeze" their own creativity. Italo Calvino's excellent If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is a prime example of this. In this novel, Calvino uses a complex mathematical iteration, as outlined in the book Oulipo Laboratory , to write what is one of the most brilliant second-person narratives in all of literature, possibly the only brilliant second-person narrative in literature. He purposefully used the constraint of the form to discipline the work and to create self-referential loops that, rather than alienating the reader with academic sterility, actually bring the reader further "in" to the story. The Oulipo, a rather exclusive and somewhat secretive group of writers and philosophers, have created an entire literary movement (though I doubt they would characterize their efforts that way) around this idea that creative writing can benefit from being constrained.

Until the last few months, I must admit that, while I have used Oulipo techniques to generate some of my own works, the idea of constraining my gaming was anathema . . . until Black Sun Deathcrawl! Here, author James MacGeorge opened my eyes to the possibilities of what could be done with gaming constraints. "BSDC," as it is popularly known, showed that, with its existential, even nihilistic atmosphere, gaming with constraints could be, dare I say it? Fun and full of despair?

The subtitle of Steve Bean's Null Singularity explicitly states that the adventure is "Inspired by James MacGeorge's Black Sun Deathcrawl, and this is clearly the case. The goal here is not to be heroic, not to defeat the powers of evil, the goal is to survive as long as you can. Defeat and death are inevitable. You will die! If you're lucky, you'll have the luxury of being driven insane before the unavoidable doom that awaits you, whether it is slow asphyxiation from lack of oxygen or being slashed to ribbons by the claws of the XenoHorror. Space is big and powerful. You are puny and weak. All is hopeless.

But it works. Perhaps it is the constraints themselves that allow for a full player immersion into the heart and mind of a character that is low on resources and in a great deal of trouble, an existentialist escapism that safely allows the player to face her worst fears, then walk away from the game table physically (though not psychically) unscathed. A story will play out and, judging from the mechanics, a very fun, if fatalistic story is to be had by players and judge alike. In other words, you won't mind being "railroaded", so long as you go into this knowing that you're going to die in the end. It's kind of like life that way, isn't it? There is a certain dark wonder to it all: the universe is doomed, you are low on resources, you are rather likely to go insane simply as a result of being where you are and realizing what is happening, and it is . . . awesome, in the truest sense of the word.

Mechanically, Bean's repurposing of the Dungeon Crawl Classics rules show just how resilient the DCC ruleset is. I am continually amazed by the different "flavors" of DCC that crop up. It is possibly one of the most malleable systems around. Null Singularity uses the skeleton of the DCC rules, but clothes it in its own . . . let's call it: "EVA Suit". Once you've participated in one of the scenarios in the book, you'll understand why this nomenclature is the only adequate description of this particular flavor of the rules. "Extravehicular activity" indeed!

All-in-all, I highly recommend Null Singularity. At $8+shipping for the hard-copy zine, it's definitely worth skipping Starbucks for a day. Available from Steve Bean Games. Get it while there's still time . . . before the Null Singularity swallows all of reality and your frail, puny body along with it!

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If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Beyond the Silver Scream

I am happy to announce my forthcoming DCC-Compatible adventure, Beyond the Silver Scream.

You and dozens of your closest friends put down the bong and fill your jeans and leather-pants pockets with quarters. But tonight, you're not heading for the arcade. You're headed for the old downtown theater (the one that shows naughty movies at midnight) to see the newest horror flick: 'Screaming Sorority Girls from Planet Playtex' . . . but you've bought in to more than you bargained for tonight, and soon find yourself in the mysterious shadow realm . . . Beyond the Silver Scream!

This DCC-Compatible adventure is a 0-level funnel pitting you and your high school buddies against cloaked cultists and mutant abominations as you pull up your courage to rescue your favorite crush from the clutches of sinister powers you thought only existed in bad '70s horror movies. See: dark rituals played out before your eyes; hear: fuzz-toned 8-tracks of your favorite metal bands; feel: the excitement of adventure; smell: the charnel-house odors of blood-soaked mudpits; taste: . . . um. Nevermind. You probably don't want to share in any meals on this adventure. Better hope you don't get the munchies!

Artists include: Nicolo Maioli James V West, David Lewis Johnson, Matt Hildebrand, and newcomer Thomas Gile.

31 pp. And fully compatible with the DCC Role Playing Game.

Anticipated release: Garycon (or earlier, if I can swing it)!

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If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Space Riders Volume Uno: Vengeful Universe

Space Riders Volume Uno: Vengeful Universe by Fabian Rangel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mind=Blown.

Balls-out, retina-melting, soul-nuking pulp scifantasy in brilliant - and I mean BRILLIANT - color! This is a love song to Jack Kirby and an (hopefully ironic) ode to EE Doc Smith's Triplanetary (except this is really, really good, whereas Smith's book was "Not Scottish,", as I like to say).

Capitan Peligro, the one-eyed commander of the skull-ship Santa Muerte, along with his compatriots, the robot Yara, whose breasts are lethal laser-weapons and First-mate Mono, the mutant mandrill (who I am hoping is named after one of my newest favorite bands, Monolord, though I doubt it); this motley trio is assigned to carry out missions as Space Riders of the Earth Interplanetary Space Force (sort of like the Scout service arm in the Traveller tabletop RPG).

Now, pile onto this gonzo-eyefull of goodness a dose of meaningful plotting, with (very short) stories of love, family, and revenge, and you've got one helluva great ride! My only regret? The plot arcs are outlined here (and one played out in full), but there's so much more to learn, love, and enjoy!

If you have any liking for Jack Kirby's comics from the '60s or '70s, this is for you. Think Doctor Strange visuals meet Sgt. Rock attitude, set a-tremble by acid-laced stoner metal and solid storytelling, and you'll see the tip of the iceberg. Well, maybe the top crystal. But why settle for that? Jump in and explore!

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If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Adventures in Immediate Irreality

Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Evocative of many other works, Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a beautiful read that is not quite its own. Perhaps if I read this before I had read Huysmans, Millhauser, and Beckett, I might have felt that the work was more unique. Though the echoes are sometimes faint, they are there. And, while "comfortable" to me, they caused me to harken elsewhere, rather than allowing me to enjoy the book for its own sake.

That said, this is still an excellent read. There are moments of pure readerly joy, such as the passage where the narrator is describing his observation of what appeared to be a dull print of Karol 1 and his Queen Elizabeta:

One day I made an amazing discovery: what I had taken for watered-down paint was nothing other than an accumulation of miniscule letters decipherable only with the aid of a magnifying glass. There was not a single pencil- or brushstroke; it was a string of words telling the story of the King and Queen. Now that the misunderstanding about the paint was cleared up, my admiration for the artist's skill was boundless. Indeed, I was embarrassed at having missed the work's essential quality the first time round and began to harbor grave doubts as to my ability to see anything at all. Having contemplated the drawings for years without discerning the very material from which they were wrought, was not I prey to so great a myopia as to misapprehend everything around me, misapprehend meanings inscribed in things perhaps every bit as clearly as the letters that constituted the drawings?

All at once the surfaces of things surrounding me took to shimmering strangely or turning vaguely opaque like curtains, which when lit from behind go from opaque to transparent and give a room a sudden depth. But there was nothing to light these objects from behind, and they remained sealed by their density, which only rarely dissipated enough to let their true meaning shine through.

This heightened sensory perception is something explored ad nauseum by Huysmans. The emphasis on artifice, a fascination with artificiality that one wears on one's sleeve, is one of Millhauser's trademarks. And the perverse, borderline psychotic (definitely "outside the social norm") attitudes of the narrator show "pre-echoes" of what Beckett would later explore in his Molloy trilogy (though the syntax and voice are not nearly as stream-of-consciousness laden as Beckett's work).

The work starts out quite . . . tame, I guess, is the word. But as one progresses through the book, the narrator's experiences and voice become more florid, more transgressive, more steeped in irreality. But Blecher never loses sight of the fact that adventures in irreality do not simply involve the pleasures of one's fascination with a world that is out-of-step with "reality". There is a dark side, as well, that the hallucinator must face, naked and alone. Else all of his hallucinatory excursions are reality in his eyes. Even the insane must face the existential crisis, at some point.

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