I Write Fiction Too: Meet Fred

Exciting things are brewing in my professional life! And though I can’t divulge the specifics yet, I can at least say that I’m adding the title “Narrative Director” to my business cards. Now, this may come across as opportunistic to those who only know me by my games criticism writing and occasional journalism, since it has all of the appearance of me using my position in games media to slide into narrative writing, practical fiction writing experience be damned. But would it surprise you to learn that was not actually the case? In fact, if anything it would be the other way around. I spent the vast majority of my college education in fiction writing courses and workshops. It was actually one such class that put me on the path to freelance journalism, as my professor happened to be the sister of at-the-time Editor-in-Chief of PCWorld Harry McCracken, and I pestered that poor professor every day until she put me in touch with him to discuss freelance writing.

In any case, back in college I earned a bit of a reputation for writing short stories about zombies, robots, giant squid, and the afterlife re-imagined as O’Hare airport in classes where genre fiction was shunned in favor of “literary fiction.” And despite my subject matter of choice, none of my professors seemed to be able to tell the difference. I guess what I’m getting at is that this opportunity to actually write for a game is really more of a homecoming to my fiction writing roots than a divergent path from the game criticism career I’ve forged over the last few years. Note that this isn’t a complete career change, games criticism can’t get rid of me that easily, just a new project I’ll be working on in addition to my regular freelancing.

But really, the point of this post isn’t so much to announce my new writing gig, that will come later when I can actually talk about it more. Right now I mostly wanted to post a sample of my fiction writing so that the new gig will make more sense when it is announced. So without further dallying, hopefully you’ll enjoy the below excerpt from a story of mine called Binary People in which I’ll introduce you to a recently unemployed robot by the name of Fred.