Your Turn
What a long August it was. It stretched out like a temporal cat in the sun from 28/7/2019 to… right now. Space and time was purred at in a satisfactory kind of way, bending them around what was once a weekly newsletter to appear as if the past year-and-a-bit was indeed, merely four weeks in the sunshine of 2019.
This isn’t a return to the weekly format, you’ll be pleased to hear. But more of a round up of the year-or-so I’ve been absent from your inbox. Shall we?
I’ve had this weird new job for just over a year now. I’m the editor of a magazine about board games, card games, roleplaying games and miniatures games called Tabletop Gaming Magazine. Yes, there is an entire print magazine about board games in the shops (you can get it in supermarkets too), and yes, there are so many games coming out all the time that we don’t have space for all of them.
Sometimes I like to pretend that writing this newsletter every week prepared me for this. The whole talking-to-publishers-and-having-deadlines thing. I also like to pretend that working in a toy factory when I was teenager is somehow related. Or when I was in charge of a website about crosswords (and cheating at them). It’s funny how you can draw lines through your life from one thing to where you are now, and for all intents and purposes it might as well have been intentional.
I’ve had the chance to talk to really smart people about how they make games. And games are just an extended and tested metaphor, like a poem or short story. It’s variation on a theme and asks you to rub two sticks together (mechanically for games, linguistically for writing) to see if you can get a spark.
Anyway, remember when I used to ask you to get your sister’s boyfriend’s dogwalker to sign up to this very newsletter? Well, how about you get them to subscribe to the magazine instead?
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It wouldn’t be this newsletter without a bit of Anne Carson. Here’s three translations of the same section/fragment of Sappho by three different translators. Translation is always interesting as we pretend it’s a mechanical act, like moving boxes from one side of a warehouse (ancient greek) to the other side of the warehouse (modern english). But it’s as much of an interpretive act as writing in the first place.
Oh! And my daughter, Ada, was born at the beginning of the year. You can see some very out of date pictures of her in obscured and weird forms here. She’s the best thing to have happened. It’s actually been a pretty good year for me, although I know this is very much against the general grain of 2020.
Elisabeth Ingram Wallace is a much-loved favourite around these parts. Here’s the premise for her next series of novels in an exclusive scoop for Etch To Their Own:
Oh, that magazine wot I work for has a podcast too, which is mainly me talking to very smart people and asking them very dumb questions. Subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify (and other places, but you’ll have to drag your thumbs across a keyboard to find us there).
And, if you like me talking about weird stuff, then you may enjoy this video of me talking about weird stuff.
These are sculpts for some miniatures, all created by the fair hands of Loren Schmidt, from Twitter. We know Loren from weird arty games of the digital variety. I want to know what these miniatures are really for, I’m hoping a TTRPG. Have a bit of look around on Loren’s twitter, there’s some great threads on work in progress, and the process, of getting these monsters up and running.
Can you handle the truth?
Like a lot of people I did a tiny bit more cooking during Lockdown One. One of the things I have perfected is making a batch of cookies in 20 minutes flat. They’re good, and it’s an interesting experiment in a ‘baking trust fall’ — you really only need to cook them for seven minutes. Honest. If you’re prefer old biscuits (like from the 1600s), try these instead. Oh, or this carrot cake.
Watching paint mix was one way people online dealt with the enforced boredom of lockdown which struck over the summer. The media conspired against you to tell you that if you were furloughed (which it assumed everyone was) you would have lots of time to improve yourself in some way that would be enriching for society as a whole. The pressure for this kind of thing came on with such velocity, I think many of us stopped doing anything positive at all. It was hard to feel like a real person at this time, when all of our soft support was taken away from us. It was a weird and atomised time. If my own life wasn’t as full as it was these last months then I don’t really know how I would have taken it.
Our dear friend Sammy has resurrected Peeking Cat as Peeking Cat Literary a many-armed media entity. Submissions are open, and a podcast and webinar series is coming in the new year.
And our other dear friend Hannah has a story from October in Clay Literary.
(and Hannah has something coming up in Litro, again. Here’s her last outing)
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. We’re not back. For some reason I’ve got into these terrible and long phonk mixes. This might be the only thing you need to watch from our online show. ❤
