I write weird fiction. Here are a few samples published earlier:
- and certain stars shot madly from their spheres, published in the Apalachee Review. It's probably my best effort so far, and I hope you'll fall in love with Nadia (or whoever she is) like I did.
- 1539, which speaks from three unfortunate points of view: Spanish, Apalachee, and--something else.
- Pleistocene, wherein the subgenres of alien abduction and time travel collide with excessive beer drinking.
- Wisteria Blue, a performance piece originally published in the 1990s, inspired by yardwork and H.P. Lovecraft (see also the Performance page).
- The Freon Jones, also first published in the 90s; a chilling tale of chemical addiction.
I've set up a Substack site, The Immersible, and will be using it to roll out existing and future tales. You can read anything there without having to subscribe or provide money.
Not everything I've written is fiction, though plenty of it is still weird. I'm an occasional writer of essays and poetry, some of which can be found on my old-school weblog What've I Done?
And as detailed in my curriculum vitae, I've written and edited a wide variety of technical, academic, and educational materials over the years. Academic publications include a dissertation, a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks (detailed in the). Two personal faves:
- A fictional autoethnography about gender performance in virtual worlds called Virtually Queer, which delights me by continuing to get more hits than just about anything else I've published in academia.
- Remediating the Stars: Rob Wright’s ‘Watch the World(s)’ Machinima, on hypermediation, MUVEs, and Vincent Van Gogh, which won a Top Paper award at a convention of the National Communication Association.
My old academic/professional blog, Virtually Natural, is an archive of often unintentionally amusing posts made during the heady days of what we grandly called New Media, circa 2006-2013. Much of it consists of breathless cataloguing of new toys and rhapsodizing about technofuturism, but there are enough more thoughtful analyses that make it worthwhile (to me) to keep it online.