December 2025 – Words Deferred

My Writing Year in Review — 2025

I don’t say much here about my life outside of writing, and I won’t change that now, but writing never happens in a vacuum. Other aspects of life inevitably intrude and intertwine with our art. Life also provides plenty of things to do besides writing, and it’s never hard to find reasons to procrastinate and put projects off.

Family medical issues and the mental energy required for my day job were the big challenges this year. Thankfully, everyone in my house is now healthy, and I am grateful to have an interesting and well-paying day job in a world where that is becoming steadily more difficult to obtain.

I am incredibly lucky to be able to visit the emergency room or get an unexpected car repair without my first worry being my bank account, and I am able to put presents under the tree for my kids. I don’t take that for granted.

Words Deferred

I’ll try to avoid repeating myself from the State of the Blog 2025.

I was shocked to learn from my stats page that I had posted almost 150 times this year. Then I looked back and realized that I definitely haven’t. It looks like there’s a quirk in WordPress statistics where it counts updates to static pages as new posts. So in actuality I posted less than 100 times (and quite inconsistently in the first half of the year).

It’s strange to realize that this site is the majority of my word count. Sometimes that feels bad, because it’s not advancing my writing career in a tangible way. (Maybe some day it will check some box for a publisher’s marketing department. Or maybe that’s not something they care about anymore and they’ll make me start Instagram and TikTok accounts.)

On the other hand, the site has been the single most effective tool for keeping me writing—and thinking about writing—regularly. It’s hard to quantify, but I do think this site helps fuel my energy for other writing projects and endeavors. Plus, you know, I enjoy it.

In terms of blog stats, this has been my best year ever along most axes. It feels a little odd, since I didn’t do anything different to “earn” it. The will of the internet is mysterious. It giveth and it taketh away.

After three years of steady growth, it was admittedly a little disheartening to see a significant dip last year. Likewise it feels good to see it bounce back this year. However, I’m not playing SEO games or trying in any concerted way to turn this site into a money-making venture. The numbers aren’t really important, except that my words might be getting out to a few more people, and that’s nice.

Even if the numbers flat-lined, I probably wouldn’t stop doing this. I’m in too deep now; there’s no getting out.

Short Fiction

I submitted short fiction 35 times in 2024. In 2025, that number dropped to 18 submissions.

I only sent stories out in a handful of weekend sessions, but my numbers were boosted by sending more simultaneous submissions to semi-pro markets. You can send to a lot more markets when you don’t have to do it sequentially.

I wrote 3 new original stories this year, and utterly failed to revise any of them enough to send out. I also wrote two goofy little fanfic stories, which is something I haven’t done before, and may very well never do again.

My main short fiction takeaways from the year are that simultaneous submissions are great, even if the markets tend to be lower-paying and less prestigious, and I need to work on revising work to completion.

Long Fiction

I did no novel writing in 2025.

I occasionally think about spending the time necessary to revise Razor Mountain, but so far I haven’t. In one sense it’s a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was an interesting process to document here on Words Deferred. But unless I go back and really polish it to the best of my ability, it will always feel like an unfinished project.

I’ve talked about it before, but I have a hard time getting motivated to polish a book that is already “out there” online, and therefore is less appealing to send out to traditional agents and publishers. The idea of self-publishing a novel remains unexciting to me as well.

I fully accept that this attitude is a symptom of being an old man, and perhaps out of step with the state of the modern publishing industry. For now, at least, that’s just who I am.

Looking Forward

It’s good to look back and reflect on the year, but now I’m ready to look forward. In my next post, I’ll talk about plans for 2026.

Firewatch — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

The job of a firewatch involves living in a single-room tower deep in the wilderness, monitoring the forest for fires. It’s a job that attracts those seeking solitude—the strange or socially awkward, and people trying to run away from their problems.

An Unorthodox Beginning

Firewatch begins with a blurred background and the audioscape of a bar. You play as Henry, a drunk college student, and you’re meeting your wife, Julia, for the first time.

A few paragraphs of text and a couple of life choices allow you to choose-your-own-adventure through several years of Henry and Julia’s relationship and marriage: their joys, arguments, and struggles. The choices start out easy, then problems arise, and the game presents more harrowing decisions where neither option is good.

Interspersed between these text vignettes are little snippets of 3D gameplay. As Henry, you load your truck in your apartment’s underground parking. You arrive at a trailhead in the forested wilderness. You hike, you camp. Eventually, you arrive at a huge, wooden firewatch tower.

On paper, I would never expect the opening of Firewatch to work. A rushed prologue in plain text? Front-loading a ton of emotional weight and exposition? When the game started, I was skeptical.

It’s a testament to the writing and design of the Campo Santo team that it does work. As a player, you become a participant by making tough choices with Henry in his back-story. You get a glimpse of life being good, then bad, and finally almost unbearable. It’s just enough time and detail to begin to sympathize with him and understand why he took the firewatch job.

Interleaving this backstory with the journey to the firewatch tower is oddly cinematic, a bit like voiceover, and creates the sense that all of this is weighing on him as he travels to the tower.

Exploration

Beyond this initial prologue, Firewatch sets aside the text and becomes a full 3D game. Your tower is your home base, but most of your time is spent in the forest. As Henry, you can walk and run, vault over obstacles and climb, but not jump. This is not a “walking simulator,” but the mechanics are simple and straightforward.

From the beginning, a surprisingly large area of wilderness is open to your exploration. More areas open up as you get further into the game and acquire new tools, the first of which is a backpack of ropes that allow you to rappel up and down shale slides and steep slopes.

You are given a compass and map, and the game doesn’t clutter the screen with big arrows, icons, and indicators. It’s easy to get turned around or take the wrong path, but this makes it feel more like real exploring and less like the game is holding your hand.

In reality, the game carefully contains the player, but it goes to great pains to make it feel like the world is wide open. For the most part, it succeeds.

Ten-Four, Boss

You are alone in the wilderness, and your only link to the rest of the world is your high-powered walkie-talkie radio. With it, you can talk to your boss, Delilah, in the next tower over, which is barely visible on the top of a mountain several miles away.

As your boss, she helps get you acclimated to the job and provides you with tasks to keep you busy. She’s been out here for years and knows her way around.

The radio becomes your primary means of interacting with the world. When you see something interesting in the world, an icon pops up and you have the opportunity to talk to Delilah about it. You soon strike up a snarky rapport, and she becomes your constant companion throughout the game. The two of you discuss your past, shoot the shit, and become close. Then everything starts to go wrong.

What’s Out There?

From your first day on the job, there is mystery lurking in the forest. Delilah tasks you with finding and telling off some camping teens who are launching fireworks in peak fire season. On your way back, you encounter a shadowy figure who blinds you with a flashlight and disappears into the night. Then you find that someone has broken into your tower.

At first, the strange happenings seem innocuous, but things get weirder and weirder. More and more clues point toward something nefarious (and perhaps science-fictiony) going on.

To make matters worse, a fire breaks out just a few miles away. Fire crews do their best to contain it, but it grows day by day, a looming danger that adds tension. If it spreads, you and Delilah will be forced to evacuate, and you’ll never know the truth about what’s really going on.

Storytelling

Firewatch is full of moral quandaries posed to flawed characters. Everyone here has made bad choices, and everyone can be blamed for something. The game doesn’t tell you how to feel, and doesn’t paint the world in black and white. It doesn’t provide a pat conclusion either.

Firewatch isn’t perfect—it was made by a small team, and they had to cut corners in some places to be able to finish it. But they did so very smartly. The graphics are not state of the art (even for a decade ago, when the game was released), but they have a painterly aesthetic that is often beautiful. There are few characters, but the voice-acting is impeccable, and makes the whole game work.

The story can be completed in 3-5 hours, but it’s full of twists and turns, and contains a few laughs and a fair bit of heartbreak. Games, even story-centric games, often struggle with endings. Firewatch sticks the landing. It’s not necessarily a happy ending, but the mysteries are all resolved.

Henry, having run away from his problems, is confronted with an example of how badly that can go. It’s up to you whether he takes that lesson to heart.

As a wonderful bonus, the game includes a documentary mode. It turns the game into a sort of interactive museum with stations scattered throughout the wilderness. Each station has voice notes from the developers, and sometimes concept art or other notes pinned to bulletin boards. I wish more games would do something like this, although I can understand forgoing it when it’s such a challenge just to ship a game.

Where to Get It

Firewatch is a game by Campo Santo, published by indie powerhouse Panic, Inc. It’s available on just about every modern console and PC platform.

Exposure Therapy — The Story Idea Vault

It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

Exposure Therapy

The Virtual Experience Technology was designed by neuroscientists and psychologists, manipulating magnetic fields at the brain surface without all of that messy wiring directly into the neural tissue. It could not only generate incredibly detailed sensory inputs, but could also modify the subject’s sensation of time passing. Coming from the sphere of brain science, it’s only natural that it would find its first use as a therapeutic tool.

No, of course it couldn’t modify memory. Not directly. But it could simulate real experiences, so real that they were nearly indistinguishable from life. Even better, these waking dreams could distill hours or days into seconds and minutes. Patients suffering from traumas and phobias could be walked through dozens of carefully designed scenarios in a single treatment session, physically safe at a clinic.

Corporations and militaries noted how effective the V.E.T. was for training. A few used it for interviews, condensing weeks of on-the-job observation into a few hours. And why not apply the same standards to those who were already hired? Why not condense more work into less physical time?

Advocates for justice reform suggested that prison sentences could be effectively commuted by living them out under V.E.T., completing them in a tiny fraction of the real-world time. Advocates for harsher sentencing suggested using similar techniques to stretch sentences into hundreds or thousands of experiential years. If a depraved serial killer was sentenced to a dozen life sentences, why shouldn’t they experience all of them?

Intelligence services quietly adopted the technology to trick subjects into revealing key information. And when the tricks didn’t work, there were whole suites of horrific torture designed to make people talk. No more messy real-world war crimes. These were invisible and undetectable, leaving only mental scars.

It was only reasonable and right that international tribunals put a stop to those horrible practices. Thank goodness they did. The CIA and FSB, MI6 and Mossad, and the Chinese MSS all pledged to shut down those divisions. Notoriously transparent organizations. Happy to let the inspectors double-check their work. They always followed the rules.

If You Care About Video Game Stories, You Should be Watching /noclip

If writing is my creative first love, video games are my second. Words Deferred is a site about writing, so I mostly limit my talk about video games to the story-centric, like my series about Games for People Who Prefer to Read.

Of course, not all games care much about story, and the entire medium has long been lambasted by serious artists for its weak storytelling. There’s a weird tension built into games, between experience and participation, the twin engines that make a game at least partly something you do instead of something you receive. That doesn’t mean there are no great stories in games, but it does mean that you have to go searching if you want to find them.

Games are also fascinating from the perspective of their construction. They are half art, and half science; programmers and engineers working side by side with artists, modelers and sound designers. The closest analogues are stage theater or TV and movies, where there is a certain unexplainable amalgamation of the magical and the mundane in order to actually put a finished product in front of an audience. Art constructed by a team is very different from the work of the lone artist.

There are plenty of documentaries on movie making; on the actors, directors, and myriad other craftspeople who put stories on the big screen. But there are comparatively few who do the same thing for games. Among the best are the small team at /noclip.

They are remarkably prolific for a core group of just four people, not only putting out multiple high-quality documentaries per year, but hosting a weekly podcast, building a game history archive, doing some indie game development, and recently creating a sort-of, kind-of online game magazine thing. They are also clearly a group who loves games as a storytelling medium, and that passion comes through in the documentary series where they give voice to the developers of some of the most exciting story-centric games.

Now is the perfect time to check out their work, because they’re right in the middle of releasing a multi-part series about Disco Elysium, one of the most critically acclaimed and lauded “story games” in the past decade, and the story of the people who made it is just as interesting as the game itself.

Novelist as a Vocation — Reference Desk #23

Book | E-Book | Audiobook (affiliate links)

Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.

Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.

King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.

The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.

For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.

If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.

Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it.

Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA, worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.

The Voice I Kept, by Juno Guadalupe — Short Report

Short Reports are a miniature version of my Read Reports: brief thoughts about small—often tiny—stories.

The Voice I Kept
by Juno Guadalupe
(Anomaly SF)

At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.

The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.

The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.

The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt — The Story Idea Vault

Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.

Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.

The 1799 Roanoke Valley Slave Revolt

I first heard tell of Abraham when I was helping Miss Elisabeth with the cleaning in the big house. Two of the drivers had come in to get a break from the August heat. They had their lemonade, and then they hung around in the back hall to sneak a few sips of whiskey. If the missus of the house saw that, they’d be the ones getting a whipping.

I heard one of the drivers say that name, Abraham Arnaud. I didn’t know any French back then, but I could tell that name didn’t sound right the way he chewed it up. The other one only spat in response, and then he saw me and I ran on up the stairs with my load of linens before he could find a reason to do something I’d regret. The only Abraham I knew was the one from the Genesis.

Now, having heard that strange name, my ears were all perked up for it. The second time they caught it was when Old Jack was telling stories to the boys. He said Abraham Arnaud was being talked about in whispers all over Virginia and the Carolinas. He heard it from the new boy, Tom.

Word was that the bosses had paid top dollar for Tom, and they were mighty mad when he ran off the first chance he got. Must have hid like a jungle cat, because they never caught him. Usually nobody got away from our straw bosses; they had real sharp eyes and they knew every way to put a hurt on you without making it so you couldn’t work.

Old Jack said that Abraham Arnaud came from Haiti to New Orleans, and he had become a vodou priest. But he wasn’t no regular oungan, lighting black candles and sticking pins in dolls. He had the real power of possession, and he could bring strong lua into his own body or anyone else. To hear Old Jack tell it, Tom was convinced that Abraham Arnaud would tear down every planation house and free every slave. Tom said he had met one of Abraham’s followers, who had taught him a little magic.

That was about when my momma made Old Jack hush up and “stop talking nonsense, putting dangerous ideas in these child heads.” It didn’t matter though, because everyone started whispering about Abraham Arnaud after that.

Four months that went on. Tom never turned up, and when three new slaves came to the plantation, they brought their own stories: runaways all over. Vodou priests walking the roads at night. The Master up at the big house must have heard things too, because more men were set to guard the farm, and the big plantation owners all got their men together to patrol at night, with torches.

The night he came was dark as death, cloudy and a new moon. After midnight the drums started, first far away, then closer, like they were talking to each other. A shout went up, and we heard one gun, then all the drums went quiet. I never heard a quiet like that in all my life. Most of us didn’t dare touch the door of the slave house, but Old Jack opened it a crack and peeked out, and just about fell backward like he’d been hit.

That door swung open and we all saw it, the big house bright as day, sheets of orange flame rising up the walls like a waterfall of light. There were shadows of people running, but one stood perfectly still, outlined in that fierce firelight like the devil, long coat billowing and a straw hat cocked sideways on his head.

“That’s him,” I thought. Nobody else it could be. And that’s how we came to be free, and how I started on the road to real, honest-to-God magic.