I review Metal Gear Solid 4 for Expanded Horizons. Sigh, I really wanted to like the game because the gameplay itself was fun, but the storyline drove me nuts… I don’t mind lengthy cutscenes when their content is interesting, but this time I felt like bashing my head against a wall. Repeatedly. Ah, just click on the link and you’ll see all my gripes in one neat package!

Something else – there was some downtime this week, but the problem should be fixed now and you should be able to access my website without any problems.

I also updated my Hungarian articles page again – I know this is getting a bit repetitive, but I found an online magazine willing to buy multiple popular-science articles a month. There is also stuff forthcoming in print venues, but those are published on less and less frequent schedules these days, moving from monthly to bimonthly or even quarterly… what I wrote in the past few months might not see the light of day for a long time. It makes me kind of antsy.

Along the same lines, I’m not writing anything for them, but as a reader I’m really annoyed the German Animania went from 10/yr to 6/yr!

“Welcome the Flood” – it’s at the magazine A Fly in Amber. A long-exposure nighttime piece, shot with a Nikon D70S if memory serves me right. Another photo from the series has been up on my site for a while now. I really enjoy nighttime photography, so I guess I should make more of these!

BTW – I’m looking for venues interested in buying photos, let me know if you know of any. I’m not interested in microstock at this time.

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I also updated my Hungarian articles page.

I made a page listing my articles, reviews, etc. in Hungarian and put it in the sidebar. It only includes recent articles and at present I have no plans of making a backlist – I’m sorry, but it would simply take too much time. The upside is that from now on I’m going to list absolutely everything someone hired me to write. Blog posts are not included, unless someone hires me to blog!

I have to say upfront that Google Translate does not really work with Hungarian yet; sometimes you can get the gist, sometimes you get the exact opposite! (Sometimes you get nonsense, but nonsense is not as misleading as when a sentence gets translated to the opposite of its intended meaning.) I’m mentioning this because some enterprising friends of mine have already tried to read my Hungarian-language articles using Google Translate and were quite baffled by the results!

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Most magyarul is elmondom – csináltam egy oldalt a magyar nyelvű cikkeimnek (főleg tudományos-technikai ismeretterjesztő cikkek és kritikák), érdemes megnézni és olvasgatni. Mindenkinek különösen ajánlom a Beszédfelismerés a videojátékokban 2. részét, történeti áttekintéssel – van benne többek között beszélő hal Spock kapitány hangjával, sikítozós Pikachu-terelgetés és a világ talán legnagyobbat bukott játékkonzolja! (Nem, nem a Virtual Boy. )

I’ve made a list of my published or forthcoming English-language SF works, you can find it in the right sidebar or here. No corresponding Hungarian list yet, I’m sorry… I wish Duotrope covered non-English markets!

Also, I’ve had issues with my spam filtering, in case one of your comments was lost, let me know!

I have a new story online! I wrote it back in December (I think…) when my friend Dash mentioned Innsmouth Free Press (a Mythos webzine) was looking for submissions to an upcoming multiethnic issue. It straddles the boundary between light horror and urban fantasy… it’s an oddball combination of Hungarian urban myths, Cthulhu Mythos, and my childhood. You can read the issue online or download a nice PDF.

I have to admit I have not written a single story since The Turul Spreads Its Wings (forthcoming in the Roar of the Crowd anthology!). If you’re interested in the chronology, Bottomless Lake Bus Stop came earlier.

I will have to spend a sizable portion of the summer writing – besides fiction, I also have several scientific articles to finish and submit! (See my previous entry.)

Expanded Horizons has a new issue out and it includes my review of Nymphomation by Jeff Noon. It was a huge disappointment, I’m a fan of his, but this book was really cringeworthy. You can read the review if you’re interested in further details!

We want to launch a regular media reviews column, hopefully with other people contributing too, so if you have a review that’s reasonably relevant, send it our way! (Be sure to read the submissions guidelines first )

Dash wrote this up, I’m crossposting it so that more people see it. Reminder: Expanded Horizons is an online magazine focusing on underrepresented groups in speculative fiction. Currently the two of us produce it in our spare time, so we need all the free advertisement we can get Pass this on!

Expanded Horizons has decided to launch an interviews project. This is a work-in-progress, so feedback from our readership and our former contributors is appreciated.

All interviews will be conducted in alignment with EH’s goal of promoting the authentic expression of under-represented voices in speculative fiction.

I’ve been very busy with Pesach preparations, so I haven’t had time to post here… just two small pieces of news:

1. My friend Sarina has recently co-founded a band, Legionaire Now, and they have a fan interviews feature on their website. (Sign up for their newsletter to become eligible!) They picked me this week and I did my best to answer their questions. Read the interview here! It includes, among other things, autism, pizza and David Bowie

2. This also has to do with Sarina in a sense. I was just about to respond to her comment to my previous entry with “sure, my English might be ‘correct’ in the technical sense, but I always have this nagging feeling it’s not poetic enough”… I logged into my email… and I was very surprised to see an announcement from Astropoetica that they would like to run my poem I sent them (IIRC) sometime in December. It’s my first – and to date, the only -  English-language poem I submitted to any magazine, so this makes me really happy. The poem will probably be featured in the 2010 summer issue.

So I think I need to reevaluate my writing goals! In Hungarian I have been published in professional venues, and now that I’ve managed to sell multiple pieces to English-language semi-pro markets, I should really set my sights higher and submit to pro markets. My last excuse was “my English is not poetic enough”, which has just been thoroughly demolished. If it’s poetic enough to sell an actual poem, it’s definitely poetic enough for prose!

But, butbutbut, I have a brand new excuse at hand namely that I don’t have time to write. Unfortunately this is more or less true… I didn’t write any fiction or poetry in February, and in March I only had time to do scripting for Amesirun, my upcoming video game. (FYI – I moved the release date to April because of the holidays. Right now I think I could sleep for a week straight.)

I have to write more, and submit what I write. I also have two stories I want to revise, and a nonfiction piece on diversity in a recent spec fic video game (you’ll see which) that I need to finish ASAP.

I’ll also have to update this site more often, since it has started to get much more traffic lately than usual, mostly due to 1. Amesirun 2. my Linux posts. So, more Amesirun or more Linux?

This is just a quick announcement to say that my historical fantasy story The Turul Spreads its Wings will be featured in the Roar of the Crowd anthology published by Rogue Blades Entertainment. The anthology will be released in September IY”H.

The story has an Ancient Hungarian setting, so if you’re interested in that sort of fantasy, be sure to get the anthology when it comes out. I’m all new to historical fantasy, but I enjoyed writing this piece and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it, too!

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Unfortunately I’ve written all of two stories in 2010 so far… this was one of them. But I finished a thesis and a lengthy funding proposal, so I’ve written a lot overall, but it was all nonfiction. I’ll try to write more fiction from now on, especially seeing as this was a semi-pro sale. I need to convince myself to submit to pro markets! (In Hungarian it’s not a problem. But in English, I admit I have a self-confidence issue due to not being a native speaker.) It’s also hard to write fiction when my job involves writing nonfiction, and I don’t want to do ‘more of the same’ (= writing in general) in my free time!

With all that being said, I’m now writing a nonfiction piece on a science fiction topic, but who said I had to make sense?

I’ve recently given English-language genre fiction a try, I wrote a few stories and submitted them to  online venues just as an experiment… I had much more success than expected, so I’ll keep on doing this IY”H. I’ve also written a rant about publishing, ethnic themes, how unpaid markets are pure evil, etc. that will probably be up here fairly soon (I just need to tone down the ranty elements  ).

So here is Experimental Archaeology, a story set in the Eren universe (my fictional universe), published in Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine. It’s a small online mag, but it has a great theme going on, so if you like labyrinths, it’s probably worth checking out.

It’s not connected to the Emerald Spires main storyline (gawrsh, I should post about that too) and if you read it, you’ll probably understand why… it would not be physically feasible. But at least it’s set in the same universe and offers you something to read until the game comes out! Unfortunately coding and writing both take up my free time and I don’t have much of that right now… if you cheer me on, the game will be completed faster!