Help Me Keep Making
Jul. 11th, 2019 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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therisingtithes:
tl;dr - A Black queer poet needs your help so he can continue making art and advocating for marginalized voices in fandom!
Hello, everyone! I’m Brandon O’Brien, an Afro-Trinidadian queer poet, science fiction writer, game designer and teaching artist.
It’s been a while since I have said a thing here… since the Content Wars…
*stares out of a window wistfully*
*shakes head vigorously*
But i figured I’d say hello and bring you up to speed on some of my latest stuff!
Some of you may have read some of my work before. If you haven’t here’s a couple of things I think you may enjoy:
‘drop some amens’, a violently hopeful poem of mine in Uncanny Magazine;
an essay about masculinity and the first two seasons of the Lethal Weapon TV series (spoiler: there’s a Lethal Weapon TV series) in Fireside Magazine;
also in Fireside, ‘Due By the End of the Week’ is a short story about a magical girl who also just wants to pass Sociology;
‘Papa Bois and the Boy’, a poem in Reckoning about a boy falling in love with the guardian of the forest;
another fantastic love poem, ‘time, and time again’, is about a romance that neither death nor time can destroy;
and ‘The Howling Detective’ is a short story about a man who discovers that just because you change form at night doesn’t make you the monster;
[ETA] and in the same vein as how people’s cruelty gives birth to monsters, another poem of mine, ‘Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast’, also in Uncanny.
This year is a big one for me. I’m working on my own big tabletop RPG project! Soundclash is a game of music, magic, and sticking it to the man, and I can’t wait for it to be ready for playtesting in a few months. Learning under Avery Alder through her Emerging Designers Mentorship program has been a great boon, and I’m excited to share what’s come of that work. In the meantime, I have a lot of small games I’ve been working on that I would love to share, including a future update of my Emotional Mecha Jam game Lovers In Freefall, a game about lovers defecting from a terrible space war and fighting for their right to be free.
I’m also writing a serial novel! How To Unmake It In Anglia is the story of Agent Ben Paragraph, a detective in a world where lies immediately become reality and any little hyperbole and idiom has the power to cause real damage. A member of the branch of public safety that polices acts of fabulism, Ben takes an extra assignment so he can avoid coming to terms with a personal trauma. Little does he know that what was just supposed to be a search for a missing college student has spiraled into a conspiracy involving folklore-nationalists, a threat against local government, and one of the oldest and most dangerous fables ever written…
I have a lot of very strong feelings about this story, and I’m really grateful to Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books for offering me the chance to tell a story this weird and intense. If you want to read this story, it’s unraveling chapter by chapter on Broken Eye’s Patreon, and will be collected into one text very soon!
I have a podcast now! It’s called Righteous Kicks, and it’s where my co-host Iori Kusano and I ramble intensely about the Japanese television franchise Kamen Rider and its abundance of heart, silliness, and divekick-triggered explosions.
I have also been thoroughly enjoying my work as the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, which is in the middle of its third full year of publication, and was recently nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine!
I’ve been working at a lot of other secret things as well, including a one-person poetry show that I can’t wait to talk more about!
But I also need some help. My freelance writing and performance work is how I pay the bills, and a few unexpected expenses kicked my butt in the last few months.
I’m also trying to get to the 77th World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland so I can represent FIYAH at the Hugo Award Ceremony, and generally be a public representative for Black and Caribbean voices in science fiction and fantasy fandom. I’ve been invited to Big Bad Con in California as well, so I can represent there, talk about tabletop as a medium for immersive consciousness-raising, play some neat games, and join the myriad other creators who enjoy Big Bad as a community of visible marginalized RPG players, makers, and fans.
I want to be able to take my work to those places and represent for my communities in ways most other people cannot. It’s hard enough for most marginalized people to have opportunities to be visible in these spaces, let alone the additional degree of magnitude it is to travel from outside the US. That kind of invisibility makes it hard for people to recognise that there are communities outside of the realm of most folks’ assumptions that have fandoms that care about the work that’s being made here not only as fans, but as fellow creators. It makes those on the inside suspect that the outside aren’t invested in those fandoms, and it makes folks on the outside feel just a little bit more unwelcome and outsider than they deserve to feel.
So I’m asking for your help to get there!
If you would like to support me and my work, you can do so in various ways!
I have a Patreon page, where I post exclusive writing that only my patrons see, as well as access to my smaller tabletop RPG projects, first peeks into some of my performance and writing work, and more!
You can also make a one-time donation via PayPal or Ko-Fi to get me to these goals!
And if you want to see some of my game design work and play it with your friends, I also have an Itch.io page where I sell my smaller games!
[ETA] If you want to support while also getting your hands on all of my small games, I’ve put up a fundraising game sale where you can get five RPGs for as little as $5!
Thank you for reading and sharing this! Thank you for your assistance in keeping this year’s dream alive, and I hope that you find something valuable in the work that comes out of this year’s effort.
Love and Light!
—Brandon
therisingtithes:
tl;dr - A Black queer poet needs your help so he can continue making art and advocating for marginalized voices in fandom!
Hello, everyone! I’m Brandon O’Brien, an Afro-Trinidadian queer poet, science fiction writer, game designer and teaching artist.
It’s been a while since I have said a thing here… since the Content Wars…
*stares out of a window wistfully*
*shakes head vigorously*
But i figured I’d say hello and bring you up to speed on some of my latest stuff!
Some of you may have read some of my work before. If you haven’t here’s a couple of things I think you may enjoy:
‘drop some amens’, a violently hopeful poem of mine in Uncanny Magazine;
an essay about masculinity and the first two seasons of the Lethal Weapon TV series (spoiler: there’s a Lethal Weapon TV series) in Fireside Magazine;
also in Fireside, ‘Due By the End of the Week’ is a short story about a magical girl who also just wants to pass Sociology;
‘Papa Bois and the Boy’, a poem in Reckoning about a boy falling in love with the guardian of the forest;
another fantastic love poem, ‘time, and time again’, is about a romance that neither death nor time can destroy;
and ‘The Howling Detective’ is a short story about a man who discovers that just because you change form at night doesn’t make you the monster;
[ETA] and in the same vein as how people’s cruelty gives birth to monsters, another poem of mine, ‘Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast’, also in Uncanny.
This year is a big one for me. I’m working on my own big tabletop RPG project! Soundclash is a game of music, magic, and sticking it to the man, and I can’t wait for it to be ready for playtesting in a few months. Learning under Avery Alder through her Emerging Designers Mentorship program has been a great boon, and I’m excited to share what’s come of that work. In the meantime, I have a lot of small games I’ve been working on that I would love to share, including a future update of my Emotional Mecha Jam game Lovers In Freefall, a game about lovers defecting from a terrible space war and fighting for their right to be free.
I’m also writing a serial novel! How To Unmake It In Anglia is the story of Agent Ben Paragraph, a detective in a world where lies immediately become reality and any little hyperbole and idiom has the power to cause real damage. A member of the branch of public safety that polices acts of fabulism, Ben takes an extra assignment so he can avoid coming to terms with a personal trauma. Little does he know that what was just supposed to be a search for a missing college student has spiraled into a conspiracy involving folklore-nationalists, a threat against local government, and one of the oldest and most dangerous fables ever written…
I have a lot of very strong feelings about this story, and I’m really grateful to Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books for offering me the chance to tell a story this weird and intense. If you want to read this story, it’s unraveling chapter by chapter on Broken Eye’s Patreon, and will be collected into one text very soon!
I have a podcast now! It’s called Righteous Kicks, and it’s where my co-host Iori Kusano and I ramble intensely about the Japanese television franchise Kamen Rider and its abundance of heart, silliness, and divekick-triggered explosions.
I have also been thoroughly enjoying my work as the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, which is in the middle of its third full year of publication, and was recently nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine!
I’ve been working at a lot of other secret things as well, including a one-person poetry show that I can’t wait to talk more about!
But I also need some help. My freelance writing and performance work is how I pay the bills, and a few unexpected expenses kicked my butt in the last few months.
I’m also trying to get to the 77th World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland so I can represent FIYAH at the Hugo Award Ceremony, and generally be a public representative for Black and Caribbean voices in science fiction and fantasy fandom. I’ve been invited to Big Bad Con in California as well, so I can represent there, talk about tabletop as a medium for immersive consciousness-raising, play some neat games, and join the myriad other creators who enjoy Big Bad as a community of visible marginalized RPG players, makers, and fans.
I want to be able to take my work to those places and represent for my communities in ways most other people cannot. It’s hard enough for most marginalized people to have opportunities to be visible in these spaces, let alone the additional degree of magnitude it is to travel from outside the US. That kind of invisibility makes it hard for people to recognise that there are communities outside of the realm of most folks’ assumptions that have fandoms that care about the work that’s being made here not only as fans, but as fellow creators. It makes those on the inside suspect that the outside aren’t invested in those fandoms, and it makes folks on the outside feel just a little bit more unwelcome and outsider than they deserve to feel.
So I’m asking for your help to get there!
If you would like to support me and my work, you can do so in various ways!
I have a Patreon page, where I post exclusive writing that only my patrons see, as well as access to my smaller tabletop RPG projects, first peeks into some of my performance and writing work, and more!
You can also make a one-time donation via PayPal or Ko-Fi to get me to these goals!
And if you want to see some of my game design work and play it with your friends, I also have an Itch.io page where I sell my smaller games!
[ETA] If you want to support while also getting your hands on all of my small games, I’ve put up a fundraising game sale where you can get five RPGs for as little as $5!
Thank you for reading and sharing this! Thank you for your assistance in keeping this year’s dream alive, and I hope that you find something valuable in the work that comes out of this year’s effort.
Love and Light!
—Brandon
