I Read Part of FALSE MACHINE

 

 

It's fairly easy as a new old comer* to any hobby to be delighted when you enter a group and find there are people just like you. As passionate, as curious, as seeking. I imagine there's similar glee in moving overseas and fifty years later discovering that one of the other members of your graduating class lives in the same town as you, working as a pharmacist— and you like them.

That's how I feel about Patrick Stuart. I just think: yes—somebody else kept going.

I bought Gackling Moon and I just asked my wife if I could start saving for the seemingly forthcoming repeat of Veins of the Earth. She did say no but she also just got pregnant so things can literally change overnight.

But really what I want to say here is that if you are thinking about buying any of the books that Stuart's written, I like the ones I have and you have my blessing in purchasing them.

But I also want to take my experience reading the first hundred or so pages of False Machine 2010-2020, to think about why I put its lovely blue ribbon into the crack of Pg 121 and said I'll come back to this.

I want to do that for his sake because it's nice as a writer to know when your work hits and when it doesn't. 

So, P, for you, fella:

•

I read your physical blog manifestation at nights most often, tucked in the upper shelf of my trailer with yes a red purple lava lamp on. I usually took in about a blog entry or perhaps two and then fell asleep with the tome on my chest. A perfect weight. I could prop the book on my chest and tuck my chin so as not to not lift anything, nada, nothing; lazy reader, night time reader, lay-down reader, baby boy.

Important to note that entering this blog, your book, your mind, I was not trying to learn anything. In that way I was most prone to read with the sacrificial knees of fiction which is: run fast at this field and with as much abandon as you can, and whatever happens to your knees, so be it. Come what may. Run.

Until you stop. out of breath, hit a root—who knows, thank God, again, for that lovely blue ribbon.

Entering this book was like coming in stride with someone dipping a cup to a well while running, filling it up, and at a fairly brisk pace, trying to pour it into your bowl-shaped hands. Naturally this lazy reader then tried to gulp, satisfy a thirst he's been cursed with forever, forever, anon.

And so many 'coming alongsides' were so fun. It's surprisingly—it's surprising, period, that reading an essentially digital document on paper, references deprived of anything but a lanyard of exotic syllables or suggestion to 'follow this up with a Google' was so liberating, a surprise that the experience was as delightful as reading good correspondence. I came to take the nightly reads as conversation between you and me. And again, I stopped at 121, but more because (I recognize now) that having those conversations felt like enough and that the way you'd presented the work made me feel confident that if we resumed the conversation two years hence, overstuffed with turkey under a new, warm lamp, that we'd just pick up right where we left off.

I think that's kudos to your writing for one: that each post felt like you wrote until your torch guttered on whichever particular topic. It is also perhaps testament to how good it felt to be reading it alone, away from the everspreading www, where the only directions I could turn were either one more page, or let the text fall on my snoring face.

So it's good. I really enjoyed really reading your work and not just intending to read it. Sure, a bit of fanboying as, again, new to the scene, here's the guy everybody is pointing to at the party, but truly: there's a reason for it. You attack ideas, explode concepts. I loved the Djinni adventure, read DTF Wizard aloud to my wife to mutual bellyfuls of humor, finely caught up on the Zak S stuff which is as fascinating to a generic outsider as finding a stack of People magazines at your feet at Grandma's with nothing to do but lounge.

And a hundred smaller moments.

Again: I didn't go in expecting to learn anything, but I did come out feeling way connected, much less alone. Tickled to let my inner crystal palace explode bright into its myriad rooms, which is what I ask for in the books I read, so good on.

See you down the road for the next one.

-Hugh

 

 

*as in, not new to role-playing, but new to the notion that there’s a digital pool of people who hobby it. Stepping in the store door, so to speak, to find that the chatter of your mind is reflected in the chatter of this horde of people bent over their tables and dice.