Writing

This book collects my poems so far. Written over more than two decades, they explore life in all its hues, dark and light and the rainbow in between:

A marionette’s dream, a pair of sonnets, a bayou tragedy, whirling donuts, nocturnes and nightmares, encounters in the dark and in sunlit moments…

Above and through all of it shimmers the greatest thing of all: the Land of Youth & Beauty — the magic theatre we enter when we love and feel truly loved.

“This happened when the world was young and love could never die, when the skies flamed every morning and it rained every night…”

Available as a hardcover and an ebook. 142 pages.

My first collection of short stories. Written over a period of many years, they explore many fields:

Prose poetry, youthful night adventure, introspective science fiction, philosophical horror, chaptered dream exploration, humorous biographical detective fiction, seafaring sequel to one of a very young H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, fragments…

Available as a hardcover, a paperback, and an ebook. Starting with this book, all my future ebooks will be print replica (facsimile) editions, preserving all the formatting and other presentational aspects of the print editions.

348 pages with an afterword plus some reflections and dates for each story.

A collection of 124 of my short non-fiction writings from over the years. With the books in this series, you can never know what the next confection-sized, elegantly crafted chapter will be about. Available as a hardcover, a paperback, and an ebook.

The first in a series of books with each volume featuring 124 sharp chapters on things and people that have brought warmth and meaning into the author’s life and that he wants to help others discover. A light, refreshing treasury of appreciations, thoughts, anecdotes, memories, observations, dreams, recommendations, love letters, and humorous asides, all crafted to nourish and maybe even inspire your own creativity.

The hardcover, paperback, and ebook of the Season 1 transcripts of my podcast What Now with Simo are on Amazon. In addition to the transcripts this book also includes an introduction and some footnotes.

The hardcover, paperback, and ebook of the Season 2 transcripts of my podcast What Now with Simo are on Amazon. Again featuring an introduction and notes, plus a bonus chapter on The Ray Bradbury Theater.

You Never Know What You’ll See in the Haunted Garden, Vol. 1 introduces us to the Haunted Garden with a series of visions. Vol. 2: The Mystery of the Chessboard Circus involves Rex the retired game actor, Pregnant Horse of Lascaux, and Alannah the butterfly in an adventure where the visions find form in a series of events. Vol. 3…?

Before I started publishing and releasing my own works, I wrote and did other types of text work for four internationally released games:

• Jane Jensen’s Gray Matter (2010),

• Kids Learn Spelling and Grammar: A+ Edition (2012, for the Nintendo DS handheld console),

• Galaxy on Fire: Alliances (2013), and

• Serena (2014).

My MobyGames profile doesn’t yet feature all these credits, so in order to learn fully about my contributions to each title, please connect with me on LinkedIn to see all the details. In summary:

• Gray Matter: additional writing (loading screen texts, a scientific article on the brain — here my psychology studies came in handy — and book titles) and checking all in-game texts: proofreading and conforming the subtitles to the final recorded lines of dialogue. I also performed quality assurance, submitting several hundred bug reports.

• Kids Learn Spelling and Grammar: A+ Edition: I was the main writer for this English adaptation for the North American market of what was originally a game for learning German. Since the particular learning challenges of these languages are very different, this meant writing most of the texts in the game from scratch.

• Galaxy on Fire: Alliances: with this game I was involved only in the early concept stages, during which I came up with the basis for an alien language and wrote a whole short story that has so far never been published, called “The Rise and Fall of the Old Ones”. Since I don’t own this intellectual property — the game or any work that went into it — I’m not sure about the legal status of this story in terms of publishing.

• Serena: here I made my greatest and most personally fulfilling writing contribution out of these games. I was part of a team of four writers and wrote more than a third of the dialogue, a mysterious four-verse poem, and two letters. I later published the poem, “Oisín and Niamh”, in my book Land of Youth & Beauty: Early Poems. Finally, I revised all texts for consistency together with designer, lead writer, and team leader Agustín Cordes. In this game I also planted the first appearance of the title of my upcoming screenplay, Dream of Snow.

All four images copyright © the respective owners. Used here only for purposes of illustration.