Greg X. Graves's Blog

What’s a little speculative fiction without a bald-faced ripoff and anachronistic speculation? Imagining Game of Thrones with less imperfect, outdated information: pervasive landlines and occasional cell phones, like if Westeros was in 1995. P.S. GRRRRR Martin, please don’t sue my breeches off.

“Ned? Is that you? Can you hear me?”

The voice, even as the maester’s equipment transmutated it into signals over a wire, was unmistakable. And unbelieveable.

“Jon…Jon Arryn?”

“One and the same, my friend....

You may have trouble determining the difference between the eleven-banded and thirteen-banded chipmunk. Actually that’s a shitty example, unless you can’t count. You may have difficulty determining what type of pine tree that you’re looking at, unless you find the key differences in needle clumping and size of the acorn. That’s exactly how it is for GRRRRMartin and myself. So I wanted to share our key differences in order to determine whether you’re looking at a GRRRRRMartin or a Greg.

The food coma is over.

Mostly.

To recap: the Graves’ household had local turkey, Syracuse salt potatoes, crepes and cookies. Below is the turkey, fresh out of the oven and resting.

Soon to be punching my gut from inside my gut.

I suspect that in the postprandial minutes and hours I was more than half dinner by weight. And it took all day to make, but that was a bonus because I missed the evil part of White Christmas.

My wife is watchingWhite Christmas while I cook.I generally enjoy that movie because Danny Kaye, but can’t help but throw up in my mouth a little bit at the not-song midway through where a bunch of talented singers get together and monotonically/arrhythmically yell “SNOW” in each other’s faces while the audience gradually wishes that Kaye’s character had not saved Bing Crosby’s character at the beginning of the movie.

I will not embed so as to avoid taint, but if you hate yourself and want to...

Now I’m standing in my kitchen cooking crepes for my wife while occasionally basting the turkey. This will be a while. 15 pound turkey means plenty of time for contemplation and/or making merry with wine.

If only I had a time machine so that my life wasn’t such a crock of shit. I have been waiting literally forever for this oven to pre-heat. Entire universes have flared and died in the time that this thing has shone the foul light of failure, emblazoned with the glyph “Preheat,” glittering and sparkling in mockery of my holiday hopes and dreams.

I will admit that there is a microscopic chance that I am merely impatient rather than there is a chronological warping field around the oven. But tha...

Rhode Island packs a lot of weirdness into one efficient package: it is the home of HP Lovecraft, Buddy Cianci’s career, and gangs of huge fucking turkeys that hang out by the side of the road like backpacking hooligans.

You can see where this is going: I needed to do my bit to take another turkey off of the road. In addition to wanting to flip the bird (topical lulz) to the carbon footprint of a turkey that had been shipped across the country, I also wanted to lower the chances of turkey-rela...

Great. I share a continent with Attila. That guy’s an asshole. Do I continue researching Education or switch to Iron Working because there may soon be Huns at the gates? If I can finish Education, I can start building universities to maintain a technological advantage over the Man of Mustaches and Horse Archers. However, if Attila decides to get frisky on my borders, all of my potential university students may be too full of arrows to focus on their coursework.

Welcome to Civilization 5! It br...

Remember that authors live a glam life.

I am standing in the kitchen, above a puppy pad (clean, thank you) with my wrinkly-ass water-damaged manuscript sitting next to me on the pantry shelf, on a box of cat food. A mouse lurks somewhere in these walls. He is waiting for me to go to bed so that he can return to his game of Corrupt Sanitation Engineer. His game board is the cupboard. He makes his own pieces.

Isn’t the mouse the cat food?

On balance, however, I have peanut M&Ms so fuck the haters....

Dear Past Greg: why’d you make a category for one post? Now I have to clean that shit. Fuck you. Love, Future Greg.

Dear Future Greg: I broke your site. All that category logic? Probably broken. This was when it happened. Sorry ’bout it. Fuck you. Love, Past Greg.