With people talking about Fallout now that would never have previously talked about Fallout, it's a great time to direct you to Bethesda's Vault 77 Page, which catalogs the origins of the entity known in the wasteland as The Puppet Man. There's also a lot of other text on the page, what your fifth grade teacher Mrs. Prang might have called a "primary source," which serves to situate the entire affair in that place and time. Bethesda was fully down to clown; it's a canonical vault, with item and holotape support. Seemed like it might be fun to go back.
Maybe I can trick Gabe into doing more? I'll try my hand at it. Right now I'm trying to make him finish reading my book but he's obsessed with James Clavell's twelve hundred page, 1975 novel of the late Sengoku period, "Shogun." It's roughly the length of Wikipedia. So I'll check in with him in 2026 or so.
I should have two other novels for him to read by then. I was shocked to learn how interesting and frankly fun it is to take a novel - Acquisitions Incorporated: Initiation - and then rewrite its major elements, shifting the genre substantially and revealing all these other hidden structures. I genuinely don't know which one I like better at this point; in either case, the same people or events "mean" something so different that I think for the reader who ends up reading both they'll find it quite novel - for lack of a better word. I'm not sure if releasing a base model and a romance version of the book has ever been done before, but as a process it was revelatory on my own side of the book. The original version is intended to be the first of at least two books, but I hope that enough people will like the second that this is a process I can use again.
Eventually I will have to harangue you to commit all those genuflections which allow written works to endure in the world, and to travel from reader to reader upon algorithmic wings, but that day is not today. But I would say it's not far off.
(CW)TB out.
