Malcolm Schmitz

The Misadventures of Sawbones and Its Menagerie Visit Amazon's The Misadventures of Sawbones and Its Menagerie Page and shop for all The Misadventures of Sawbones and Its Menagerie books. Check out pictures, author information, and reviews of The Misadventures of Sawbones and Its Menagerie

Hello, friends! I write a series of short stories called THE MISADVENTURES OF SAWBONES AND ITS MENAGERIE, about a grumpy plague-masked veterinarian and the magical creatures it helps. One part James Herriot, one part Dungeon Meshi, one part Murderbot.

Get them here:

www.amazon.com/dp/B0CPX6NHS8

Right? And it's infuriating because I love the actualfacts period!

THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS is a more interesting cosmology than 90% of contemporary fantasy, to say nothing of, like, Dante's ACTUAL conception of the Inferno!

....It saddens and scares me how hard it is to find accurate visual information about 'fun' historical periods, and it's only going to get harder with AI polluting the mix.

Like, I'm not a medievalist in any meaningful way, I know enough about the Middle Ages to know how much I don't know. But I know where to go to do research and I know how to tell Dungeons and Dragons from reality, and a lot of people just... don't.

A medieval sluice gate built into a bridge below a grand building with towers. This is a photograph of a real place, and it shows.

A time-worn medieval sluice gate at the bottom of a river.

Versus the thing I was actually searching for, which I found by changing 'water mill gate' to 'sluice gate':

A cute, whimsical miniature of a 'medieval' fantasy water mill. It's definitively not trying to be realistic- the roofs are sloped like something out of World of Warcraft, and everything is run down but in an Appealing way.

I love medieval fantasy (heck, I'm writing some), but I hate how much medieval fantasy has polluted the Google search results for anything related to the middle ages.

This is what I get when I search for "water mill gate medieval":

A book cover for "The Unicorn's Beard" by Malcolm Schmitz. The cover is designed to look like a medieval manuscript, and features two illuminated illustrations of slightly wonky unicorns. In the first picture, a shifty-looking maiden is holding a unicorn who looks a bit like a constipated muppet; in the second, a unicorn that looks a bit goatlike poses on a red background.

I finally fixed the cover for The Unicorn's Beard!

I was never satisfied with it- I got a cover off Fiverr and got exactly what I asked for, unfortunately. But I've leveled up my graphic design skills a few times (thanks, Sims) and can make my own covers, now!

Just read Stardust Family by @porochan.bsky.social - it's an incredibly haunting short manga about a world where people have to be vetted before they can raise children, and about the inspectors who vet them. It's really good and I'm keeping an eye on the 'horror one-shot' they're teasing.

Went to see Shakespeare in the Park last weekend. Going again tomorrow. If you're in greater CLE, highly recommend this take on the Scottish Play!!

Visa and Mastercard pressuring Itch.io and Valve does 'nothing to protect' women, and shock games will just be 'side-stepping the ban entirely', say affected indie devs "Cutting these women off from income streams and audiences does nothing to 'protect' them."

really good write-up of this whole situation with payment processors enabling right-wing censorship of adult games www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

There are no - absolutely zero - “legitimate” concerns about trans people in any context. THAT is the only correct answer. The entire trans panic is made-up garbage. THAT is the only thing Democrats should be pushing. Anything less is unacceptable.

Called Mastercard today.

An injury to one is an injury to all, and all that.

Oh ewwwwwwwww, I added a bunch of jazz standards to my playlist for Bright Young Things, and uh...
Today I learnt that there's a reason of "Let's Fall In Love" that's incredibly, horrifically racist! O_e

So it's just kind of in my head that Animals Georg is a standard superhero archetype. Never really thought to question it, until I was laying out the design of my Choicescript game to my partner and they were like "wait, animals? Why, though?"

"It's like flying or super-strength or invisibility or whatever. Right?"

Turns out, no, no it is not.

My siblings and I were just obsessed with Teen Titans (2003) when we were small. And my middle brother *always* wanted to be Beast Boy every time we played superheroes.

Sometimes when you're writing, you've got an assumption that you've never bothered to check, because why would you. Totally benign assumption- totally wrong.

For me, lately, that's been "animal transformations are one of the, like, default generic superpowers, right?"

Oh boy. I just finished The Dispossessed and I am having Complicated Feelings about it.

.... Mostly because this is a story about a State versus a cult.

Opinion 1: There's an art to tone in mystery writing. Too bloodless, and you lose the impact of the crime. Too grisly, and you risk tipping over into comedy or horror.

Ellis Peters is the master of this balance.

Time for the newest meme! One like, one non-political opinion.

@amaditalks.bsky.social If you want to chat about mysteries, I'm game!

I'm usually a cozy mystery kind of dude, but I've been reading a lot of Japanese honhaku-ha mysteries lately and they're an absolutely fascinating blend of Golden Age detective fiction and Gothic horror.

I am neck deep in gender/pronoun options for Bright Young Things today and boy howdy I can see why a lot of games don't even bother with a binary gender selection.
I've got *sixteen* pronoun options, and they're totally disconnected from your character's gender or lack thereof.
I'm in Heck.

Absolutely wonderful -- and well deserved -- news of IWTTO being shortlisted for Best Anthology at the British Fantasy Awards. Well done to everyone involved, and especially to Bona Books's fantastic team.

Working on the pronoun selection screen for my Choice of Games game tonight.
@gendercensus.bsky.social has been invaluable in helping me figure out where to focus my energy/what options I need to include most.
If you're planning to write something inclusive and you're not trans, USE THEIR REPORTS.

check this out: the practical magic soundtrack

I think some of it is that the narrative about the 30s is that everyone was Suffering and so no cultural change happened, because people were spending all their time on the bread line.

When the fact of the matter is, if someone's bad off enough, they might buy a movie ticket instead of a sandwich.

So far, I've stumbled over this with swing music, various forms of fashion, and now with pulp magazines.

With the added wrinkle that the story I'm writing takes place in London, so most of what I know about pulp magazines is wrong anyway.

When you're doing historical research, you will inevitably come to a moment where you realize that your mental image of a time period is several years too early.

A lot of the time, things you remember as being from "the 1920s" are actually from the 1930s, reflected through nostalgia.

It is a genuinely good game, and it's worth playing.

But that's my writing advice for the morning.

Write your stupid comedy concept with dignity. Take it as seriously as humanly possible.

Let there be puns, let there be goofs, but let your characters be deeply, achingly human.

THANKFULLY my best friend since high school gave me this game as a present, so I soldiered on, and once you get into the Dating Everything proper, the game pulls back.

It lets you take the characters seriously, on their own terms, and doesn't lampshade their character traits too much.

Combine that with the metaplot's Corporate Satire- which, I'm sorry, after Careless People it's no longer funny to me; anything you can write, the people running the world are willfully stupider, shallower, and crueler than that- and the intro left a really bad taste in my mouth.