What follows is an ongoing Q&A with the author of the Mrs. Quarterhorse stories. Included among the topics are familiar agonies of our times—AI, indiscriminate professional sheen, DRM (Digital Rights Management), HTML gremlins, and the reckless use of the dreaded f-word.

Strictly speaking, this site is a blog—it is made using Blogger and will occasionally be used for posts in the ordinary blogging sense. Generally speaking, however, the site is not a blog—rather, an online home for specific stories, comics, and short movies. Since these projects are often enormous, some taking years to complete, the site might at times appear to be dead. It is not. It merely takes very long breaths. Many works appear here in truncated forms. Such are generally contained within posts, not pages, and usually end with a tongue-in-cheek “the full text is available by appointment only.” In truth, although the presented snippets have been duly fussed-over, the full texts of the works they’re snipped from are so rough they will likely never see the light of day! And it is worth noting that posting dates here are meaningless. Work continues on both posts and pages all the time. At any given moment, the oldest might actually be the most recent! Some works appear in their entire...

The beating heart of Mrs. Quarterhorse resides nearly exactly in the middle of the story, and consists of a simple, unremarkable description of an everyday action: “She then picked a ladybug out of her hair, carried it to the back door, and released it onto a nearby branch.”

Traces of a Benevolent Face is a 12 minute animated story about two sisters enjoying an ordinary day about town. They set out to visit their favourite haunts: a used bookstore for bedtime reading, a grocery store for afternoon lunching, and a cinema for a dinosaur movie matinee. An accident interrupts their routine, and the thunderstorm to follow forces them to abandon the cinema to seek shelter in an open and seemingly empty church.

This ridiculous game requires an explanation. It started as a pleasant diversion. I needed a break from my everyday writing, I'd come across Twine , and I thought it might be fun to write a very short interactive story. Oedipus came immediately to mind as a good starting point, since the Oedipus tragedy is tied into my Mrs. Quarterhorse stories; and even if it wasn't, Oedipus is a perfect foil for a text adventure, since the point of an interactive story is that the reader can choose their own destiny, whereas the point of the Oedipus legend is that our destinies are inescapable!

City of Headstones is the most recent title of an old story that resurfaces whenever the author feels like mangling an already thoroughly mangled text. It had been intended originally as a novel, briefly accepted its fate as a mere short story, but now, headstrong after receiving its own header graphic, prefers to be called a novella . It would also prefer no one even know its original title was The Plague of Hyenas . A bit full of itself, don't you think?

Phantoms in Egypt is a fragment of a story never completed. It would have told of a Helen who never arrives in Troy—a Helen abducted by the gods and abandoned on Neptune, while a phantom Helen absconds in her place with the Trojan prince, Paris. On Neptune, the real Helen fills her lonely days playing in a similarly abandoned amphitheatre, or standing wistfully atop a cliff looking out to sea, waiting for her husband, Menelaus, to arrive to bring her home.

A young man born into wealth is our protagonist, and he spends his days, as we all do, observing the world around him. But despite having the wealth to buy a world as big as he likes, our protagonist's world remains small, no greater than the bounds of his house—a big house, bigger than most, but since his idle roamings never extend beyond the exterior doors, his understanding of the world remains, like his world, in quantity at least, impoverished. His observations eventually settle on particular guests in his home, a Count and Countess who, unlike him, have lived their lives well out in the world, and further still outside their means.

Meanwhile Not Far Away on the Moon is a 542 page, year-long, stream-of-consciousness doodle, created for no greater reason than to keep my hands occupied while I edited the text of several novels (the first two Mrs. Quarterhorse books) by ear. I mention this here because I'd be embarrassed to show the resulting comic without a disclaimer! Please don't think of it as a finished work, it is barely a first-draft! The text is lumpy, the jokes are poorly timed, new characters appear on the fly without a thought to their appearance, the tone is inconsistent (at least at the beginning; it does eventually fall into a groove), and since I added at least a page a day regardless of inspiration, expect many uninspired pages. At least one page is downright inexplicable. A day best forgotten, most likely.

The parallel stories of Princess Ariadne and the god Dionysos eventually intersect to provide a satisfying conclusion to Maidens and Bulls . Not narratively satisfying, that is, more like the satisfaction that comes from ridding your house of fruit flies. While the book features many maidens, true to its title, they share the stage with only one-and-a-half bulls. The half-bull is, of course, the Minotaur. Theseus, unsurprisingly, also appears, along with other characters familiar to scholars of ancient Greek legend: King Minos, McTeague the sea captain, a hippie called Peas, and a severed spaceman head.

Our Squalid Century  is a six minute dash through an oeuvre, let's call it, that plays better as a quick series of images than it does as a body of work.

The characters of Justine, Blanche, and Lily return in what was meant to be a modest follow-up to Wild Flowers Animal Gods , but wound up taking just as long (two years) to create. In this new story our sisters share a basement apartment at the end of a busy city street, directly behind a newly erected work of public statuary. Justine is the only one of the three to recognise the latent threat in their bronze neighbour, and so while Blanche works on her scales and Lily empties a box of breakfast cereal, Justine races with the setting sun to create a charm to secure their door from supernatural invasion.

This is the story of three slaves of a wicked high priest in ancient Egypt who are entombed along with their dead master, and are thereafter witness to the judgement of his soul, and, eventually, become inadvertent participants in his prosecution.

This story begins with a fairly simple statement of purpose but goes on to largely ignore that purpose. Orpheus and Attila doesn't tell a coherent story of any kind, the author is willing to admit; but, to quote, "it makes me laugh." It is the author's contention that the most downcast stories are written by the most upbeat authors, and vice-versa. Unhappy people tend to write happy stories. Happy people, conversely, are the villains responsible for all the bleak, soul-crushing fiction out there. Goth kids, for instance, while refusing to admit it, are usually the best adjusted, happiest kids. Smiling kids, cheery kids, those are the ones hanging by a thread. So it goes with authors. The consistently funny and upbeat tone of Orpheus and Attila , then, speaks of an author who must have been uncommonly miserable!

Everyone dreams of getting away —getting  away from where they are, physically, mentally, perhaps even getting away from all that we collectively call reality. The Last of the Twentieth Century is about such an escape. First by car, then by crashed jet, then by mobile home, then by train, and finally by boat.

One might reasonably ask why a story about An Icy Golden Hoard would have the subtitle: A Space-Age Tale of Silver and Steel? Gold or silver, which is it? This isn't a rhetorical question, the answer is gold . Furthermore, the author, forced to reckon with the subtitle, can offer no explanation for the reference to silver beyond alliteration.