Ian M. Rogers

Last year I proofread a script for a client’s video ad that compared the experience of using the client’s web design tool to using AI. The ad’s less than a minute long, but sums up an incredibly important principle of how we use and don’t use AI: Note: Readymag didn’t pay me to share or write this mini-essay, but the video did inspire it. Besides the actor’s amazing ability to express their impatience using just their hands, and the AI’s overly smug emojis, I like this ad because it focuses on a specific set of circumstances: After attempting to work with the AI interface and give it clear instructions, the creative person gets frustrated and gives up (“this is not working”), telling the AI that they’re looking for something that feels like it came from them and only them (“i need something that reflects my style”). As a result, the ad ends with our irritated creative putting AI away and deciding to make the website themselves. As a counterexample to this, one of the first AI controversies I saw in early 2023 involved a college-student gymnast and social media influencer who ran a paid post touting AI for writing papers

There’s no feeling quite like finishing a novel draft. Sure the novel still has a ways to go with revision and polishing and endless rereadings to make sure everything’s exactly the way I want it, and sure the novel’s still not quite ready to be shown off to friends or at a point where I can say it’s anywhere close to finished—but that feeling of I accomplished something! I wrote a fucking book! feels pretty damned good. I’ve been working on Once Upon a Complex, my third novel (technically fourth if you count my unpublished Japan novel) since last January, and I finally finished the draft earlier this month.  All told, this draft took a lot less time than the Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers draft because I didn’t take any long breaks, but it still took longer than I wanted it to because there were many weeks during the year when I couldn’t quite find time for writing.  The draft is still incredibly rough—both in terms of things like character names and technical details needing to be filled in, and in terms of scenes not flowing the way they should—but again, it’s technically finished, with a Beginning,

Last month, my family lost my grandfather, Peter E. Newman, who passed away at the age of 89. A few days after it happened, my brothers and I did a video call to check in and sort through how we were feeling. It was a complicated conversation for a few reasons—while my grandfather was a kindhearted, deeply caring man who always looked out for others (especially his family) with a great sense of humor who loved to laugh, he was also a distant, quiet, and rarely reached out to others. Often, it was hard to know what he was thinking, and we certainly didn’t know how he was feeling. My brothers and I were closer to their grandfather than most kids. When I was eight, a few years after my grandmother died, my family moved from southern Connecticut to New Hampshire to live with my grandfather and my youngest aunt, who was still in high school at the time. The move made sense for a lot of reasons: my family wanted to get out of the city and start somewhere new, and it seemed better for my grandfather and my aunt not to be alone. My grandfather lived in an

When I was in grad school, one of the things that most struck me was the way other writers, (especially the other grad students), talked about their achievements. All of them, it seemed, had a neatly canned bio listing off the magazines where they’d been published, academic positions they’d held, and, of course, awards they’d won. I found the formulaic aspects of these bios fascinating. Their components were more or less interchangeable, their lengths (always a short paragraph) never seemed to vary, and most noticeably, I never seemed to recognize most of the journal and award names. How was I to know, I wondered, whether a literary award or journal I hadn’t heard of was significant, or just some hot air to make the writer look like hot shit? When I started gathering ideas for MFA Thesis Novel, I knew right away that I wanted all of the pretentious writer characters to have their own bios—all of which would be filled with imaginary magazines, literary awards, and academic positions that would disorient readers the same way I’d been disoriented in the academic writing world. Here’s a snapshot from the first page: Kendall Warren is a recipient of the Reginald R.

It’s been nearly two months since Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers made it in to readers’ hands, and since then, people have been asking me a few different questions: How did your book launch go?How many copies have you sold?What else are you doing for book promotion?Where do things go from here? Now that things have cooled down a bit and I’ve had some time to reflect, I thought I’d give a summary of what I worked on for the launch, how it went, and where things are going from here. Carcrash Parker Launch Recap I held the book launch at my hometown bookstore, MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, New Hampshire, the Saturday after the book came out in July. I wanted something that was bigger, but not crazy big, and did a photo slide show about how the novel came to be, focusing mostly on the early Carcrash Parker adventure game project and the Glimrick-Carcrash back-and-forth between fantasy and real-world speak.  More than forty people showed up, which was VERY cool to see, and we had a solid Q&A afterward, plus people stayed to hang out, talk writing, get their books signed, and in general have a good time.

In Part 1 (which you should totally read first), I talked about how Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers began as a point-and-click PC adventure game I worked on with my best friend and fellow adventure game fan Mike Rushia. The novel version comes out July 22nd, and I’m currently taking pre-orders for the book and bonus postcard set through my webstore. Here’s the second half of the story. As the years went on, and especially when I moved to Nebraska for grad school and started working more heavily on my first novel about Japan, the Carcrash Parker adventure game just kind of….fell by the wayside. This is really common for creative projects, I think, and it happens for a variety of reasons.  In our case, Mike and I being busy adults with jobs was definitely a factor, but a bigger reason was that the project itself was incredibly large, intimidating, and went beyond our skill set, especially when it came to the art. Had we been friends with an art person, or been more savvy about finding illustrators online, this hurdle would have been less formidable. However, for us, at that time, the whole project just felt really

My second (and even more ridiculous) novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, is available for pre-order through my webstore, where you can get a signed copy and support me financially as an indie author, since when you buy directly from me, a bigger share of the sale goes to the author than if you buy on Amazon. Today, though, I want to talk about how the novel came to be, why I’ve been working on this story in some form since 2008, and how a single story can take vastly different shapes After College Ended, I Needed a Creative Project to Work On Let’s rewind alllllllllll the way to summer 2007.  I’d just finished college, and was living at home in New Hampshire, working a temporary internship with a lake protection group.  I’d also just broken up with my girlfriend, a lot of my friends weren’t around anymore, my student loans were coming due, my trusty 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme had to be scrapped due to a rusted-out brake line, and it felt like people were constantly asking me what I was going to do with my life.  When fall rolled around, my internship went from full-time to

Happy New Year, everybody. I’m writing this two weeks into 2025 after taking some time off for the holidays, spending four days in Connecticut presenting at the in-person university residency where I teach online, and in general, getting oriented to being back at my desk. It’s been a while since I updated this blog—that’s party by choice (I want to be spending my time on other things), partly by necessity (I’ve been too damned busy), and partly because I’m in transition (working on an updated version of my author page that should be up in a few months). But I still want to keep people updated, let them know what’s going on, and assure all of you that I’m still moving toward my goals. If I’m being honest with myself, though, I haven’t been moving toward them as fast or as smoothly as I’d like, and I’ve been working on some serious course correction to get myself back on track. In this post, I want to start by summarizing what I did in 2024 (a continuation of a separate year-end series I used to do), then move on to 2025, what the future holds, and how I want to get there. Enjoy! 2024 Was a Rough