TITLE Leonard's Writing
I write professionally and non-. If you'd rather do something than sit
around and read, check out Crummy Features or
Software Calculated to Drive you Mad.
Weblogs
And other ongoing concerns.
Nonfiction
Books
RESTful
Web Services (O'Reilly, 2007). With Sam Ruby.
Ruby
Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2006). With Lucas Carlson. 2007 Jolt Awards Finalist
Beginning Python (Wiley, 2005). Co-author.
Article-length
Technical papers and presentations
Miscellaneous
Fiction
"Expect great things from Leonard Richardson." —Cory Doctorow
Novels
Constellation Games. A novel about space aliens and video games. 2010. Seralized by Candlemark & Gleam starting November 2011.
Short Stories
- "Found Objects" - How do you sculpt space junk? 2011. Bonus story for Constellation Games.
- "Dana no Chousen" - My blood-soaked tribute to GameCenter CX. 2011. Bonus story for Constellation Games.
- "Maxwell's Succubus" - Everything they told you about D&D is true. 2011. Unpublished.
- "Four Kinds of Cargo" - Space opera about space opera. 2011. Unpublished.
- "The Day Alan Turing Came Out" - Shameless wish fulfillment. 2009. Published October 2010 in Retro Spec.
- Thoughtcrime
Experiments (editor): an anthology of other peoples' amazing
fiction. 2009. Self-published.
- "The Highest Bidders" - Alien invasion in the age of
NAFTA. 2008. Unpublished.
- "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" - Exactly what you think it
is. 2008. Published 2009 in
Strange Horizons.
- "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" - Science fiction about
fantasy about science fiction. 2008. Unpublished.
- "The Sterile Area" - Ballardian security theatre. 2008. Unpublished.
- "The Eyes of Ceres" - Golden Age-style semihard SF. 2007. Unpublished.
- "Vanilla" - Mundane space opera. 2006. Unpublished.
- "Mallory" - Mundane
cyberpunk. 2005. Published 2008 in Futurismic.
- "Jake Berendes West
Covina" - 2000. Subversion through fiscal policy. Self-published.
- "Grunion Time" - 1997. Magical
realism without the magic. Incoherent but very
short. Self-published.
Short-short
A lot of very short one-off fiction goes into News You
Can Bruise. Here's some of it.
Bagatelles
Miscellaneous short-form stuff, some of it pretty old.
- In 2004 I co-wrote some one-off comics
(1
2
3)
and a storyline for Kris Straub's webcomic Checkerboard Nightmare. This one is surely the best.
- Some comics created under constraints from NYCB readers: "'Kangaroo' Jack Masters in Caution: Filling Is
Hot!". Constrained Cat and Girl fan comics: "In the Black", "The Best Strategy",
"Going Outside".
- Another travelogue, of my trip to PyCon 2003.
- Tonight's Episode:
Show titles for a long-running, pop-culture-obsessed police procedural. When it
jumped the shark, the shark jumped back. R.I.P.
- Doctor Virtual's Cyber-Couch
matches the Internet's collective unconscious with the Internet's
favorite psychiatrist. 3 episodes.
- Behind the Firewall, an essay on
having one's open source software being made proprietary. Written
while the pain was still fresh.
- Reddish Purple vs. Bluish Purple,
a superior visualization of the 2000 presidential race. Much more
sophisticated visualizations were available by
2004.
- Make Dan
Complain, a fun game to be played with my one-time roommate Dan Helfman.
- My less successful,
incomplete travelogue of my trip to a Linux World Expo in 1999. At
this point I stopped doing big complicated travelogues.
- My epic travelogue of a 1998
trip to Texas, with pictures. This piece marks a turning point for
my writing, where I began to rely less on obscure references and
wordplay and more on...whatever I rely on now.
- Do you dare uncover The Forbidden
Secrets of crummy.com?
- Jack in the Box and the
International Christian Conspiracy, from 1998 when Crummy still
had pretensions of being a general humor webzine. Despite my best
efforts this article has not started any kind of urban legend.
- The Deficient Adventures of Captain
Planet, a five-page collaborative comic book by me and
Kristofer Straub. 1997.
- The Race For The White House, a satirical
photoessay I did for my high school paper in April 1996. Still pretty funny.
The Work of Others
Finally, a few works by other people that I've put up for everyone to
enjoy.