The Grey Ledger Society

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The Intrepid

The Cat's Miaow - When You Smiled And Turned Away

Being the long-winded rambler that I am, I've also got a soft spot for those who are able to walk it, say it, and wave toodles. Particularly in music, where the feat of cramming four or more good songs on a 45 RPM 7" single draws

Vests in the Crown

An eight-encounter scenario for THE ROUSE The Premise Thirteen days ago the Home Office made ectoplasm treasure. Tomorrow at 10 a.m. a coroner decides whether a mother's freezer is full of Crown property or full of her son. The Treasure (Designation) (Revenant Exudate) Order folds the

Yes, and I Don't Know, and...

Notes from a million-word accident While walking Delia, I found myself wondering whether The Grey Ledger Society had developed an essence. Not a mission statement, exactly, but some recognizable disposition toward the world. Could I identify it? Could I build a sort of funnel through which my conversations with

Love for Sale

What a record keeps, what it loses, and who carries it forward A recording outlives the transaction that made it, and goes on passing through the hands of people who had nothing to do with making it. Each handoff keeps something, alters something, and drops something. The musicians, it turns

The Company a Song Keeps

A Bit of Finger About a month after taking a sliver off my right forefinger with a mandoline slicer, I started playing again. Fingerpicking still hurt, so I reached for Nancy's short-scale Mustang bass and a pick. Before long, the descending figure from Nick Drake's

Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)

A setting for use with The Black Hack (v1.2) The Brief Independent crews haul cargo between mining stations, colonies, and depots in a lightly settled system. Ships are old and loans are large; a late delivery can cost a crew its ship. Law obliges any vessel to answer a

Rasputin, the Chatbot, and the Dog Who Got Away

People prefer a figure. A dynasty is hard to inspect. A monk is easy to point at. Antony Beevor’s account of the last Romanovs is, among other things, a warning about that preference. The empire he describes is already a suspension bridge in disrepair: an unreformed autocracy, a war

The Roused

A Mörk Borg calendar for the membrane The apocalypse is not a dragon. It is a filing error that becomes true. Britain looted haunting and could not contain it. R Unit wrote the dead onto a duty roster. The Unit died. The shop bought the roster. The membrane between the

Ten Sides to This Tale

Once upon a time. It was close to two in the morning at a club I won’t name, and the man on the bandstand had three horns in his mouth at once. The fellow next to me — a serious type, the kind who reads the personnel listings before he

Catastrophe As a Play Stage

The other day, while reading Antony Beevor’s Rasputin, I had the thought that the last days of Imperial Russia would make an excellent MÖRK BORG setting. This is, admittedly, not the most dignified response to civilizational collapse. There was something immediately legible about it, though. The weak autocrat. The