Geoffrey Long
Fiction

Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to tell stories. I started out writing fiction, and it's still my favorite type of writing. I've posted here synopses of some of my old works; I'm currently working on a much bigger storytelling project, which I hope to be able to share soon.

Interactive/Experimental Storytelling

A House Out of Time
Installation (2016)

A House Out of Time is a different kind of ghost story, an experiment in location-specific storytelling, tangible (artifact-centric) storytelling, and the intertextuality that drives the best transmedia storyworlds. At its center is a paper model of a haunted house, set atop a large plinth. On each side of the plinth is one of four interconnected stories set in different eras (1939, 1989, 2039, and an unnamed period). Audiences are invited to experience each story independently, reading each side's story from top to bottom, or to walk around the plinth and follow the connections between the stories to find the secret behind the house itself. Each story stands on its own, but is improved if the audience experiences it in the context of the others – the same kind of intertextal additive comprehension behind such successful transmedia storyworlds as Assassin's Creed or Halo. For more, click here.

 

The Lighthouse in the Woods
Virtual Reality Experience (2014)

The Lighthouse in the Woods is an immersive ghost story. Donning an Oculus Rift, the user finds herself locked in a windowless study as a disembodied voice tells how, one by one, the narrator's family fell victim to a mysterious curse. Portraits on the walls illuminate as each family member is introduced, dim as each one falls, and re-illuminate as they come back. The audience member can move around the room, but cannot leave it, and has no control over how the story progresses – replicating the narrator's experience of impending doom and helplessness. For more, click here.

 

Waker
Video Game (2009)

I wrote (and performed!) the story, told in interstitial animations, for this game by a group of students at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the summer of 2009. Waker is a puzzle/platform game set in the world of a child's broken dream. As the Waker, the player uses both mind and reflexes to solve puzzles, creating platforms to form a safe path through the dream worlds. Forming the paths, however, is the trick – it is up to the player to figure out how to create each path, and to manipulate the Waker and the world to travel safely through each level. As the Waker, will you awaken your dreamer, or leave her to drift forever? For more, click here.

 

 

Comics

USC World Building Media Lab, 2016

Dry City: Turning PointsDry City was a collaborative worldbuilding project for Alex McDowell RDI's World Building as Design Practice course at USC. Inspired in part by the award-winning work of Kunlé Adeyemi and his architecture, design and urbanism company NLÉ, the 2015-2016 world building class of student architects, interactive media designers, musicians, engineers, urban planners, animators, filmmakers and artists chose to focus on the Nigerian city of Lagos and its neighborhood of Makoko in the mid-2030s due to Lagos' rapid urbanization, Nollywood influence, booming economy, and growing population. Most intriguingly, Lagos now is water-poor despite being a port city on the Gulf of Guinea, an irony doubly true for the floating village of Makoko on Lagos Lagoon. The first semester course focused on Lagos in 2035, and the second semester's course honed in on Makoko in 2036 to more completely evolve the world. Each student created a character in that world and told an hour-by-hour, day-in-the-life story about that character in that world. Dry City: Turning Points was mine, an 8-page photocomic illustrated with collaged-together found online images.

Excerpts from Dry City: Turning Points and other student projects were showcased in the USC IMAX theater at the end of the fall 2015 and spring 2016 semesters, and in Kunlé Adeyemi's Silver Lion-winning Makoko Floating School replica at the 2016 Venice Biennale.

Short Stories and Novellas

Hammers
Short story (1999)

The story of what happens when the ghost of Albert Einstein joins the earth-wandering cranky god Thor on a park bench in London, and the two of them begin a pissing contest. My friend William R. Coughlan recently adapted it into a screenplay, and we're talking about how to get it made.

 

The Love of the Library
Short story (1999)

This was a short story I wrote for Valentine's Day about a romance author and the secret way that books procreate. I slipped it into Inkblots in the spring of 2001.

 

The Slow Sweet Coda of Walter Kincaid
Short story (1998)

The Slow Sweet Coda of Walter Kincaid tells the story of two old men who try and bury the axe between them after the woman that divided them passes away. Of course, they try to kill each other.

 

Green
Horror novella (1998)

Yet another ideal candidate for an episode of The Twilight Zone, this is the story of two doctors who believe that their God-given mission is to find an organic replacement for synthetic limbs. When one of them stumbles across the a chameleon-like plant in the mountains, chaos ensues. Again, they of course try to kill each other. That was kind of how my brain worked in the late 90's.