In Memoriam: Bard Bloom

[rowyn]

My friend Bard Bloom passed away on Saturday morning.

I knew them for a very long time. We were casual acquaintances on FurryMUCK in the early 90s. Their character, Floki, was a fixture of Furry: always around, always switching genders and appearances, with a fire theme that was sometimes obvious and sometimes just a token. I remember a few specific forms: a female anthro cat morph with a sun design, because I drew her. And the Swiss Army 'taur, which Bard hardly ever wore because they'd made the shape purely as a joke. It was a funny joke, though. Rude. But funny.

I didn't know them well in the 90s. I remember when they were in the midst of writing World Tree, because I happened to catch them on Furry at a point when neither of us were on Furry as much as we used to be, and we caught up on big recent events. If I recall correctly, I found out about them getting married to Vicki in much the same way.

I grew to know them better in the 2000s. I discovered their in-character World Tree journal, Sythyry, around 2003: after they'd been writing it for a few months. I started reading Sythyry with whichever entry was current when I discovered the journal. It was several years before I went back to read the earlier ones. I was surprised that there weren't as many as I'd expected.

I enjoyed Sythyry tremendously, and in particular the way Sythyry interacted with zir audience of "extradimensional monsters". Reading Sythyry was less like reading a novel and more like reading a diary-style blog by someone who happened to be from a fantasy world. Zie added a delightful touch of the otherworldly to my LJ feed. I drew some avatars, sketches, and paintings for Sythyry. In return, Bard gave me a guest character in the journal: Esory, a Rassimel artist to whom zie attributed my art in-character.

In 2007, Bard put up an invitation to players to participate in a 'half-assed play-by-email game to beta-test a new unfinished TTRPG' they'd put together. They expected the PBEM to fizzle out within a week or two. I joined on a whim. I'd never played a PBEM before, and didn't know what to expect.

That TTRPG was +terrible butterflies+: an unpublished roleplaying game that remains my all-time favorite system. The PBEM lasted through most of 2007, with a blazing intensity for the first few months. It's one of my favorite RP experiences, and Bard is my favorite GM ever. They had a GMing style that I tried to learn from but never really succeeded at mimicking. I loved the way they would tell players to describe the results of their actions, or to play NPCs, or to flesh out the setting, rather than controlling every facet of the game. And yet the game still very much belonged to Bard: they were the GM, in charge of the mysteries and the primary story line, as well as final arbiter of what we could and could not do.

After +tb+, Bard became one of my closest friends. We bonded over our shared love of writing, roleplaying, and the PBEM format for combining both. Over the years, we played together in many more PBEMs and attempts at PBEM, sometimes with Bard GMing, sometimes me, and a few times without a GM. Some of the games barely got off the ground and others lasted for several months. We did one game where Bard played a dragon from their books meeting a dragon from my books, in the sky over San Francisco (neither character was from Earth or knew what they were doing there). It was very silly. We followed that up with a much longer two-person-no-GM campaign where we both played dragons inspired by Bard's Mating Flight setting, but without any of the mating/marital-socio-political stuff. They were tourists/invaders on Earth. It was great.

Even when we didn't have a current PBEM (which was pretty often -- we'd start one or two in most years, but if they fizzled out quickly we didn't start another for a while) we chatted almost every day, using Google's current chat program or Discord or whatever was working at the time. Bard was much better at keeping in touch than me: they'd send a greeting pretty much every morning. (I was good about responding, though.) We talked about games and the books we were writing and what was going on in our lives.

In May of 2020, we were in the midst of a relatively new PBEM game. They were one of three active players in the "World of Lightness" campaign, a lighthearted, romance-themed game where the players were alien exchange students on Earth. Bard played a six-legged, two-winged dragon about the size of a human for that one. That was the last PBEM we got to play together. The game came to a halt after Bard was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a brain cancer.

Bard let me beta-read most of their fiction. They published several books: the World Tree RPG, Marriage of Insects, Wrath of Trees, four volumes that collected and edited Sythyry's journal, two Mating Flight novels, and Snake-Armed Girl. (I love all their work, but that last book is one of my all-time favorite novels ever. One of those rare books that surprised me with twists that were perfectly set up and fit exactly with the setting.)

Bard did not much enjoy the process of publishing books: it was a lot of effort to reach a small audience. They wrote a third Mating Flight book, Disintegration, which they serialized on Sythyry's LiveJournal account. Beyond that, they wrote several other novels where they sent installments as they were written to a handful of readers, and never published them more widely than that. Some of them I remember but can't find now: lost in the vast archive of my gmail account. A few of them I may never have seen the entirety of; I think at least once Bard finished a draft but didn't send the last chapters to me.

They left so much behind.

Most of our relationship was online, from those early days of MUCKing to emails, journals, chats, Google Docs, and other digital platforms. I am grateful for that now, because it means I have a vast trove of memories that I can dig through to remind myself of them. As I was writing this, I tracked down the serial for the third Mating Flight book, and started re-reading bits of it because it sucked me in again. Now I am re-reading the whole thing from the start: there are parts I remember well, but other things I mostly forgot.

But this was the side of Bard I saw the most: their playfulness and imagination, the way they built worlds and the joys and dooms they visited upon their characters. Their worlds were often alien -- perhaps too alien; perhaps that was why they struggled to find an audience -- and full of magic and wildness and wonder, and flaws. Always so many flaws, like their powerful, arrogant dragons inflicting casual atrocities on the small people whose autonomy they did not respect, and less-casual atrocities on their own children. Mating Flight created a setting where a single dragon could easily conquer an entire civilization -- and yet their vast combat prowess made more problems for them than it solved. One of the central themes of the story was learning to live with incurable disabilities. I don't know anyone else who portrayed so well that particular combination of 'vast power' with 'inability to resolve the problems that matter to them.'

There was so much of Bard's life that I never saw. I only saw them in person on a handful of occasions over the years. They were delightful in person, too (and I love seeing their wife Vicki and progeny Lavender as well). But I can’t really speak to what they were like as a spouse, as a parent, as a mathematician, or a software engineer.

But as a writer, they were astonishing. For the last few decades, I have often struggled to read even authors that I love. But I was always delighted to see Bard had written something new, always eager to read it. I trusted them as a story-teller, and they never disappointed me. They had a way with words that shone in every conversation, a way that was distinctively Bard. They were more likely to text something like enfolds you in their wings or wraps you in warms than a simple hug. They didn't use ordinary curse words: they'd "thwap with a frozen kangaroo tail", or other Bard-isms. They could be snarky and surreal and funny and sweet, and sometimes all of that at once.

After their diagnosis, they said often 'I'm sticking around to tell the people I love that I love them. I love you.' I said it back to them as well.

I wish I could tell them one more time.

They contained universes, and it's almost inconceivable to me that they're gone now, and most of those universes with them. As many books as Bard wrote, I know they had so many more ideas left unwritten. When they were diagnosed with cancer, they started a fantasy story that was very much a magical version of glioblastoma, and it too was amazing, despite their struggles with both typing and words after the cancer.

I miss you, Bard. I hope the psychopomps enjoy the stories you have to share, too.

Comments

[wyld_dandelyon]

Oh no!

[rowyn]

hugs

[xyzzysqrl]

Ah, that hurts to know.

I was a Sythyry follower. When that ended I drifted away, because I wasn't terribly interested in what came after it. I bought and read and enjoyed A Marriage of Insects.

I never really expected to be reading this news. I wish I wasn't reading it now.

[rowyn]

I wish it wasn't true too. v_v hugs

[falcongrrl]

Oh, this is beautiful. Thank you for sharing it.

[rowyn]

hugs

[tuftears]

*hugs* I really enjoyed the fictions of Bard's that I got to read, and playing with them from time to time! They made the world brighter, and I can only hope wherever they've gone, that place will shine more brightly next.

[filkferengi]

I'm sorry for your loss, but glad you have those decades of friendship and memories.