I’ve written another article for D+Pad Magazine. This time it’s a preview of a web browser game called 8 Realms.
When I first got the press code for the game I realised I’d never played a browser game before. I needed some hook to help me get invested in the game. I knew what I had to do…
See the article in all it’s horrible glory at D+Pad Magazine.
I’ve been a member of the Guardian Gamesblog for many years. They were the force who inspired me to get a 360. Thanks to them I met new friends who I have daily contact with, and not just on the blog.
For a blog about games, it’s actually more “around” games, to paraphrase One Life Left. They talk about sitcoms, colanders, whisky, zombie-killing weapons and routers, always goddamn routers.
Anyway, they hold an awards ceremony each year and my brother got talking to one of their number, Simeon, who writes and edits for D+Pad Magazine. My brother pitched some articles and I realised, as awesome as that was, I should have tried getting in on that.
I brought this fact up a few weeks ago and Simeon got in touch. He asked me to review something as my audition, and here it is:
Also, because it’s great and I’ve referenced it a few times, here’s a link to my brother’s fantastic article about mundanity.
Back when my brother was unemployed for something like 51 weeks, he and I didn’t talk a huge amount. I’d ask him what he was doing about getting a job and the conversation would end.
Then he e-mailed me a review he’d written about a Japanese horror film. He titled it, “Killed by Ghosts” as it was about Ju-On, The Grudge. Then I e-mailed a review back. We went back and forth with reviews, him of at best middling horror movies and me of generally terrible ones. I’ll link up a couple of them soon.
The reviews had a conversational style which I enjoyed, and after watching a horror movie BY ACCIDENT, I had to resurrect Killed By Ghosts. This may be one last time, or it could be a thing I use on the site every now and then.
Either way, here is the review of 2010’s film: Detention
There is a disturbing man on my floor.
His face only has one expression, like he’s smelled something unpleasant, and cannot find the source.
He always sits far away, in the corner, with several empty tables separating him from the rest of us.
He was reading a book on the Third Reich.
Now he is there, and he is reading a Bible.
He will kill us all.
I saw that the latest Terrible Minds contest involved corporate abuse, and had an idea for a short piece which is actually related to the current chapter of where I’m at with my novel. I don’t know if this will be DLC or something for the book, acting as the ‘cold open’ to the chapter, or if it’ll be left to stand alone, as it hopefully does.
This is a Day in the Life of John’s Body. I am still working on NaNoWriMo, but I had to give this a go, too. My novel’s at 28,835 words currently, so I’m ahead.
I’m also trying out Movember, but less successfully than the novel. I can’t win them all, I guess.
Because writing 50,000 words in a month isn’t enough, I’ve decided to write an article about the most impressive tv pilot I’ve seen this autumn, a show from five years ago which has only recently ended: Friday Night Lights.
As far as NaNoWriMo goes, I’m up to 17,206 words, a feat which has surprised me. I’ve attended the social NaNoWriMo events and met a ton of awesome Nanites… Wrimos… whatever we’re called. Many have netbooks, similar to mine, but have eccentricities about them like not-working screens. I keep whispering to mine not to listen to the prayers and pleads that a netbook behave. I did get a sticker for hitting the 5,000 word point on a write-in this Wednesday and a set of light-up pens for winning a mini word war today. I will either use them at work to seem uber-dignified, or hand them out to my gaming group when we play WoD: Innocents to help them role play seven to elevent year old children.
I’ve been off the grid for a while, and here’s why.
In the last two weeks, I’ve had a massive shift in which novel I’m writing for NaNoWriMo. It’s changed things up, but I think I’m mostly prepared now.
THE FIRST PLAN
In NaNoWriMo last year, I saw a huge amount of fantasy novels being written, and I had an idea which was a following, then destruction of, “The Hero’s Journey”. I still intend on writing this at some point.
The book is set in my, “Fallen Kingdoms” world from an RPG I’ve been using, but in a separate location with separate people. Against the backdrop of a revolution, a fisherman loses everything he has and a noble is conscripted into a resistance to the new powers. Both are going through their own permutations of the Hero’s Journey until the inevitable clash between them. It’s all about revolution and political upheaval in a high fantasy setting, religion, madness and twisted old regimes.
It might be my next year, but I realised I wasn’t prepared enough with the middle act or the supporting cast.
MY SECOND PLAN
Point of Departure was my first NaNoWriMo book. It was just over 50,000 words and when Proofreader Steve made a couple of editing copies, one for him, one for me, I glanced at mine and felt disgust.
Much like JK Rowling in the first Harry Potter, I started with a very specific tone of voice and lost it part way through. Even worse, I changed tense ALL THE TIME. In my rush, I ruined what could have been a workable first draft.
I love PoD and the brilliantly-flawed cast. I thought that I should plan to redraft it in NaNoWriMo 2011. I know now that it’s a horror story, even though that snuck up on me the first time. I wrote on my whiteboard in giant words, “COLLECTIVE FIRST PERSON PRESENT TENSE”. That’ll make more sense next year, when I’m done with the second draft.
The thing is, I read the first 50 pages of the 300 which made up PoD and it’s not that bad. The tenses kill me, but there are so many scenes I love which I’d forgotten about. I improvised a lot of the book, with just a Kanban of the core dramatic events. Listing the scenes and events would take ages.
Then I read a Chuck Wendig article about NaNoWriMo and how this should be a Zero Draft. I realised I wanted to do the second draft of Point of Departure, but it’d take way more than a month to do.
PLAN C
About a week or two before I came to the realisation about Point of Departure, I worked out how to handle some of the timing problems and to utilise a character in another project I have, Knights 48. Originally planned as a comic or television script, the infinite budget of the imagination helps it.
Knights 48 (possibly London Knights if it doesn’t sound too much like Baywatch Nights) is the story of people who investigate the weird and keep the balance between the mundance and magical worlds.
I used to say, “Civil Servants of the Supernatural” to emphasise the mundanity of the fantastical in this world. The fairytale and the mythological exists alongside us, in our peripheral vision. We see it occasionally, but write it off as either our imaginations or we repress what it really is.
The Knights hire people who are aware of the strange and haven’t hidden or forgotten it.
JJ is a young man who foiled a bank robbery. He’s was a local hero for five minutes and everything went back to normal… just not for him. JJ saw the robbers for the monsters they were, and he took something from them. A ring which allows him to run, jump and move in ways he couldn’t before.
Izdihar “Izzy” Gardener, is a sarcastic video shop clerk who saw a troll in a business suit and started an investigation of her own. When confronted by the Knights, it turns out there’s a lot of weird in her life which she thought was completely normal, most of it lurking in the garden outside her shop.
When Knights 48 are lost in a tube station-turned-labyrinth, it’s up to these new Knights to rescue them. The only problem is that with labyrinths come minotaurs.
Set in the far-gone year of 1999, we follow the investigations of the Knights in a London both familiar and weird at the same time. Suburban wasp-people, part-bear part-owl lawyers, fairytale tower blocks and zombies in data entry await our cast. Throughout all of these smaller cases, the old and new Knights try to establish their place in this world, as well as a traitor from within their ranks.
This is the first of five books covering the secret history of the 20th century, and the changes that happen at its end.
That’s a basic blurb. My intent is that it’ll be about 70,000 words, placing it at about half of Lightning, a more reasonable first novel length and a limited series.
At the moment I have a synopsis written on an e-mail to my proofreaders, and I’m warping that a little when I put it on my whiteboard and my OCD NaNoWriMo spreadsheet which will tell me how many words I’m at each day, then how many are left, if I’m under or over par and so on. It also has a chapter/scene layout checklist and a timeline of things in the late 90’s so I know what popular culture I can or can’t reference. It disturbs me that when I came up with the idea in 2002, it was a quirk of timing which made it set at the turn of the millennium and now it’s almost a period piece. Damn, I’m old.
Still, I’ve been working myself up and getting very excited for this project. I’ve got myself an extra hour off work for the first week, and then I’m on holiday for the rest of it. I can’t wait. Come at me, novel. I’ll fight you, and I’ll win.
THE STATE OF MY NOVEL, “LIGHTNING”
My novel’s done as far as writing, proofreading and a copy edit. Now I’m in the brand new territory of having to find a literary agency to represent me. As a full-time worker who’s trying to write and find work, I need an agent. I can’t run around representing myself when I have no idea what I’m doing and have a million other things to do all at the same time.
Agents will take a cut but me earning 80-85% of the book’s money is far more than 100% of nothing, that’s my mindset. An agent will also be a voice to springboard off of as my proofreaders are non-writers who are increasingly busy and it’s not cool to pester them every day. Every other day, maybe. Neither had the stamina to join me all the way through Lightning’s copy edit at the pace I was going through it, sadly, but my goal was to be done with the edit by July, a deadline I managed to hit with gusto.
I was going to get the latest Writer’s Handbook until I bumped into an old customer of mine on the train home from work. He was always an interesting customer to talk with, being a fellow writer-type and someone who evidently thinks academically about comics. The last time I spoke with him on the train, he recommended me The Writer’s Market. He also sounded quite down on the comic industry and writing in general, I hope it was just a down day. I was secretly hyper about comic delivery day and bouncy about something to help me hunt agents, something he only helped with.
I ordered The Writer’s Market 2011 from Amazon. It got pushed back, and back again, and I kind of let it. That horrible ‘will to fail’ took over. I wouldn’t progress in anything to advance my novel because I didn’t have the book. When I realised that was what I was doing, I cancelled that order and looked for a new copy. Then I found the 2012 edition. Awesome!
Once I got it, I started to go through, creating a shortlist of literary agencies to pester and checking out the essays at the start. A fellow aspiring writer on the Guardian Gamesblog mentioned that it was depressing to go through. I get that, but I felt oddly heartened. A lot of the advice were about things I knew already, or trying to idiot-proof the process. If I’m going up against idiots vying for time with the agencies, then that’ll be great. I can do this.
My shortlist of agencies stands at 44. Any who take at least 10% unpublished writers and at least 10% novels are on the list. If they specifically do take sci-fi or young adult (the closest genres on the list) then that’s mentioned. To be honest, Lightning’s cross-genre enough that it’s fine with even being “mainstream fiction” in the list of genres.
My next step is to make a query letter. In his freakish prescience about my writing career, the one man swearpocalypse Chuck Wendig has written a piece about 25 things I need to know in writing a query letter. Which is good, as I’m struggling.
The main issues I have are with genre as it crosses a few of them. Also I want literary comparisons, when all I have are tv/film/comic ones. I’m going to try and throw words at my proofreaders, I have a giant whiteboard with a mind map mentioning all the genre conventions and aspects I want to highlight.
I have confidence in my characters and the dialogue, so I need something short and punchy enough to send off.
And that’s where I’m at with Lightning.
As I’ve been busy prepping for an RPG for a bit, today, I thought I’d unwind with a fluff piece about video games.
Here is a summation of how I feel with this new DC reboot and the comics I’ll be getting regularly.
Faked Tales 