Snow (30/11/10)

Posted in Critical Failures

7am. Snow. Global warming is a lie.

8am. Snow. Wishing I’m not going to work today.

10am. Snow. Apparently I’m NOT going to work today.

11am. Snow. Sticking needles into Al Gore dolls and wishing I hadn’t invested in UK Tropical Orchards Ltd.

12am. Snow. Realising that, tomorrow, we’ll be *prepared* for snow. Which means the local school will be closed, even though the roads have been cleared.

1pm. Snow stops. So that means everything will melt and freze again and be ice. Yay.

2pm. Realise that ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change’ for a reason. Stop sticking needles into Al Gore dolls.

3pm. Snow now making up for lost time. Blizzard. Just in time for walk to school. Yay.

4pm. Snow. Stagger home from massive snowball fight. Playground full of children and a good few parents too. Freezing. Sodden. Happy.

Yay for snow.

Poppies (9/11/10)

Posted in Critical Failures

I shall be wearing a red one on Thursday. I wrote a long post into the whys and the wherefores, and then I read it and realised it was, by and large, bollocks. Really, it comes down to a pretty simple thing. Killing other people sucks. There’s no such thing as a good reason for setting out to do it. To anyone. There might be understandable reasons or rational reasons but there aren’t any good ones. None.

Normal service will be resumed next week. This may well involve a rant at my editor :-)

End.

Of Hoods and Men (28/9/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

booksinthewild-TTA

Berren: ‘Ere, look. No one’s using this site right now. We could squat here for a bit.

Syannis: Oh, for pity’s sake. Can’t we just go home?

Berren: But there’s snuffers!

Syannis: Right. So I kill them. Sorted.

Berren: But I like doing sneaky stuff.

Syannis: Get that hood off. You look like an idiot.

Berren: Everyone else is wearing hoods these days. It’s a fashion statement.

Syannis: No it’s not. It’s ooo-ooo, look at me, I’m all dark and sinister. I have, like issues and stuff.

Berren: You mean like you.

Syannis: Stupid boy. I don’t have issues. I have a deep simmering rage that burns for revenge on those who stole my kingdom and butchered my family. That’s not issues. Issues is having a big sister who humiliates you with cutting sarcasm. Or parents who’ll only buy you a cheap second-hand car when you’re old enough to drive instead of a brand-new 4×4 like all the rich kids have. I don’t have issues – you’re the one with issues.

Berren: Me?

Syannis: You’re the one who wants to skulk about wearing a cloak and a hood all the time, loudly proclaiming to the world how sinister and dangerous you think you are, even though you’re not.

Berren: And you won’t let me!

Syannis. Exactly. That’s what I mean. You have issues.

Berren: You kill people for a living. That’s not having issues?

Syannis: No. That’s a job.

Berren: Er… Threehands? You remember Threehands?

Syannis: (pausing) That might have been a little over the top.

Berren (smugly): See. Issues.

Syannis: Look, just because I’m a bottomless lake of acid anger and resentment with a dark undertow of bitter vengeance, that’s different. And even if it isn’t, just because I’m a bit crotchety…

Berren (spluttering): A bit crotchety?

Syannis: … doesn’t mean I want everyone to know about it. You hood-and-cloak youngsters, it’s a fashion statement, that’s all it is. OOOooh… I don’t care about social values and conformity and fitting in and tedious crap like that, no, I have to be different and I have to make sure the world knows that I’m different and scary and filled with troubles. Ooooh, I’m so dangerous.

Berren (under his breath): Goes down well with the ladies though.

Syannis: What?

Berren: A bit of danger. A bit of edginess. Has an allure, doesn’t it? And attraction, eh? (under his breath again) not that you’d know about any of that.

Syannis: You mean, you set yourself up as a loose cannon who’s on the edge, who might turn into a psycho nut-job at any moment, who’s driven by dark desires he can’t entirely control, who’s probably an obsessive borderline stalker, just might turn out to be a rapist or an axe-murderer but more likely will end up dead in a ditch with a knife in him like the sad loser he actually is under all that facade, and women like that?

Berren: (points silently to the urban fantasy and paranormal romance section)

Syannis: Oh for pity’s sake… This site sucks. I don’t know why we even came here. I’m going home.

Berren: Don’t forget your hood!

Syannis (leaving): Boy!

Berren (running after him): I’m just saying you might get laid more…

A Parting of Ways (31/8/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

This week’s post isn’t about books. It’s not about the state of the world. Today I need to talk about something much more personal, more intimate. I need to talk about the break-up of a relationship that’s been with me for a very long time, for a decade and then some. A relationship that was once filled with love, but which, if I am honest, has become tired and drab and has lived off  its memories for years. Something I need to get out of my system.

So.

Dear Ben and Jerry

We’ve been together such a long time. that it’s hard to believe there was a time before we met. I remember it, though. I was a single guy who liked to sit down on an evening from time to time and watch some TV, or maybe a movie with a little company. I wasn’t picky about that. A bag of cheesy nachos one week, maybe some salted cashew nuts the next, or maybe a small trifle. I guess I wasn’t the sort for a long-term commitment, or at least that’s what I thought. I played the field. And then I met you. I’ll never forget the flavour your wore for our first evening together. ‘Chocolate Fudge Brownie’, I think it was, but that was mere foreplay. With ‘Pulp Addiction’, you seduced me deep into your creamy folds. With ‘From Russia With Buzz’, we should have been together forever.

But then you changed. For a while, I thought you’d left me, but then you came back, dazzling and renewed. With ‘Dublin Mudslide’, and my tongue yearned for nothing else. I thought we were the perfect couple. All those evenings we sat together on the sofa. And yes, there were children, and they took their toll, but they would have loved you too, in time. In fact, I’m pretty damn sure they would have loved you too. Let’s face it, they’re not exactly picky.

You haven’t had those flavours for me for a long time now. Sure, you came up with some others. ‘One Sweet Whirled’, ‘Bohemian Raspberry’, but they weren’t the same. It hasn’t been the same for a long time. Who are we kidding? We’ve moved apart, so far apart that you’re not even the first thing I look for in the freezer aisle any more.

You don’t excite me any more. Maybe it’s me that’s changed, but I’m fairly sure it’s you. The list of ingredients pretty much gives you away there. I don’t suppose you even care now, but it’s over between us. I have to move on. I have a new sofa-desert in my life now.

Goodbye.

Ultimate Fantasy Cover Art (24/8/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

Abercrombie, Charlton, Sanderson, Newton, you think you and your swanky new covers look so goddamn pretty, but pretty is a relative thing…Master of the Obvious

I don’t know who the artist is, but I’d like to shake him by the hand.

Dear Activist (10/8/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

Twice in the last few weeks I’ve come across the phrase “This is the fault of governments” while browsing otherwise interesting and thought-provoking articles on the internet. There is a risk, if I see it again, that I may poke myself in the eye with something sharp just to relieve the pain. What made it particularly painful was that, in both cases, the point being made was otherwise lucid, well-researched, references were given to source material to back up its assertions and one with which I happened to strongly agree. Hurrah! Fill the internet with intelligent, well-reasoned SOLUTIONS to the problems of the world. More please!

But “This is the fault of governments.” makes me want to rant and shout. Aside from the obvious retort (if it’s the fault of governments then quick, let’s get rid of them. Replace them with, er…some anarchy, yeah, that’ll work. Phew, the environment sure dodged a bullet there), what, exactly, makes up a government? People, that’s what. And who votes for a government? That would be people again. Who chooses to run for office? Yep, people. Who implements their decisions? Who abides by the rule they set down? Who enforces them? Er, that would be some more people again. That would be us. So when I get to “It’s the government’s fault,” or “the government is responsible,” or some such, I’m left with this powerless feeling. Y’know, that I can’t do anything, even if I want to. Which is bollocks.

The injustices, the short-sightednesses, the selfish evils, they are the fault of people[1]. But when we have a point to make, we don’t say that. We blame the government, or some other remote body (also made up of people). It’s the first rule of propaganda to reduce all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’, ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. Them (the government) bad, us (you and me) good and it really ticks me off whenever I see it. WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT, or at least that’s the principle that’s supposed to underlie a democracy, isn’t it? So STOP TRYING TO MAKE OUT THAT I’M NOT.

By following the first rule of propaganda, we are telling people that they aren’t in charge of their destiny. We blame distant politicians and bureaucrats, whose choices may well have little to do with what ‘we’ think or want, but they are still our responsibility. Blaming ‘the government’ over and over is convenient and easy and hardly likely to start a pub fight, but it has a hidden message: Repeat after me: It’s the government’s fault. Not your fault. Them, not us. We are not them. They are not us. No wonder everyone feels so disenfranchised. The subtext of almost every piece of political propaganda from whatever part of the spectrum you care to examine is that ‘the people’ and ‘the government’ are different things. And they’re not [2]. Blaming the government seems to me to be a license for general apathy and aimless discontent. ‘They’ are in charge, ‘we’ have no say in what happens, life’s not too bad (for most of us), so what’s the point in rocking the boat? Lo and behold and look around. Is it simply that you know that you’re only preaching to the converted? Because if it is, that’s pretty sad, and not just for you.

I guess this outcome happens to suit some people. But you, dear activists out there, I don’t think you’d count yourself as part of that happy clique. So why do you keep doing it?

End of rant.

[1] So are a lot of good things, but for some reason we don’t seem to hear nearly so much about those. Which is a shame.

[2] In any country with a reasonably honest democratic process for electing one, anyway.

[3] Although if it was down to me they would be and the Dalai Lama would become dictator-for-life with supreme and unchallenged power across the globe. However, that’s a rant for another day. For now, just make sure you never vote me any kind of worthwhile power. I don’t want it and you wouldn’t like what I did with it.

Cake And Orange Juice (15/6/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

I was at a children’s party over the weekend. The Sithlings get invited to enough that I have a pretty shrewd idea what to expect, but for those of you who don’t know, it goes roughly like this:

Most of the children will know each other. They are all ‘friends,’ although being children, they will occasionally have fallings out over nothing much and acts of random meanness may occur. Little alliances are routinely formed and then broken. However, to start with, none of this matters. Energy levels are high. Excitement fills the air. The odd little setback or contretemps is quickly resolved and forgotten.This lasts for about fifteen minutes, the exploration-of-the-new-environment stage. There may be a few minor upsets, trips, falls, random acts of perceived injustice and so forth during this time, but they are isolated and quickly repaired.

This is what we parents (behaviour regulators in the normal course of things) think of as Golden Time: They’re all off playing together, doing whatever they do that generally seems to involve lots of running and climbing and shouting, but that’s all fine because they’re doing it without any supervision, and there are few words more glorious to the parent of a small child than ‘without supervision.’

Play continues, increasingly more frantic and manic games develop as they bolt on more and more ideas to whatever basic aliens-vs-predators or plants-vs-zombies game they started out with. Restraint falls away; everyone’s playing flat-out, all striving to be the loudest, the best, the leader, the strongest, getting more and more excited and more and more hyper on less and less energy.

Eventually the inevitable happens, somewhere around the hour-and-a-quarter mark. Someone trips someone else up.  Someone’s invisible friend says something to someone else’s invisible friend. Someone gets thumped. Someone pushes someone. The shouting turns to tears and the next thing you know there’s a whole gang of children shown up all crying and pointing and telling you who did what to whom and how no one is their friend any more and how they want to go home and mope in their room all day listening to My Chemical Romance, only emerging during the hours of darkness.

No, wait, that last bit comes later.

So their little worlds go from utopia to horror-filled nightmare-of-social-injustice in the space of a minute. But fortunately, we are prepared, because we know this is going to happen. So we sit them down around a table. Ten minutes of calming down, a slice of cake and a big glass of orange juice and they’re ready to again.

Anyway, we were having our peace and quiet before the inevitable crash. I was sat with a friend I haven’t seen for a little while who does stuff to do with money, so I asked him what I’ve been asking everyone who can spell ‘bank’ of late: Where did the money go?[1]

We reckon it went roughly like this:

Most of the bankers will know each other. They are all ‘friends,’ although being bankers, they will occasionally have fallings out over nothing much and acts of random meanness may occur. Little alliances are routinely formed and then broken. However, to start with, none of this matters. Energy levels are high. There’s lots of shouting and waving bits of paper. Excitement fills the air. The odd little setback or contretemps is quickly resolved and forgotten.

Eventually the inevitable happens. Someone trips over a string of bad debts. Someone pushes someone. Everyone’s invisible moneyfriend falls out with everyone else’s invisible moneyfriend. The shouting turns to tears and the next thing you know there’s a whole gang of bankers shown up all crying and pointing and telling you who did what to whom and how no one is their friend any more and how they want to go home and mope in their room all day listening to My Chemical Romance, only emerging during the hours of darkness.

Seven trillion pounds. Most expensive cake-and-orange-juice ever.

[1] I once had this silly naïve little thought that banks ran short of money when they lent it to people and didn’t get it back. But no. We’re talking about stuff that’s not actually real, but serves a useful purpose as a psychological prop. That sort of money. So, in essence, they run short of money when their invisible friend falls out with someone else’s invisible friend. And that, I’m afraid, is as good an explanation as most of us are ever likely to get.

Racing to Twarmageddon (2/6/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

I think I came close to some sort of mental collapse when Guilliermo del Toro quit The Hobbit. Not because of the event itself (bad enough), but because everyone, EVERYONE had to announce it. Even days later, my twitterstream was still reading something like this:

eastingspaghettibolognaisetonightDELTOROQUITSHOBBITfacebooksucks DELTOROHOBBITSHOCKisrealiskillsomemorepeoplebutnoonecares GUILLIERMODELTOROTOLEAVEHOBBIT!!!

Alright already. Can I not mourn in peace? Fortunately the Twitter servers didn’t collapse into an information black hole, there was no naked banality unprotected by a sense horizon and the four 140-character horsemen of the twapocalypse didn’t emerge to systematically convert the world to moronic matter at a subatomic level. Although I gather it was a close run thing.

Anyway…

I’ve been playing a Shadowrun game on and off for the last couple of months while our regular GM moves house, sorts his plot out and my Diamond Cascade posts catch up with where we’re actually at. Shadowrun, for those who don’t know, is a point’s based game which allows you to take certain inconvenient character traits in exchange for better skills at stuff. Things like having a bomb in your head that will explode when someone yells ‘Oi! Dickface!” at you, for example. Everyone should have one of those. Particularly people who drive Audis and BMWs. They should have really big ones [1].

Anyway, I’m a mathematician. Presenting someone like me with the opportunity to min-max a system I’ve never played before is a bit like going up to a crackhead, giving them a big lump of crack and then asking very nicely if they’d mind just looking after it for a bit and not smoking it. Fortunately this is a system that doesn’t allow you to go completely mental and end up with an immobile brain-in-a-jar with enough psychic powers to dissolve an entire planet into its component atoms every twelve hours or so (I miss you, Champions, I really do). So I have a media addiction. My character must spend two hours a day, every day, mindlessly surfing the internet. For this, I have earned myself half an extra point of charisma. Or logic. Or intuition. Or something. What a race of supermen we could become if the real world worked like that too, instead of the other way round.

[1] Sorry Dave [2]

[2] Yes, it did occur to me that you’d end up blowing yourself up too. Sometimes that seems like it would be worth it.

Be The Dragon (24/5/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

Someone complained that there hadn’t been a Critical Failures post for a while (totally neglecting the awe-inspiring poetry of Wu-Tome Clan, I note). Well fine. You want rant. Have rant. It’s a slow news week anyway. Mostly what I’ve done is write a prologue for The Warlock’s Shadow, been very pleased with it, realised that it’s not absolutely essential and will therefore feel the wrath of my prologue-hating editor[1] and then hit myself around the head with a brick a few times.

Ha! Well the prologue in Order of the Scales is cunningly disguised as a chapter. If that doesn’t work, I’ll cunningly hide it as a flashback somewhere on the middle. Cut my prologue then, mister editor…

This wasn’t supposed to be about prologues. So I guess so far this has all been a …

<snip>

Right. Characters. That was where I was supposed to be going. Sometimes people ask whether there is any part of me in my characters, but I think that asks the question the wrong way round. Yes, obviously there has to be and there are parts of what I see in other people and so on and so forth and buy me a beer at a convention and we can talk about that for hours. But what about the other way round? No one ever asks that, but the should! My characters, they sneak out of the page and into me, you see. They affect my thinking. I can spend a few days writing about a grumpy world-weary amoral sell-sword and I start turning into a grumpy, world-weary, amoral . . .

Oh. Right. Maybe that’s not such a good example.

In all seriousness, though, they do. I slip in and out of the heads of my characters to write them and every time, I come away with a little bit of them inside me. I take the point of view of an alchemist for a few days, I start wringing my hands about how short-sighted people are. I take the point of view of a sell-sword for a bit, I’m exactly the person I was wringing my hands about only a few days before. I write a chapter as the Night Watchman, and suddenly I’m the household sergeant-major. I exaggerate, of course, but it’s true – they do all leave a little mark when I’m with them that takes a little time to fade. Wierd, huh?

So there’s the Order of the Scales. Back to working on that, I am. Polishing and making shiny. And if there’s one thing it’s got more of than the first two books, it’s dragons. As in time spent in the company of and sometimes sharing the thoughts of.  Be the dragon, that’s what I want. They don’t think like people. Humans are food, barely significant at all to a woken dragon. I’m going to be in that head a lot for the next month. So if you talk to me before the end of June and I’m all ‘HUMANS ARE A CONTAMINATION OF THE EARTH AND SHOULD ALL BURN,’ that’s just a bit of dragon I’ve brought back with me. DO NOT BE ALARMED. Just don’t, whatever you do, spill barbeque sauce over yourself.

Oh, and in July and August I’ll be spending most of my time as a randy teenager with a cleavage obsession. God help us all.

[1] To be fair, I think he only hates unnecessary prologues. Whereas I would probably write a book made of nothing else, given half a chance.

Wu-Tome Clan: Too Hard Kill (11/5/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

Because Sam Sykes asked me to, that’s why. Is that not reason enough?

[kung fu sample]
They told me, what happened, alright
You’re still young, and things like that always happen
When you’ll learn, then you’ll know not to make those mistakes

[Inspectah Lenk]
Really? These dudes don’t want it with Lenk, no, my sword glow
Hate it or you love it, but you gonna respect though
You ain’t got to know my name, check the blood, sweat & tears
For years fish-men know I bang
I’m a made killer, caking what you call a boss
On my own two, never taking orders from ya’ll
On a ship, get the god-men involved, it’s wreck on the yard-
arm. It’s Undergates, son, it’s more than hard
The life that’s all clamour and shit, best believe
On the flip side, killer, it’s them demons and fish
Wanna live in high fashion and rich, so we scramble the ship
The Tome, son, with they hand on the grip
Ain’t nothing gon’ stop Lenk from getting his due
No, your feets not big enough to fit in his shoe
I don’t rock what you rap, fishes, they be pole
God of War, just not HBO
They under fire, this crew that I come to know
They know they time up, guess that’s why they hate me so
But yo, they will never take me though, I had to go like
Psychotic, licking, slicking crazy blow
Still I be Hard to Kill like Seagal
Warrior built, big shield and long sword
Fucked up in my head, doing it, king size
Salutations, that’s respecting the king eyes
For those that follow my lead, attract to the fight
At the same time, marvel the speed
I’m so dope, I can bottle it free
The most influential, modern day murderous he

[U-Gariath]
Yo, deep in the bungalo, stomping the motherload
Carving my own path, taking another road
I need to boss the fight, he brought the troops with him
It sound apocalyptical, that’s the truth within
Want just the I to die with glory, that ain’t no bandinage
I’m on the warpath, death with no camouflage
And my way is hard, the Wolverine skeleton
I be the dragon man, crushing life out in my hand
But my anger is a brand, light up the darkness
I’m brute strength killer, yeah, I’m heartless
My heart rent to a hole I’m unstoppable,
Half frenzy, half indestructible
I told you before, under worser conditions
Crotchboxing, Daenos, you in a dead body position

[Masta Kat]
Aiyo, it’s time to make cash dinero
I’m coming from the Shictland concert to bash your hero
Lie up in your bedroom, smash your bureu
We looking for the Tome, man, divide by zero
Demons in the house, pass the book
And, we don’t want to have to stop to look
Cuz we ain’t gon’ be laughing then
One Shict bitch, take on your whole staff and win
Look, humans stay messing with the Kat’s future
And that weighs on me heavy like Rasputia
But I still keep spitting coz I hotshot
I’mma be still dissing your opinon as the arrow pop
From the bow of my rage to make your heart stop
Bleeding on the beach like a short cop
It’s your girl Kat, Undergates’ own
All you purple-ass rap dudes, please stay home, come on

I had to, you understand. I was not given a choice.

Now go and vote TAP for the Gemmell Awards

Careful What You Wish For / The Wrong Trousers (26/01/10)

Posted in Critical Failures

It had to happen. I’ve come home from the cleaners with the wrong trousers. Long and dark and in a bag. So I get them out this morning to put them on and immediately they don’t feel right and I know something’s wrong, and eventually I work out they have acquired pinstripes as well as a whole new texture , and finally, after a lot of head-scratching, I get around to looking at the label.

I am not Mrs Ronson. I’m pretty sure about that.

Also these trousers are too long. I am moved to comment on this to Adamantine Lady, as I am a fairly long fellow myself, and this may make identifying the owner of these errant trousers much easier. Really tall person, 6′6″ or more, walking around in their underpants looking pissed off.

Adamantine Lady: (pensively) (who has a minor thing going for really tall people) “Really? I think I’d like to meet Mr Ronson.”

Me: (With great smugness): “Mr Ronson? It says Mrs Ronson.” Yes, instead of acknowledging the extremely likely possibility that these trousers have been taken to the cleaners by some gentleman’s wife, I prefer to explore the extremely unlikely possibility that Brigitte Nielson’s 6′6″ Amazon half-sister a) exists and b) has her trousers cleaned in Chelmsford. There may be a certain wish-fulfilment to this line of thought. By the time I am finished with pointing out this possibility, I am the king of smug. Ha, let that teach you to jump to conclusions!

Adamantine Lady: (precisely exactly as pensively as before) “Really? I think I’d like to meet Mrs Ronson.”

Exit author under a cloud of hoist-by-your-own-petard-ness.

Mr/Mrs Ronson, I have your trousers. I do apologise. I will aim to return them shortly.

Story-Writing 101 (20/1/2010)

Posted in Critical Failures

A while back I was invited into the local infant school to teach children a little bit about writing stories. I think what I actually managed to teach them was how to draw a cartoon dragon and a cartoon goblin, but hey, they liked the visuals, so here they are, in case anyone wants to try and do a better job.

StoryBeginning

The ideas I was trying to present are pretty simple, and are also pretty much how I set about writing a novel:

Start at the beginning of the story

Know who your story is about

Know what problem they need to solve

(or what challenge they need to overcome – remember I’m talking to six-year-olds here)

StoryEnd

Know the end of the story

What is their last chance to succeed?

What is the final outcome?

(Between you and me, sometimes I do this the other way around and get the end before I even know to whom it is happening, but remember: 6 years old).

(The “story” we ran through here is pretty obvious: Dragon and Goblin want to make a book. Contrary to popular (6-year-old) opinion, Simon Skeleton in the last scene isn’t Simon Cowell…)

Now you’re ready to start. Think of the rest as setting off on a journey: You know where you’re starting, you know where you want to go, but you don’t know how to get there. You need a map (or a compass and some orienteering skills or some combination of both in practice but we’re keeping it simple, remember?).

StoryMiddle

This is the bit where you just think of a couple of things that sound fun and exciting and happen between The Beginning and The End. I have to admit I’m not very good at describing what happens here: make some stuff up. Don’t lose track of where you’re trying to go.

Anyway, anyone who fancies using the pictures, help yourself. They’re probably a damn sight better than the words that went with them.

Travelling Hopefully (30/12/09)

Posted in Critical Failures | News

Someone asked me a couple of days ago whether I plan in detail or use the ‘travel-hopefully’ method. Now being asked questions like that makes me feel all unnaturally important, as if my words and methods might carry some weight and I was all set to write a lengthy post on how to set about writing a story. Fortunately some sense prevailed; the fact is that everyone seems to write in different ways and I think everyone probably has to find what fits the way their head works.
That said, ‘travel hopefully’ does describe the way I write quite well once I get going, but having said that, there does have to be some sort of framework in place before I start; everyone has to have something, right? Otherwise how do you know where to begin? I don’t think I know anyone who sits down in front of a keyboard knowing nothing more than that they are about to write a story…

So what do I need? I need:

  • A world. It doesn’t have to be fleshed out an detailed, but it needs to be there in skeleton form. In particular, I think what matters are the general rules by which the world operates. The big things that will shape it need to be thought through. The Adamantine Palace may not have that much world-building actually in it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t thought about. For a fantasy world, is there an analogous period in history? I will always start from something real and then add bits (magic, dragons, the fact that the moon is made of cheese, whatever). These bits need a little basic thinking through, too, about what the consequences are for the base society when you add the extras. I’ll do most of this as a go along, but I need to know how the rules that govern the way the world works have changed because of whatever I’ve added (or taken away). Same principle goes for Science Fiction and technology. If you’re going to set a story in the real world, then which part of the real world and which time in history?
  • Some driver characters. A few main protagonists with what they are trying to do and why and very roughly what they’re like. These might be characters who will be in the foreground of the story (example: Prince Jehal: Intelligent, cynical, callous, wants to be top dog (because being the top dog is the only place that’s safe), deep down also wants to be… <spoiler deleted>) or they might be in the background (Saffran Kuy in The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice). They are the characters who are shaping events. What they are trying to do and why they are trying to do it will define the way the world changes during the course of the story.
  • Some front-line characters. These might be the same as the above or they might be different, but these are the characters who are in the foreground of the story. I find they tend to acquire their own personalities and colour themselves in as the story goes on, so all I have here at the start are a few seed characteristics that make them stand out from those around them (Angry, guilty, can swing a sword. That sort of thing).
  • An end. In some ways most important of all, I need to know how the end is going to feel. Someone has to either achieve something or fail to achieve something. It’s not so much the specifics of what that I have up front, it’s how it’s going to feel for the reader (bitter-sweet is always a favourite with crushing despair a close second, but there’s always the possibility of a happy success). There may well be several ends for several different story-lines.

And that’s it. After that it’s travel hopefully time. Which has worked extremely well on some occasions and less well on others. This year’s submissions will be The Order of the Scales and The Warlock’s Shadow, both already written in draft straight off the back of their prequels (on the grounds that all the preparation work had already been done) and both examples of FAILURE of the method, dammit! The Order of the Scales in particular has rolled a fumble (er, I mean has a lot wrong with it). I can see at least three re-writes being necessary before it’s good enough to be submitted. The first one started this week, along with the stress headaches.

This would also be the time when some sort of review of the year would appear, but I haven’t got time for that right now. Here’s one someone else made earlier.

Dear Rafa (3/11/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

OK, I was going to write something snarky about how wonderful it was that Liverpool have finally managed to sort out the problem that’s been holding them back for the last few seasons (namely getting far too many draws). Yeah, phew, good to be throwing that monkey off our backs. Perfect record so far this season too – not a single one…

Yes. I was going to do that, and then I read this and hey, we’re all armchair football managers right, what do we know <biting back the urge to seethe about Alonso going to Real Madrid. Biting. It. Back>?

Phew.

So I’ll just sit here in bed, eating Chinese takeway, writing aimlesslessly amid a big pile of kittens, taking a break from the re-write-athon, thinking that yes, sometimes writing sucks like any other job. But not today.

Back to the un-real world next week with our silly name competition winner (still open, but the current number one is going to be hard to beat), news on the gazetteer and maybe one or two other things.

Save the World, Buy a Book (7/10/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

For some reason it’s been a long strange week full of stuff that has made me reel in more bemusement than usual; certainly enough material for several entries to Critical Failures. However, time is pressing so I shall be brief. Besides, I have a Ramen pot-noodle thing awaiting my attention, I’ve done the pour-in-boiling-water thing and have already moved on to stir-with-care and ensuing allow-to-stew stages.

Today is kind of special because my first ever royalties arrived today. At least, the first ever royalties based on the the actual selling of some actual physical books as opposed to the idea of maybe writing a book. So that was nice and we’ll be buying a bottle of something to celebrate and life goes on. Day job, you may sleep easy, content in the knowledge that we’ll not be going our separate ways for some time to come. One or two comments I’ve seen recently, however, lead me to understand that others might have a vastly, well, shall we say uniformed view of life.

On a similar monetary vein, if a slightly different scale, it’s impossible to listen to the news without someone bleating on about government borrowing and national debt. Even those who think authors get paid in bars of hidden nazi gold must surely suffer some occasional breakthrough of interference from the real world? And am I the only one to whom it all makes absolutely no sense at all? It’s as though the whole thing is managed by some cabal of Illuminati who rule the monetary world simply by talking in every increasing spirals of gibberish whose the sole purpose is to ensure that absolutely no one truly fully understand exactly how everything works; presumably if they did, they’d be the accountancy equivalent of the antichrist and trigger some sort of global financial meltdown.

Oh. Wait. Oh well, whoever it was has doubtless since been neutralised by a special-tactics branch of the FSA by now.

Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s all quantum now. Isn’t that the whole point of credit? Hey, you’ll never know whether I’ve got a pound in my pocket or not until we look, but if we don’t look then I we can just assume that I have and then I can lend it to you at a small percentage and you can lend it on and so on and so on until it eventually makes its way back with a load of interest and, for some reason, a stale saveloy. But this only works if I don’t look in my pocket. So maybe our current difficulties were caused by some banker actually sticking his hand in his pocket to see what was in there for once and being sorely disappointed. Erwin Schroedinger, hang your head in shame. Look what you did.

In order to prevent future crises, all bankers are forthwith denied pockets. End of problem. Surely a simpler solution than bankrupting the entire world.

Just one little puzzlement, though, if every single developed country in the world is borrowing massive amounts of money (an allegedly conservative off-the-cuff estimate for global state borrowing for next year is, in royalty terms, about ten trillion copies of The Adamantine Palace[1]). From whom? If the entire world has a huge overdraft[2], from whom exactly are we borrowing this? The wizards or Middle Earth? The Gnomes of Zurich? The Royal Bank of Satan and His Little Minions?

No. It’s aliens. Aliens are lending us money. It’s the only explanation left. When the skies fill up with flying saucers, it won’t be an invasion, they’ll be here to foreclose. See. It’s all Science Fiction (or possibly Fantasy) really, just dressed up in different acronyms and words that no one understands. Which could all be fixed by re-aligning the phase-correlators on the FTL hub.

And people wonder why Science Fiction gets no literary respect.

Still on the stir-with-care stage on my noodles here. I really feel I’ve been caring quite a lot for some time now and that the instruction stir-with-fork might have been more appropriate.

Or maybe now, since apparently you can get buy a training machine and get some one-on-one recorded tuition from Master Yoda and learn the secrets of Jedi Mind Powers. I’d marvel at the audacity of selling such a product rather than just making it up for a joke, but since it’s going to cost me more than half as much merely to get the family to the cinema to see Up next weekend, I’m not so sure (what are they doing? Have they raised old Walt from the dead to serve popcorn in the foyer? At the very least I expect the seven dwarves to serve me ice cream). You have to wonder what part of the brain, exactly, is being activated here. I suppose if nothing else it’ll grow us up a whole new generation of wannabe-Jedis like me, except these ones will be really good at frowning.

Anyway, long story short since noodles are calling. Buy a book, save the world: Here’s the math:

  • 1 alien financed global budget deficit equals
  • 100,000 Virgin Galactic customers trying to spot them through the windows (just thought I’d throw that in) equals
  • 100,000,000 Jedi training kits so that the next generation can telekinetically haul their green asses out of the sky and kick them back to the Funny-Potato-Shaped Nebula from which they came equals
  • A mere 10,000,000,000 more copies of The Adamantine Palace that need to be bought before I can buy your collective debt off our sinister alien overlords.

For those people who think all authors are immediately made of gold, shit precious gemstones and have wanton nublies fawning at their feet, hopefully this will provide some perspective. I solemnly promise to donate half the royalties after the first trillion sales to bailing out a bank of your choice, so best get cracking, right.

Oh and there’s some real news. About books and shit.

[1] Sourced from a really reliable internet source(TM).

[2] The logical error is about here, right? So come on then accountancy types, explain it in words that make sense and can be understood. You can’t, can you.

How to Get Published: Myths and Legends (23/09/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

Hints and tips brought back from Fantasycon 2009 and a few reminiscences.

So you’ve written a novel. You’ve got the craft of putting words together into coherent sentences, choreographing those sentences into scintillating paragraphs, corralling your paragraphs into scenes and assembling a story. How do you get from there to seeing your name up on the shelves in the local Waterstones? The internet will fall over itself to tell you what you can do. All sorts of books will do that too. Trouble is, do any of them really work? Continue reading “How to Get Published: Myths and Legends (23/09/09)”

Inspiration and Revenge (26/8/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

“Where do you get your inspiration?” That’s a question that most authors seem to get asked at some time. It’s almost something you can’t avoid. The usual response is to refer to a few previous significant works in the applicable genre, maybe a film or a television show, and some moderately classic works of general literature, or maybe a historical figure or two. Example:

Fictional interviewer: “So, Mr. Deas, where do you get your inspiration.”

Author: “Oh, from a great variety of place. I’ve always been a fan of Conan and Elric, that’s the kind of fantasy that really pulled me in. Hong Kong fantasy martial arts movies like Zu Warrior of the Magic Mountain and, more recently, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and so forth. Anything Chinese really. Medieval Chinese history and culture fascinates me. Everything is on such a grand scale and they somehow did things in a different order. Oh, and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle has probably had an influence I could point to on half the stories I’ve written. And Joseph Conrad, when I’ve got the willpower to plough through it. And, and…”

And and. Lots of easy answers. Not that this sort of answer isn’t true, and it certainly does answer the question, but it’s far from complete. Far, far from complete.

Trouble is, delve too far and the answers start to become downright uncomfortable. Example:

A few days ago, Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Megrahi was released from prison on compassionate grounds and sent back to Libya to die in the comfort of his own home (no this isn’t a cut and paste error from a different blog, bear with me) and with his family. I’ll nail my colours to the mast and say that I thought this was the right thing to do. I noticed that a lot of people didn’t, and then I noticed that not only did some people disagree, they were really very angry about it. Why? Were they afraid that he’d go and do it again (a reasonable thought, perhaps, given he’s going to die soon anyway)? But that didn’t seem to be it. Were they afraid that the wrong example was being set? That his release was somehow undermining the deterrent of being locked up for such horrible crimes? Again it’s an argument that could reasonably be put forward, but that didn’t really seem to be it either, although. No, it was about the feelings of the relatives of those he’d killed (or supposedly killed, if you’re into the conspiracy theories). So that’s where I went. Hypothetically, at least, into their heads to see what it was like to be them. I won’t pretend that I can tell you what it’s really like to have someone killed by a terrorist (or a drunk driver for that matter) for no better reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can tell you that I’ve tried, though. I can tell you that in trying, I’ve come to understand a little bit more about revenge, that engine that drives so many stories (imagine, for a moment, what literature would be like without any revenge. How many great stories would be wiped away?) I can understand a little better why letting someone who’s done something like that to you go free, for ANY reason, is so repugnant. And one day I will use that understanding to make some character in some story just that little bit more real. That’s the dark side, if you will, of inspiration.

I pick on this example because it’s in the news at the moment. A few weeks from now it’ll be something else and then something else again. Inspiration comes from everywhere, from everything. It comes from walks in the Southern Alps, it comes from the awe-inspiring imaginations of other writers and artists and film-makers. It comes from watching my children feeding little plastic knights to their Gigantosaurus. And it comes from plumbing the dark depths and the dizzying heights of what happens around us, from the horrible and magnificent things that seemingly ordinary people do, and from trying to go inside their heads to see the whys and the hows and the consequences. I can say my inspiration comes from all of those things and they’d all be true. But can you imagine? If I say my inspiration comes from child-molesters and suicide bombers and battered wives, that’s a bit of a concersation killer, neh? So when I’m next asked the question, I’ll probably mention Conan and Chinese history and leave it at that; but you’ll know, if you’ve read this, that that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I still think, even if he was guilty, it was right to let him go, but I sure understand now why there are those who disagree.

A Stain Upon the Vastness (4/8/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

Meh. Finished manuscript blues. I could start on the next one, I suppose (OK, OK, I already cracked on that yesterday). I could start the rework for King of the Crags (editorial comments have now been received, and will be blogged about at sarcastic length[1] shortly). But I’m going on holiday for a week of wandering around on Cornish beaches in the pissing rain, and since I am NOT ALLOWED to take my ‘work’ with me (and since I don’t yet have a ruggedised mil-spec laptop suitable for use in Afghanistan Cornwall, what’s the point in starting something for a week only to put it away again, eh?

Meh.

Meh meh meh. Can’t even play with kittens (why do the kittens get a longer holiday than I do? Do they need one? Was the assault on my USB stick that stressful? Maybe they’re plotting. Maybe that’s it <twitch>)

Well, for a week, I’ve found a passable distraction. There’s this thing at Orbit: The Worst Cover Ever. I can’t draw for toffee (sorry Doodled Books but I did warn you). What I can do is blurb, though. So here we go.

A Stain Upon the Vastness

Fifty thousand parsecs out from the edge of the dying Galaxy, the last surviving remnants of the human race, devolved back into savagery and ignorant of the origins, float through the vastness on an artificial world. They are monitored from within by the Uppers, the elite few who have access to the vast data banks and artifical intelligence that controls the world. They are safe, self-sufficient, their survival assured.

Until they encounter the mysterious Stain, a being of pure energy that might just be God or The Devil.

Cue some mish-mash of Forbidden Planet, old Star Trek and a reworking of the Garden of Eden myth that’s as subtle as a brick…

Man, I love that title (and the one about the dancing cyborg fairies too) I might offer up some more blurbs for the other Orbit covers. In the mean time, go check out the other titles. And vote Stain! (I didn’t come up with this. I just like it).

[1] I’ll be making almost all of this up, damn you Simon, since there’s absolutely nothing in what you’ve said that isn’t entirely reasonable and, well, at all easy to get worked up about.

The Speaker (23/6/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

Who will be the Speaker of the Realms? <dun-dun-daaaa>

For anyone who’s reading this and doesn’t already know, a significant part of the plot to The Adamantine Palace revolves around the Machiavellian manoeuvrings and machinations of a group of ruthless, selfish, murdering bastards for the position of Speaker of the Realms, a sort of Capo di tutti capi of the dragon-realms. Particularly astute reviewers have noted a sprinkling of contemporary social commentary (thank-you, Locus) present in this. Share with me for a moment, then, my amusement at the the current plight and manoeuvrings surrounding the appointment of the new Speaker of the House of Commons. Overlord of Fraud? Not for me to say; I’ll leave that to the bold men and women of the Daily Telegraph and merely observe that in many other countries, this level of expense-fiddling behaviour would be so mundane that no one would even raise any eyebrow. So let’s be glad we don’t live in any of those places, eh?

Yes, share my amusement and then share with me my disappointment at not having any say in who’s next to sit in the silly chair. Because, frankly, I’d like a say in the matter, and I’m not going to get one. Boo! Hiss!

Done with the disappointment now? Good. Let’s be honest, you didn’t actually care one way or another, did you? You were just pretending. No matter: Mere facts and reality should never be allowed to get in the way of a little bit of fun. Since any say I have in the matter will be purely a fictional say, I don’t see why I should stick to casting my fictional vote for people who are defined merely by their aspect of actually existing. No, far more fun to add my own candidates to the list (especially since the alternative would be ‘none of the above’, and using my fictional vote to tick ‘none of the above’ on my fictional ballet paper for a fictional election that exists only in my mind seems, well, noticeably unsatisfying).

Anyone with a serious interest in politics, look away now. They gone? Just closet geeks and nerds like me left now? Right. First the honourable mentions. These are the folks who didn’t quite make it into the top five, but deserve a mention anyway for the admirable qualities they could have brought to bear on the job, Starting with….

Conan the Barbarian: A personal favourite and old friend, Conan can be relied upon to clear up any mess, usually by turning it into a different kind of mess with more blood involved. Likely to be a short stint at the job, but probably very satisfying for almost all concerned.

Dr. Van Helsing, or indeed anyone else experienced in dealing with bloodsucking vampires. Um… because, well… because. Would probably have made it into the top five if Abnormal Lamont had still been in the house.

Severus Snape: Makes out like he’s one of the bad guys but actually isn’t. Worth a go for the withering sarcasm. “What is it now, Clegg?”

The wizard responsible for Pinocchio’s nose. Don’t know who he is, but we have people on the case.

John Connor and the heroes of all slasher flicks: They know what it’s like when everyone is out to get you and have good experience dealing with people that keep coming back again and again no matter how many times you think you’ve gotten rid of them.

Right. And now, without further ado, my own personal top five fantasy and SF candidates for the new Speaker of the House of commons:

Sneaking in at number FIVE is A Dalek! Can be any Dalek you like. Darren the Dalek, say. Rather let down by serious question marks over his ability to provide strong moral guidance, Darren the Dalek has nevertheless made the list simply for the satisfaction of hearing that the traditional call for “Order!” has been replaced by the familiar old favourite “Exterminate!” and general ensuing consequences.

In at number FOUR: HAL2000! Always calm, always patient, never losing his temper or raising his voice, HAL brings to the job a logical perfection and a guarantee to exactly follow the rules, perfectly and without question, whatever they are. May unexpectedly lock everyone out of Parliament on a point of order from time to time, but I’m sure we can live with that. Distinctive sound bite: “I’m sorry Gordon, I can’t let you do that.”

At number THREE: The X-men’s Professor Xavier. No more procrastination and tub-thumping during Prime Minister’s Questions, no with the Prof you get answers, plucked straight out of the mind of whatever minister matters. Now questions like “Does the Prime Minister truly believe that the Iraqi government is capable of deploying weapons of mass destruction against the United Kingdom in the space of forty-five minutes?” can have the answers they deserve. Like “No, actually, the Prime Minister is pretty damn sure that’s total bollocks, he was just hoping you wouldn’t ask.” Does that sound better? Thought so. Also brings a keen and willing intellect and a strong moral sense to the job. Telepathic powers may pose some security concerns, however.

At number TWO: Any D&D cleric of at least third level. Why? Silence 15′ Radius, that’s why. Extra credit may be given to higher level clerics who can throw a flamestrike or two into the mix.

But now for number one. This character brings both moral backbone and a certain flexibility to the job. He may not always be politically correct, in fact quite often he’s not, but he’s the perfect Servant to Society. With his trademark cry of “Oi! You lot! Shut it!”, expert in dealing with a rowdy rabble, my personal favourite, squealing into the lead around the last corner at the wheel of something that sure ain’t a Toyota Prius, the winner of this blog’s Fantasy Speaker award, let’s hear it for… DCI Gene Hunt!

Hmmm.

I’ve missed something. What is it?

Oh yes. Psst… Hey Cameron… “Exterminate!

Damn. Now sitting and writing a piece about the Gemmell awards seems positively drab and mundane. I guess that can wait. Laters dudes. Got to roll with my Dalek fantasy for a while now.

World-Building (26/5/09)

Posted in Critical Failures

I’m beginning to think this doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean what a lot of other people think it means too. Or else it doesn’t mean what I think a lot of other people think it means. In some contexts. Maybe.

Hmmm. Needs some Ming-the-Merciless beard-stroking this does.

More on this in the future, I think. In the meantime, anyone who thinks they actually know what this means, do speak up.

Where Be Dragons? (12/4/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

(An abridged version of this article appeared in the April issue of Sci Fi now, and got repeated loudly and with much gesticulating at the Eastercon panel ‘Don’t trust a book with a dragon on the cover’)

———————————–

Here be dragons. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Filled with mystery and anticipation. You don’t know what to expect, but whatever it is, it’ll be something impressive, something vast, something that will change anyone who comes by it. Something not easily faced. It sits there on the edge of the map[1], impassive, implacable, a challenge to anyone who dares to explore the unknown corners of the world.

So where be dragons? At first glance the answer appears to be absolutely bloody everywhere. There’s something about them, something that fascinates us with a grip that no other mythical monster has. Flip through the myriad of satellite channels and you’ll come across a cartoon of some sort with a dragon in it. Fantasy literature can’t get away from them (mea culpa and proud of it); even when we’re not writing about them, we’re thinking about them or flirting with them or actively avoiding them. Not only is that true now, it seems to have been true forever. Dragons (or lion-snake-raptor things that might be a bit like dragons) appear in indigenous art across Europe, the Far and Middle East and the Americas. As early as Babylon’s Ishtar Gate[2], as geographically disparate as Vietnam and the Arctic Circle. Pretty impressive for something that doesn’t exist. You might point at crocodiles or giant snakes or lizards, or at the unearthed fossil remains of dinosaurs, but none of that seems to account for the geography of the beasts. I think, if we can’t leave it as a mystery, I like the collective hard-wired subconscious fear of large flying, slithering and clawed predator-things all rolled up in a tidy fire-breathing package. OK, I’m not sure where the fire bit comes from[3], but I’ll put that down to those early fantasy authors who wanted to make their Beowulf and Sigurd characters look really hard.

But what is a dragon? What does it mean? A common conceit among fantasy writers is that names matter. To call something a dragon should mean much more than ‘four-legged flying fire-breathing big thing’. The dictionary is, at first, a little less than helpful:

dragon, n, a fabulous winged scaly-armoured fire-breathing monster…[4]

Right. So four-legged fire-breathing big thing. With wings and scales. Did that bit already and anyway, lots and lots of fabulous creatures that get labelled as dragons don’t have wings and/or don’t breathe fire. That just tells you what some (i.e. contemporary European) dragons happen to look like. Wings and scales and fire might define how a dragon appears (or they might not – most early depictions of ‘dragons’ don’t tend to have the wings or bad breath; given the origins of their name, they’re more likely to have the same deadly gaze as a basilisk[5]), but they don’t define what a dragon is. They’re colouring, clothing, dressing to hang over the fundamental essence of dragon-ness that lies underneath.

dragon, n, Something very formidable or dangerous. [6]

That’s more like it. For me, that fits, whether we’re talking about Fafnir or Smaug or the more benevolent dragons of Asia. Something formidable or dangerous. I don’t think that’s enough, though. The dragons that Beowulf and Sigurd fought weren’t merely dangerous. They stretched the strength and courage of the greatest heroes of their time to the very limit. Their point, I think, was that they were so formidable and dangerous that they could not be stopped by any man save one. They defined the heroes that defeated them. Without their dragons, the myths of Sigurd and Beowulf wouldn’t have existed.

Which brings me back to the very first question. Where be dragons? Things with the label ‘dragon’ are regularly wheeled out in works of fantasy, both book and film. But do they deserve the name? Are they something very formidable or dangerous? The answer, in my opinion, is almost always no. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with flying, fire-breathing ponies, or with an armoured company aiming their 30mm cannons and Stinger missiles at things with wings that flap instead of wings that don’t. They can wear the clothing and the label of a dragon, but that alone doesn’t make them  a dragon, at least not in a symbolic sense. They become trappings of the background world, a colourful piece of scenery.

I think, with a very few exceptions, we have emasculated our dragons. We give them traits that are recognisable as human. We try to explain how they work, how they live, what they eat, how they came to be. We steadily bring them within the circle of our understanding. In the end, we make them like us, and there’s probably a very straightforward reason for that. There’s no space on the map any more for Here Be Dragons. Sigurd and Beowulf are, to be blunt, rather one-faceted heroes. Modern protagonists (and I’m talking about fiction in general now) are expected to be much more human, much more multi-dimensional and, frankly, are much better for it. Dragons have simply followed the trend. Besides, you can’t get away with having a dragon and simply going ‘Oooh! Dragon!’ and expect anyone to be impressed, because we’ve seen it all before. Dragons have evolved in order to survive within our changing stories, but I think they’ve lost something on the way.

We have a book at home called You’ve Got Dragons. It’s a story about a boy who is chased by scary dragons. Gradually he learns about them, turns to face them and they stop being scary. It’s fine enough for what it is, as a parable for children. It’s a natural human thing to do after all, to try and understand something. That’s how we deal with the unknown. That’s how we conquer fears, by understanding things, by breaking them down into little pieces and assimilating them one by one. It’s a thing that children need to learn. The dragons in this case are a blunt metaphor for childhood fears – as you come to understand them, they diminish and go away. In the context of teaching children not to be afraid of the dark, that’s fine. In the context of a work of fiction, I think we’ve shot our collective selves in the foot. By understanding our dragons, we’ve diminished them. In doing that we’ve diminished the heroes that fight them and ultimately ourselves.

The very last sentence of You’ve Got Dragons is: No dragon is more powerful than YOU. However well intentioned, that sticks in my craw. No dragon is more powerful than me? Excuse me? Yes they bloody well are! That’s their whole point, damn it! Something formidable and dangerous, remember? Something that only a hero can overcome. And anyway, don’t we need a few dragons? A few lurking monsters and terrible mysteries to keep us from apathy and complacency?

And that’s just dragons. Don’t get me started on what we’ve done to vampires.

[Exits to the strains of The Stranglers “No more heroes”]

[1] Dragon trivia: The phrase ‘Here be dragons’ seems to originate from the Lenox Globe, c.1505. That appears to be about it, until fantasy writers took up the baton. Never mind, eh.

[2] Creatures that look like hybrids of eagles, lions and serpents are documented in descriptions of the gate and appear on the reconstruction in the Berlin museum.

[3] Alright, alright, it’s probably an embellishment of the flickering red forked tongue of some snakes and lizards or something like that.

[4] The Chambers dictionary

[5] From www.etymonline.com: c.1220, from O.Fr. dragon, from L. draconem (nom. draco) “serpent, dragon,” from Gk. drakon (gen. drakontos) “serpent, seafish,” from drak-, strong aorist stem of derkesthai “to see clearly.” But perhaps the lit. sense is “the one with the (deadly) glance.” Nice.

[6] A secondary definition from wikipedia’s online dictionary.

The Power of Poo (Part II) (8/3/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

So I have a roleplaying party who are part of a band of travelling actors/musicians/performers(/clowns) and who don’t like to be sucked into anything that might be dangerous. They’ve found themselves travelling with a dodgy mage and they’ve handed him in to the authorities. They’ve witnessed an atrocity and handed it in to the authorities. If they found money lying in the street they might keep it, but only if they were sure it wasn’t dangerous. What, I wondered, would it take to kick them into action…?

I mean, what happened to “You’re all in an inn when a shadowy stranger staggers in. He slumps over your table, bleeds a lot, holds out a map, gasps something about ‘treasure’ and dies,” and that was all you needed to do? Adventure started. Plot ready for thickening. Lights camera action, etc. This lot would back sidle hastily away, pretend they’d never been there and complain bitterly to each other about the bloodstains on their clothes.

Well now I know what it takes. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but the plot now revolves around poo. It’s not even my fault. They started it. I’m just jumping on the bandwagon.

So, if nothing else works to kick-start your adventure, I have a new one. “You’re all in an inn, bleary-eyed from the night before when a bunch of people run up and throw poo all over your stuff.”

Yeah. Do I have your attention now? Never mind glory, never mind riches, never mind the looming cataclysm that threatens to end the entire world. Dude, there’s poo on your stuff.

Eeesh.

The Power of Poo (part I) (8/3/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

I run an occasional (much more occasional that I’d like) role-playing game for a few old of mine. They are, by nature, a generally danger-averse lot, and the same character or character types come up time and time again:
a) Someone who generally likes to lurk at the back, is good with knives and whose first instinct is to run away.
b) Someone who’s a bit of an academic or craftsman, who can’t resist the draw of meddling in Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know, but whose first instinct is otherwise to run away.
c) Someone who has a feast of character quirks and whose first instinct is to run away.
d) …

You get the picture. So when I dangle temptation in front of them, there are a couple of players who are generally game for investigating what’s up, and a rather larger number who are game for leaving Mr Temptation well alone, thank-you, or possibly notifying the authorities if there are some authorities conveniently nearby. Most famously, this lot have managed to avoid any sort of confrontation whatsoever for seven consecutive game nights until they finally plucked up the courage to tackle a single guard dog. A single guard dog that was asleep at the time.

In that particular game this was, finally, how they fell into the clutching maw that was the plot. They have learned from their mistake to let sleeping dogs lie. No more temptation. Rumours of a mysterious artefact in the nearby woods? Best leave it be. Mysterious artefact known to be in the hands of dodgy guy they could easily turn over? Best leave it be. Mysterious artefact found lying unguarded in the middle of the road? Best leave it be. Man runs up to them claiming to have been an arch-villain who’s just gone through a religious conversion, has seen the light and is giving up his warrior ways for a life of contemplative solitude and would they like to look after his mysterious artefact? Best leave it be.

Sometimes, when a mysterious artefact really won’t leave them alone, they turn it over to the authorities instead.

Disturbingly like the way real people might behave, in fact.

Big Ships and Zombie Mayhem (8/2/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

So far this weekend I’ve been avoiding doing anything useful by sketching out the structure of the next ten books to follow Order of the Scales (a slightly more prosaic way of saying I’ve been twiddling my thumbs and staring at my navel), the ubiquitous internet surfing and by actually reading books by people who aren’t me, a pleasure I’d almost forgotten.

I have dim memory of someone once either telling me or declaring to the world that fantasy and ships didn’t mix, that ships were just too constrained a setting for the genre. Well I’ve started reading The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert Redick, in which ships and fantasy mix perfectly well, thank-you. So far it’s very, very good, up there with the best. The secret? Make the ship very, very big…

And then there’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Yay. Just what possibly the best book of all time needed – a zombie makeover! Ultraviolent zombie mayhem is pretty much the literary equivalent of cinnamon, after all – a pinch of it improves almost anything and I shall take myself a piece of that sweet sweet undead marketing pie myself one day. So Hurrah! Truly the world is a better place, and I will sleep more easily at nights knowing that this exists. Not.

OK, OK, it made me giggle and grin for a minute, and apart from the cover I don’t actually know a thing about it. Truth be told, I like zombie books and I like the idea. It’s the sort of thing I might have thought of in an idle moment. And then I’d leave it alone. I’ve read a few spoofish zombie books and I’ve yet to find one that was as amusing to read as it was to talk about. World War Z is possibly the exception.So someone else wholikes both Austen and zombies please read it for me and tell me if it’s really worth more than a quick snigger over a pint. In the meantime, if you want to go straight for the publicity-gimmick jugular, I leave you with:

The Old Testament – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. But bright was the mysterious radiation from Venus. And a strange plague did infect the land. And though he was slain, Abel arose once more. And great was his hunger for brains. And Lo, he did chase his brother Cain into the land of Nod. And there Cain did find the Holy Chainsaw and did mince Abel into itty little bits. And much gore was strewn across the land. And Cain, who was a tiller of the land, did see that the flesh of his brother did make good fertilizer. And Cain did turn away from the sight of God and did take up a career in zombie-slaying.

Builders Breakfast (1/2/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

In the absence of having done anything particularly constructive for a while, I’m going to rant about the most exciting thing that happened to me in the last ten minutes, namely a packet of crisps. Walkers Builders Breakfast. This comes as part of some great quest to bring a new flavour to their range, and we can all hope and pray that its arrival will finally deal a crippling mortal blow to anything even vaguely related to prawn cocktail flavour (which is probably called langoustine melange or some other pretentious bollocks but still tastes like fishy puke in vinegar. But I digress).

Builders breakfast is an absolute marvel in flavour engineering. It really does carry the flavour of fried eggs on buttered toast. You can taste that it’s butter, not hydrogified vegetable spread or cow-tongue-scrapings or whatever else gets put on bread these days. It doesn’t taste of bacon, it tastes of the ghost of bacon, that residual taste your bacony tinge that eggs get from frying them last because there wasn’t enough space in the pan for it all.

It’s so well done that the sudden realisation that I was eating crisps and not a proper fry-up was something of a disappointment and made me want to throw them away and run for the eggs and the buttered toast instead.

Damn but I’m hungry now. Whoever put this flavour together, it’s a masterwork.

Ars Draconis (13/1/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

I don’t remember how we got here. First Reader thought Ars Draconis might be a good title for book seven or maybe eight. Or maybe nine. Or maybe it was just me. Anyway, Ars Draconis so obvious that someone was bound to have used it already, I thought. I’d Google it, find it used a dozen times already, and that would be that.

But no. As far as I can tell, it’s a free title. Virgin. Up for grabs and going begging. Amazon has no knowledge of any such title.

Still, I thought I’d better go and have a look at the top of the Google list

Whoa. Hermetic dragon magic shit. Not for the novice magician! “As a cautionary word of warning: This Work is NOT for a new practitioner. I advise that the new practitioner seek education and experience that way they can call upon the Dragons with the NECESSARY experience and confidence.”

I have to admit, this is not what I expected. And I strictly ought to raise my hand at this point and say ‘yes sir, when it comes to real Order-of-the-Silver-Twilight etc. magic, new practitioner would describe me very well’ and meekly head off somewhere less intimidating.

Well screw that, thinks I. When it comes to the dragons, I am the arch-mage. I conjour with tooth and claw and fire and scale on a whim. Summoning the full force of my draconic power around me, I entered and had a good look around, and so far I don’t seem to have suffered any undue mental trauma. The craftsmanship of the poetry leaves something to be desired. I think I can safely say that (force and Earth do not even pretend to rhyme, dammit!)

No. What got me were the adverts in the banner:

- ‘Yin Yang symbols – thinking of buying’ (no, not really, but it’s in keeping with the theme of the site).

- ‘Children’s Lights’ Er… but a moment ago you were telling me how to summon the powers of the elder dragons.LO! Come to my mighty fortress of power where I shall initiate ye in the awesome power of the elder dragons and sell you lampshades.

- ‘Free Magic Spells: Whatever you need, my powerful spells can help. All free.’ Hmmm. Well if I could do magic that actually worked, you can be damn sure I’d be charging a fistful for it, but OK, at least we’re back in character.

And finally my favourite, because it caught me out at the first take: ‘Compare energy prices.’ Wow, I thought. Twenty-first century or what? Are we piping in psychic energy from India via Khazakhstan now? Pitching that against a little Voodoo juju zapped in from Haiti? Is that what it means? Is there a free market in Reiki sendings now? In which case, do they operate a money-back policy? Maybe now we’re mining latent Atlantean energies from the North Sea… Suddenly the world is filled with possibilities.

Sadly no. The small print makes it clear. ‘Compare UK gas and energy prices.’

Dammit, I liked my advert better.

Shattered Glass (5/1/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures

We watched this rather good little movie last night. It’s based on the true story of a journalist who worked for the New Republic and who, for whatever reasons, fabricated his stories rather than based them on carefully researched fact. The journalist is played by Darth Vader Hayden Christensen. It’s a pretty good performance and leaves you guessing for a lot of the movie as to what’s going on inside his head. The problem is, don’t know whether the cold, calculating decietful person I thought I was glimpsiong from time to time was really supposed to be there, or whether that was just a part of my brain screaming ‘Don’t trust him – he’s turning to the dark side!’ and actually the story is about someone rather sad who was simply floundering way out of his depth.

Sad sad sad.

On the plus side, Peter Sarsgaard is excellent as his editor.

Happy New Year (2/1/2009)

Posted in Critical Failures | News

Happy new year everyone. I don’t know whether to class this as a ‘news’ post or a ‘critical failures’ post. A critical failure because this post was supposed to go up yesterday. In fact, my whole year is already one day out of whack on account of having had two New Year’s parties cancelled on me at short(ish) notice and then spending most of the day in bed with a migraine anyway. So yesterday was our ‘celebration’ day in this house. All in all this holiday season hasn’t been that great. We had a very nice Yule celebration on the 20th, Christmas itself was overrun by the little people, the smaller of whom seems to have regressed to being two again and throwing ‘I want’ tantrums left right and centre. The bigger one knocked a tooth out, root and all – still don’t know quite how he did it, and we’ve managed to see precisely one couple of *our* friends. With a bit of luck that will change shortly. So the holiday season gets a big thumbs sideways this year. The kids had a great time. The rest of us, I think, are just relieved that it’s all over.

However, on the plus side, number one son’s favourite song is currently The Knights of Cydonia by Muse and number two has developed a penchant for Space Lord by Monster Magnet, so at least driving is fun now.

In the midst of all this, some surprisingly useful writing has happened. The reworking of King of the Crags is under way and I’m about a third of the way through. It seems like it’s going really well. I’m pleasantly surprised to find that it’s quite a good book in the first place (or so it seems to me, but I always remember everything I write as being rubbish until I read it again). But what’s really making the difference is the addition of a little extra material. I won’t say that this has come about as a direct result of the early reviews because to some extent it would have happened anyway. Still, the reviews have made me think about some things more than would otherwise have happened, so thank-you reviewers, all of you so far. You have made The King of the Crags better (and fractionally longer – sorry Simon) than it would otherwise have been.

the Order of the Scales is on hold at about a third of the way through while I deal with the rewrite. A certain Total Recall inspired scene is now imminent. Or not, as the case may be.

No New Year’s resolutions this year except to finish King of the Crags, Order of the Scales and the construction of the Lego Death Star (in no particular order) and to actually read some books written by other people this year.

Tescos In Chelmsford Is Crap

Posted in Critical Failures

Now in hindsight, I should have realised that going to a supermarket on the evening of December 22nd was pushing my luck. I admit, I thought that ‘a bit busy’ would be an adequate description. After all, it wasn’t the 23rd or the 24th. There were still two full shopping days before the entire retail world shut down for – what – a world-shaking 60 hours, any one of which could turn out to be Armageddon, right?

The first clue was the car park. ‘A bit busy’ was just about an adequate description. It was possible to park without having to cruise for hours and start several bitter personal feuds that would last generations in order to get a parking space. It wasn’t that bad. My gamble, it seemed, was going to pay off.

Inside the store wasn’t too bad either. At least, not the running up and down the aisles part. In that is was possible to move more often than it wasn’t. If you put aside the number of trolleys that had been abandoned, half-laden, in the middle of them, that is. But then even one trolley abandoned with obviously no thought given to anyone else tends to induce homicidal thoughts in me (I can understand the need. Even my wife does it. But please, park them where they’re at least a little bit out of the way. You’re in Tescos, remember? Not barricading the streets to herald the coming of the revolution).

So all of this is not as bad as it might be, and as usual, I’m pleasantly surprised by how good-humoured it all is. And, come to think of it, this happens every Christmas, right. When you stop and think about it, everything I’ve described sounds entirely predictable, right?

So why, with the shop practically bursting at the seams and eight laden trolleys lining up for each till were only half the checkouts open? When I left (with the checkout I had used now closed behind me), the queue had reached ten. At the far end of the shop in the alcohol queue, they’d run out of aisle and were snaking around the back of the shop. It’s a good job we English are so well-natured when it comes to queuing otherwise people would have been looting the gardening section for pitchforks and torches so they could lynch the management. Can’t have been any fun for the till-operators either.

Mead and very content children have since taken the edge off my bile and I realise that forty minutes of queuing is a mere piffle in a town that’s used to hosting the V-festival, but still, critical failure of forward planning, Tescos. 1/10 (a couple of bonus points for the shelves still being at least reasonably well stocked, minus one for refusing to let me use my Clubcard rewards vouchers unless I’ve got my f**king Clubcard with me).

The wisdom of children

Posted in Critical Failures

Right. Now the necessary context here is that I have quite an eclectic taste in music. This varies all the way from baroque organ music to death metal. It is the latter of these that concerns us today, for it was one such CD that had cycled its way into the car stereo when I inadvertently turned it one while the children were in the car. For those who don’t know what death-metal is, it basically consists of playing the same very loud note over and over again really fast and barking out unintelligible lyrics in a very deep and constipated growling sort of way. I’m sure the attraction is instantly clear…

Naturally I apologied profusely to the (I assumed) horrified small people behind me, who I imagined to be on the verge of instant tears. But no, I was informed that death metal (Boltthrower to be precise) was quite acceptable. They listened in an open-minded sort of way for a minute or so before reaching a unanimous opinion that death metal wasn’t for them (and you have no idea of the look of relief on my other half’s face when I reached that part of the story – having hooked them on The Swans and Fields of the Nephilim has been quite bad enough…), and proceeded into a short but bitter argument as to whether Ennio Morricone or Hawkwind would be a more suitable palate-cleanser. As I, still somewhat mortified as though I had somehow done something akin to accidentally letting my five-year-old play Manhunt, changed over the music, I was presented with one final critical question from my audience:

“Papa? Was that Jabba the Hutt?”

I had to say yes, yes it was. I have listened to that CD several times since then. And it is. The secret of death-metal singing is to sound like Jabba the Hutt.

Almost trivial aside: Proof-reading for The Adamantine Palace finsihed this morning. That’s it folks. No more fiddling, no more chances to change anything, no more opportunities to add in 20000 words of mysteriously deleted background material. And breath in… and out. And in… and out.

Twitch

Twitch

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