Monthly Archives: October 2017

Eidolon: I Actually Did A Thing

My time off from my full-time employment is rushing toward a close. I have less than six weeks remaining before I head back, and I feel like I don’t have a lot to show for it. My intention was to write my next two books in the ten months I had off. Instead, I’ve got two partially-written first drafts, neither of which is close to being finished. I don’t know if I’ll make significant progress on either of them before I have to rejoin the daily grind.

At the beginning, I was working extremely well. The first couple of months were easily my most productive — maybe even more productive than the entire period after them. Then I had some recurring issues with my chronic depression playing up quite badly, which threw me off and it’s been an extreme struggle to try to get back into basically anything at all. On top of that, I had to move house in the middle of things so there were other things that delayed and stressed me and just sort of made everything a lot harder.

I did manage to write five short stories, all of which are available for free on this site and others. Some of them I’m honestly not overly fond of, and some of them I actually think are reasonably good. Even so, they’re fairly small things and I don’t really consider them significant accomplishments.

Just today, though, I stopped working on an actual Thing that is now basically finished.

A while ago, I’d been talking to my sister (an actress who graduated from the New York Film Academy a little while back) who mentioned that there aren’t a lot of scripts around for small, local directors who are looking to produce things, and suggested that if I wrote a script, she would be able to pass it around her contacts and we could all maybe do a thing together. I had a bit of a think about it and set down some base guidelines that I thought would be important if what I wrote was ever going to get filmed — I’d need to write something that would be cheap to produce, used minimal sets and actors, etc. An idea sparked right away, but it took a while for me to actually do some serious work on it.

I went through a couple of drafts, sent it through to my normal set of beta readers, did some reworking, and a week or so ago I sat down with a few people and we did a proper table read of the script. I made more edits based on feedback received from my ‘actors’ on the day, as well as going through the recording of the table read several times and making even more changes based on that. Now I think I’m basically done with it. I’ve sent it off to my editor for another read, just to catch any typos or other small mistakes that may have slipped through, but once he gives it the all clear I’ll be passing it along to my sister, who has some directors she’s planning on approaching with it.

I don’t want to share too much of the contents, except to say it’s a horror script that should turn out a film about 15-17 minutes long. I wrote a very short blurb because I am in the habit of doing that with anything that I write these days, thanks to the short story competitions I’ve been entering, which I’ll also share:

No-one believed Allison was innocent. Her fanciful story about her parents being murdered by a monster from her childhood imaginings was a delusion at best; or a poorly thought-out lie at worst. That’s what the jury decided. They were wrong.

I don’t think it’s a great blurb, but it gets across the gist.

So yeah. I did a thing.

I have no illusions about the likelihood of it actually being picked up by a director, but it is a Finished Thing I can add to my list of other Finished Things and feel a bit better about myself. On top of that, writing a script was very different to writing a novel or a short story. Dialog works differently and you have to take a much more visual approach but also cut everything right back and not have any more description than is necessary. I’m glad I spent the time writing it, and feel like I learned some stuff along the way.

 


 

I’ve got one other side project that I have a fairly firm intention to complete before returning to work. I’ve talked about it on here before: Blackened Hearts.

We had the original first playtest way back in June, which I was exceedingly happy with. There were a lot of changes that I wanted to make, most of which I’ve now made, and I wanted to package it up in a professional-ish quality set of documents — again, most of which I’ve written and done. There is one major part I need to do still that will probably be quite a lot of work, but the bulk of the project is actually done. If I worked on it with any sort of real regularly, I would have been done by now.

As it stands, I need to (1) finish reviewing the character role descriptions and re-organising the item and power cards, (2) write some short, basic examples in the GM section for the end-of-game denouements, and (3) come up with new powers for more than half of the characters [this is the big one].

Once I’ve done that and put together everything in a convincing-looking package, it’ll go to my editor for checking. After that, I’ll be looking for someone else to run a playtest of it. Honestly, I might even just release it then if I’m happy enough with it, and once I manage to organise someone to run a second playtest I can always update/reupload the PDFs later if there are more changes/tweaks I want to make.

I’m not ever going to be super happy with how much work I’ve gotten done this year, but having at least a couple of big Finished Things under my belt at the end of it (and the short stories as well, I guess) will at least go a long way to making me feel like it hasn’t been a complete wash.

This afternoon I’m at least going to make an effort to get some more Blackened Hearts work done. We’ll see how I go.

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The Key of Allen

This story was my second round entry in NYC Midnight‘s 2017 Flash Fiction Challenge. The writing prompts that I had in my brief were: Fantasy | A Dry Riverbed | An Allen Wrench.


 

 

Elora stifled a shriek of surprise as a whip-thin blade flicked past her ear, nicking her cloak and coming to rest firmly against her neck. ‘Yield, thief, and I will be merciful,’ the warrior said, her voice quiet and hard as steel.

‘Talawen,’ Elora mumbled. ‘It’s… it’s me.’

Her older sister straightened and blinked in surprise, peering through the darkness of the gilded hallway. ‘Elora? What in all of Faen do you think you’re doing?’

‘Shh!’ The younger woman waved her hands desperately. ‘The guards will hear!’

Talawen hesitated briefly, but dropped her sword to her side and her voice to a whisper. ‘Is that the Key of Allen? How did you even get it out of the treasury?’

Shifting the uncomfortable weight of the artefact strapped to her back, Elora set her jaw and averted her eyes. ‘I’m taking it to the fortress.’

A look of exasperation flickered across Talawen’s face. Grabbing her younger sister by the hand, she dragged her down the hall toward her bedroom. Elora allowed herself to be led, trying to still the trembling of her hands.

Once they were safely out of the halls, Talawen closed the door behind them and walked over to her balcony doors, drawing back the curtains to let silvery moonlight spill across the room. She paused a moment as her eyes adjusted, then opened the doors and walked outside into the cool night air. Elora followed.

‘Mother has made her decree,’ Talawen said. There was no heat in her voice, only tiredness. ‘Preparations are already underway. We leave a week hence. You know this.’

Elora walked over to the edge of the balcony, unshouldering the Key of Allen and resting it against the white marble balustrade. She stretched her arms, feeling the relief of the muscles in her already-aching back. The Key was a dreadful, imposing thing: a thick rod of shining black metal fashioned into a perfectly hexagonal shape. It was featureless and unmarked save for the last third of the rod, which had been bent precisely perpendicular to the rest. Were it straight it would measure more than two full inches, almost as long as Elora was tall.

She gripped the railing with both hands. ‘We can’t just leave. This is our home. Our people have lived here since they left the forest.’

‘And the Queen has decreed that we will return there. It isn’t your decision to make.’

‘Leaving won’t protect us! The forest of ancestors is too far for us to travel there safely. How many will die before we reach it?’

Talawen sighed. ‘The flow of the river powers the wards that protect us. Unless the water returns soon, we will no longer be hidden. The fell beasts of the field will prey upon us. The humans will find us. What other choice do we have?’

Only a week ago, Talawen’s balcony had commanded a breathtaking view of the river whose flow protected their kingdom. On a fine day you could see clear across the glittering waters to the shore beyond. Now all that remained was a tiny trickle of mud, a bare whisper of the once-powerful torrent that had carved out the now-dry riverbed.

The hairs on the back of Elora’s neck prickled as she looked upriver. Though it was concealed by distance and darkness, she could still sense the foreboding presence of the grim citadel that now spanned the river, diverting the water from its natural course. She pictured it in her mind. Stark, blocky parapets of enormous size and long ramparts that allowed only the barest trickle of water through.

The construction was many hundreds of inches long—perhaps even a thousand!—and, given that it rose from the deepest parts of the riverbed to the height of the shore, at least forty inches tall. That the humans had raised such a fortress in a single day was a testament to the power of their dark and terrible magics.

‘Grandfather’s journal—’

‘This again?’ Talawen interrupted. ‘Mother told you we cannot rely on those stories.’

‘Grandfather’s journal,’ Elora repeated stubbornly, ‘says that the human child he befriended bestowed the Key upon him as a gift.’

‘Yes. And?’

‘He said it was a tool. One that could be used to build things, but could be used to unmake them as well.’

Talawen shook her head. ‘Even if that were true, we don’t know the first thing about their magic. You aren’t human. You can’t just wave one of their tools of creation and hope it does something.’

‘Look at it.’ Elora rested a hand on the black metal. ‘It looks large to us, but to a human? It wouldn’t even be the size of a finger. It would be tiny. I don’t think it was forged for them. I think was for us. Maybe Allen—whoever he was—knew that we would need it one day?’

‘That’s still not enough to risk the whole kingdom on!’

‘But I think I know how to use it! It’s a key. It’s always referred to as a key. If there’s a key…’ She paused, waiting for her sister to follow her thought.

‘…a key implies a lock.’ Talawen grimaced, but nodded reluctantly.

Elora turned to look at her sister, a look of fierce determination on her face. ‘I will take the Key to the fortress and I will use it to undo what the humans have done.’

Talawen looked at her for a long time. ‘All right,’ she said eventually. ‘Give me a few moments to gather my armour.’

‘You’ll come with me?’ Elora blinked, surprised.

‘Of course.’ Talawen sighed again and allowed herself a tight smile. ‘What kind of a sister would I be if I let you go alone? We’ll do this together.’

Minutes later, they were gone.

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