Solstice Greetings and the End of 2020

 

This year freakin' sucked. It's traditional to do a blogpost at the end of the year to discuss what has happened over the last twelve months, and to be honest, it's going to be hard. 

It started badly, losing my beloved cat Marla in January. She really was the most important thing in our lives, and losing her so suddenly hit me really hard, and I'm still not (and probably never will be) over it. 

Then we had a bad case of the flu, I blacked out, and just a month after we'd recovered from that, the rest of the world went to hell as the pandemic swept across the globe. With governments lead by floppy-haired pillocks who wouldn't know common sense if it smacked them in the face, it got out of control. As I write this, the strain in the UK has mutated into an even more contagious disease that threatens to dominate the country. The rest of the world has put us in isolation and our green and pleasant land has become the next Children of Men. 

While we try to survive the last days of 2020, looking back there were some good moments. They were few, but they were there. My wife launched her awesome Etsy shop, where her hand-crafted and upcycled goth coolness has been really busy in the build up to Halloween and Christmas. 

Lockdown (1 and 2, with a 3rd on the horizon) meant I got to stay home and hide. In between therapy sessions for my worry and stress, I managed to finish off a massive project that'll possibly be announced sometime close to the Doctor Who New Year Special - Revolution of the Daleks (hmmm, I wonder what it could be?). 

I also managed to finish off an adventure for EN's Awfully Cheerful Engine, which will hopefully launch next year.

And, thanks to Stoo and 300+ Kickstarter backers, WILD has been funded and will see print around Easter next year too! Just have to finish off those extra bits that were unlocked as stretch goals. Thank you to everyone who backed it or shared it!

We just have to hope there's a next year. The way this year has treated us, there's still the chance of a zombie apocalypse or rogue asteroid to really finish of a really crappy year.

So, I'm signing off for the rest of the year. I'm hiding in my bunker (when I'm not stuck at the dayjob). 

Stay safe everyone. 

[Roll Your Own Life] The Movies That Made Me (Part 20)

FIGHT CLUB (1999)

Like The Matrix, out the same year, I have a very distinct memory of seeing Fight Club for the first time. I was working at the Odeon, recruited to help with the rush for Star Wars: Episode I, and out of the many, many new recruits on a temporary contract I was one of the handful kept on. It wasn't an easy job - we had aggressive teens who broke into the cinema on many occasion and I have a distinct memory of having to grab a particularly violent teen who punched my assistant manager.

Anyway, while the job had its downside, and it paid minimum wage (which was about £3.80 back then), there were many, many elements of the job I loved. Working with movies, wandering the cinema freely, the cool trousers with a special pocket for the torch down the outside of one leg... The cinema itself was an old theatre, broken up into six screens. Above it was a spooky abandoned flat that just was filled with movie posters and cardboard standees, despite it looking like something at the end of The Blair Witch Project. And waaaaay down a long corridor at the side of screen 6 was where we stored the ice cream and popcorn, in storerooms near the old theatre dressing rooms. It was old, creepy, and cool. Doing the last checks at the end of the night to ensure the screens and building was empty, at 3am after The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre had cleared out, was a slightly thrilling spookfest.

One of the great things about working in the cinema was getting to see the movies. I saw EVERYTHING that came out for about eight months. EVERYTHING. I think I saw Disney's Tarzan about eight times, and despite the disappointment of The Phantom Menace, I saw it nine or ten times and grew to love it - my favourite of the prequels. It's where I fell in love with Notting Hill, possibly my favourite romcom.

But there was a film I really wasn't interested in. Fight Club. I knew nothing about it, hadn't seen any trailers except for the cryptic PSAs that Edward Norton and Brad Pitt did, and the poster made it look like people just punching each other. I didn't get it - where was the appeal?

Fight Club opened, and first screening I was ushering. I had my little torch (usually in that cool side pocket), walkie-talkie, and I took the tickets off people and ripped off the stub as they went into the screen. Those latecomers who needed help finding a seat, I used my torch and guided them in. It was typical policy when you were working a screen you hung around for the first fifteen minutes to make sure everyone was sat, latecomers were seated, everyone was happy, and so on.

It was really quiet, as you'd expect on a weekday opening, first showing at about 11:30am. About ten customers in a screen that could hold 300 or more. The certificate thing came up, I was stood at the door, and the Dust Brothers soundtrack crackled into life...

I stood staring at the graphics... no other customers came in, pretty quiet. The titles finish and it zooms back down Edward Norton's face and down the barrel of a gun.

"People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden..."

There's the cool zip around the buildings showing the massive amount of explosives set up in the basements, and then we start on the clever narrative flashbacks - to "Remaining Men Together" and earlier...

I was completely mesmerised. Those opening sequences, I was sold. Twenty minutes in, and I knew I had to get back to work, so I pulled myself out of the screen and went back to it, but my mind was filled with the amazing direction, the cool images, and that narration. I needed to see this movie as soon as possible.

I finally did - I don't know if it was that night, or the next couple of days. The wonders of having two free tickets every week through working there. And I was amazed. It was just brilliant. Thanks to working at the cinema, I think I saw it eight or nine times before it was removed in favour of the next big release.

I went out the day after seeing it to buy the book, and then absorbed the others by Chuck Palahniuk. Those first five or six books had such an impact on my writing style, when I tried to write fiction it just sounded like I was channeling my inner Chuck Palahniuk.

Long after we moved away and back across the country, I bought the DVD with its mass of extras, and later the bluray with its subversive trick making you think you were about to start watching the Drew Barrymore movie Never Been Kissed, before the Project Mayhem logo flashes on screen.

I won't go into the meaning of Fight Club, or what it's about - if you haven't seen it, please do. It is a brilliant piece of film making and storytelling that has influenced movies and TV shows for years afterwards.

As for me, when we bought our house - our first ever home - and we adopted a cat from the rescue, we adopted this gorgeous black cat (originally called Gothic by the RSPCA rescue centre). She had a tooth missing at the front, one of the canines, and she looked like she'd been in a fight (she was rescued after being hit by a car). It was only a day or two of her coming home with us that she rolled off the bed and fell onto the floor, just like Helena Bonham Carter's character from Fight Club did. Pair this with the line from the movie describing her as a "predator posing as a house cat", and we knew what to rename our cat... Marla. (Full name, Marla Singer Chapman).

It's been just over four months since we lost her.

God I miss my cat.

Okay, until tomorrow's - stay safe.

Four Weeks

Four Weeks on since we lost Marla and I'm still finding it hard.

I'm not sure if people realised how much she meant to me, my constant writing companion and loyal friend. I'm not ashamed to admit that thinking of her brings tears, and when I'm not distracted by mindless crap on TV, stupid games, or reading, my thoughts go back to her.

Marla always helped me with my writing and game design.

I should be distracting myself by writing. But actually concentrating on the writing leaves me open to thinking too much and the lure of distracting my brain again comes in.

I have written, I don't want to let people down, but it is a struggle. I'm going to try to do some more now...

I'll be back. I promise.

A Predator posing as a House Pet

Marla, my best friend and companion

I've been quiet again, avoiding the internet for a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago we lost our cat, Marla. She'd been my constant companion for nearly fourteen years, and I have to confess I'm finding it hard at the moment.

I've been trying to keep my mind occupied - when it's not my thoughts go back to her - but my attention span isn't great. When I was writing, she'd be curled up on my lap with her head upside-down. Watching TV would be the same. I still wake at 2:30am every morning, the time she'd wake me for food.

We miss her dearly, and constantly expect her to come wandering into the room at any time.

I need to get back into writing - I don't want to let my publisher down. When my father died I buried myself in Conspiracy X rewrites and system changes that became Conspiracy X 2.0, and I know that it's not the healthiest of ways of dealing with these things.

I will be back, it just may take a little time.

Holding Pattern, Disengage (Part II)

Marla is suitably narked at the last six weeks

I posted at the beginning of January about how life had become stuck in a holding pattern for the duration of the festive period, and I was now approaching the start of the new year with a new vitality and determination to get back to the writing, to do... well, stuff.

All that fell by the wayside. I got sick. Nothing major, just a bad case of the flu, but it knocked me out for a couple of weeks. Literally in one case. I remember sitting up in bed and then blacking out completely. Totally unaware of where I was. It was weird. And, being the sharing type, I gave the flu to my wife as well.

This period of being ill had an adverse effect on the third member of our family, Marla - our fur-baby.  She does get stressed easily, and a combination of her worrying about our weird passing out and sleeping all day behaviour, along with some dental issues that we were initially unaware of, meant that she stopped eating at all and there was an incredibly stressful number of weeks where we feared the worst. We didn't know what was wrong with her, many trips to the vets, blood tests, medication and trying to feed her recovery food (a weird meaty paste delivered in a syringe) every few hours, squirting the paste onto our fingers and letting her lick it off while she hid under our bed.

She was booked in for dental surgery, but her bloodwork was worrying, and we were panicking a little to say the least. She was due to have all of her teeth out, but luckily they only removed two, cleaned the rest, and after another week of medication she's almost back to normal - as is her bloodwork (seems the worrying levels were purely from her not eating).

She's a little nervous of noises, convinced she's going to get put in the carrying box again and taken to the evil vets, and she's clingy with us - which, let's face it, is nice to have lots of cat attention.

Now that those worries are hopefully behind us is it time to finally disengage that holding pattern? I hope so. But with very little writing work being offered to me, very little communication from anyone really, I need to get back into the swing of it.

But I'm having my doubts about the core game mechanics for WILD, and I need to get my head back into the game.

Hopefully, very soon.

Until next time...