Daily Sketch: Days 5 & 6

Didn't get chance to post yesterday as bogged down with assembling some flatpacked shelving. I had a thought about how these pictures may be diluting the basic cause of the blog, so I may keep doodling but post a week's worth in one post, so that the interesting posts (at least, I hope they're interesting) about gaming don't get lost in the mass of awful pictures...

Anyway, here's yesterday's pic...

Daily Sketch 5: Not the Bad Robot you were expecting.

 I don't know what I was doing, I just started doodling...

Daily Sketch 6: Self Portrait of me circa 1988.

And the other one is a pic of how I used to draw myself back in the 80's! Hence the hair and the lack of glasses!

Daily Sketch: Day 4

Daily Sketch, Day 4. No idea, just started doodling. Discovered that setting Sketchtime to magic marker, in light grey, and a fine point, is like drawing in pencil. Hmmm...

Daily Sketch, Day 4. Just some doodling

Daily Sketch: Day 3

Really couldn't think of anything to draw today, ended up doodling the scary doctor-spider thing in the book but trying to draw something that had deliberately weird stretchy limbs felt really odd. Not happy with this one either.

Daily Sketch, Day 3, evil spider-doctor-creature

Daily Sketch: Day 2

Daily sketch time again. Really struggling to come up with ideas of what to draw, so just doodling any old crap. And crap really is the key word here. What kind of proportions am I going for here?

Daily Sketch, Day 2, Some guy with a gun.

Daily Sketch: Day 1

Well, I promised I'd do it, so here goes. Daily Sketch, day one. I dunno what I was trying to do here, part of me wanted to start on the basics of one of the WILD Tarot cards, but I didn't get very far. I've found Sketchtime is good for doodles and working out what shape I want images, but nothing really beats pencil and paper for me. Maybe it's the huge stylus and lack of accuracy, or maybe it's just that I haven't really drawn anything for about ten years. 

Anyway, it's early days yet, maybe things will improve as the year goes on. So, yes... this is poop.

More tomorrow hopefully if I'm not buried under a mass of flat-packing and half assembled bookcases.

Daily Sketch No.1 - 1/1/2013 - WILD Card - The Pontifex

New Year's Task Resolutions

Writing this in the last few hours of 2012... that was a crap ol' year. I know it is just an arbitrary dating system, but I do hope 2013 proves to be better. Lost a lot in 2012, I'm determined to make sure that 2013 is better.

One of the ways I'm planning on this is I'm going to force myself to do some things. Well, not so much "force", let's just say I'm setting goals and I'm hoping I'll be able to meet them.

So here goes:

1) Finish WILD. This could be the hardest of the lot, but I'll put it first. I have the game system, I've started writing character creation, and I've started writing up the background and how the cards can be used. I just need to stop procrastinating and actually write the damn thing. And I need to produce a basic game system document so that I can start giving it to a select few to start playtesting, to make sure the system works.

2) Finish Extinction. This is another tricky one. I'd started work on it before my mum died, and then I just couldn't really face it. It's a dark and harrowing tale of warfare and survival after an alien invasion, and I guess my head wasn't in the right place to deal with some of the issues. But, I'm determined to get that finished for Eden. Sorry, George. I will, I promise.

3) Take part in NaNoWriMo again in 2013. NaNoWriMo was a great motivator, and I've already had some ideas for a sequel to the WILD fiction novel that I managed to write for the last NaNo. Of course, if this gets in the way of actually finishing the game, then I don't mind sacrificing this one.

4) Get out of Retail. Every Christmas I say "x Christmas in retail, that'll be the last one." Well, this year it was "12th Christmas in retail" and I'm determined that it'll be the last one. It destroys all of your festive spirit, and frankly, I'm getting too old for it. Then again, I say it every year, and every year I'm still there...

5) Draw. I used to draw all of the time. Hell, I set up a comic publishing company to get my writing and art out there to the public. After that, I really haven't tried much artwork since. I've purchased "Sketchtime" for the iPad, bought a stylus, and while the actual art I've been tinkering with for WILD won't be produced this way, it's a good habit to get into. I've taken to wasting my lunch hours playing GTA: Vice City or Carmageddon, when I should be producing something useful, so I figured I could be spending this time drawing something. I've decided that, no matter how little or crap, I'm going to draw something every day. I may even post them on the blog as a way of keeping track of my vow to keep going. Hopefully the first one coming on the 1st Jan... if I can figure out something to actually draw... and remember how to draw...

6) Do something with the video camera. No, not that you perv. I'm just sitting on this nice video camera (well, not actually sitting ON) that I bought for the Cheesemint stuff, and it's not doing anything any more. I really want to do some video stuff. I've had an idea for a short that is almost an introduction to the game, but that's at the more ambitious end of the filming spectrum. At the least ambitious end, I'd at least like to do some "blog" supplements, some unboxing of classic RPGs so you can see what they were like, and to show off what the new stuff is like and how cool it is.

So that's it.

Let's hope 2013 is a great one. Anyway, tasks to do, things to get done, so I'll leave it at that and go back to watching Firefly yet again. Genius...

The Year In Review: 2012

Last blog post of the year, and traditionally a lot of bloggers and publishers produce a "State of the Nation" speech, a summary of the ups and downs of the year. I didn't do one last year, mostly as no one was really reading my blog (is anyone actually reading it now?) but I did a similar thing with one of those legendary "family newsletters" that I used to put in Christmas cards to everyone.

However, this year was so bad that I haven't bothered doing a newsletter - it would have been so depressing and miserable that it would have been a miserable read and not what people would want to read at what is traditionally a cheery time of the year.

So what has happened this year when it comes to my writing?

The year began a little lost. I was in between writing jobs - a situation I'd put myself in by turning down writing opportunities for the last year while I worked on the Unlocked webseries with my former video production partners, Cheesemint. I'd had the thought that producing comedy was the way to go, writing something funny that everyone could enjoy. While the original series of Unlocked went down well and was screened at GenCon Indy 2011, things kinda fell apart and I found myself alone (with the wife and cat) and at a particularly low state.

I managed to get myself a little writing job covering the release of Marvel's "The Avengers" (or "Avengers Assembled" as it was called in the UK) for Forces of Geek, heading to London to see an advance screening of the film, and then attending the UK Press Conference, being in the same room as Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, etc. An amazing opportunity, and a fantastic couple of days (see the full post here).

But even then, the universe wanted to keep me down, with my mother being taken ill the very evening of the Avengers press screening. While she was being rushed into hospital, my phone was turned off and I was miles away, unaware of what was happening.

My summer was dominated with taking every opportunity to travel back to my hometown to visit mum in hospital, and then in the care home where she was placed, but she never really recovered from that night, and she died early in August.

The rest of the year was taken up with recovering a little, and the day-job in retail as it built up to Christmas and the usual madness that entails.

So, yes. Not a good year.

It wasn't all bad.

Conspiracy X 2.0 returned to life thanks to Kickstarter. The three supplements for the game were successfully backed and two out of the three are already in glorious shiny hardcover form.

The supplements for Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space started seeing print, the amazing Defending the Earth (UNIT sourcebook) is now in hardcopy as well as PDF, and the Time Traveller's Companion has just launched as PDF with a print version in the new year.

And I successfully finished my NaNoWriMo novel that set the scene for the WILD RPG.

WILD seems to be the place for me to put my sadness, frustrations and setbacks aside. And hopefully, the game will be all I hope it will be - a game of dreams, where you can explore the mind, the unconscious, to visit impossible realms, to do the amazing and not just kill your way through bad guys. The world is harsh enough without games of death and destruction. Sure WILD can be used to play action, and violence, but I hope the game will be something more.

Hopefully, WILD will be closer to publication next year. Maybe even finished. I hope to Kickstart it, but I want the game to be actually finished before I try to do that - that way, there won't be the traditional 6-12 month wait between paying for a game and for it to actually come through the letterbox.

With the novel already done (probably needing a rewrite/edit) there's already a bonus incentive, and then there's the cards to work on...

It has become a very personal project for me, and I just hope that when you do finally see it, that it is everything I hoped and dreamed it would be.

Let's hope 2013 is a better one, for everyone.

Nothing to see here, move along...

No real blog post this week. I thought about doing the next phase in the "Roll Your Own Life" sequence, but I'd need to scan a load of comic art as we're at that phase of my gaming history, so that'll have to wait until after the festive season.

Meanwhile, writing more WILD stuff, this time how the cards can be used. It's good to get back into the swing of doing that.

Otherwise, work as usual, and it would have been my Dad's birthday today. He'd have been 90 if he'd still been alive. Miss you, Dad!

Roll Your Own Life (14) - Yes, this is a Kult

Last time I did a little nostalgia piece I was talking about the old World of Darkness and how we all got very into playing Vampire and Mage, and then I had a bit of a falling out with White Wolf, mostly due to the way my wife and I were treated by the nasty minority in The Camarilla.

The cover for KULT 1st Edition

I did, however, still really like the characters and the setting that we'd formed for the game, and I wanted to continue the story of the tabletop game, but on a smaller scale. The multiple games in the same setting was too demanding considering I was supposed to be doing college work, so I reeled it back to the basics - just one game running at once, just a handful of players. But what I needed was a new system to play dark urban occult fantasy with. And, as usually happens with my game buying, there was one game sitting on the shelves that intrigued me with its striking cover - Kult.

I don't know what it was about Kult, but there was something scary about it. The cover was cool, but it seemed a little sinister too. Maybe that's what drew me to it, that strange scared fascination you have to see something that you're not really sure you want to see. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When I was a kid, that film came out and it was legendary. The stories of how people were fainting during it, it was something that was almost too scary to watch, but you were fascinated enough to almost dare yourself to try.

Kult was the same for me. Its inspiration from Hellraiser was obvious, but I gave in, bought the rule book, and was hooked. Not in a "tear your soul apart" way, but just in the way that it was crafted. I set to converting the characters from the Mage game and soon we were back in action.

The cover for KULT 2nd Edition
Just awesome and wacky.

Kult allowed us to do some really weird things in game. One of the characters was killed - not even a player character, just a reliable NPC, and one of the PCs vowed to bring him back by using a host of powerful and available spells from Kult to make the character pregnant, to put the dead character's spirit back in the unborn baby, and to travel back in time to leave the child with foster parents so the character could still be alive today. Of course, he was radically different when they returned. He wasn't a vampire anymore for starters.

It was very cool, and the way that The Metropolis worked, the city behind the illusion of reality, would be something I would always remember in future projects.

When second edition Kult came out with its awesome typography and design, I was shown a whole new world of how rulebooks could be presented. They didn't need to be plain or basic, they could play with the conventions of typography and layout, experiment with the way that the game could be published, and laugh in the face of mundanity. The two supplements for magic were so bizarre in their layout that some pages were almost unreadable, but that just made it cooler. And the Judas Grail adventure was so bonkers, I don't think the players got very far with it. Love that game.

Layout design for the Purgatory supplement
courtesy of www.kult-rpg.com

The following versions of the game just didn't have the same scary coolness or wacky graphic design as that or the first edition, and for now Kult seems to have faded into obscurity.

However, it was at this time that weird things were happening outside of the game.

I'd set up a comic publishing company, Autocratik Press (also known as Autocratik For The Masses) with the backing of the Prince's Trust, and my attention to games and games writing had taken a back seat while I created a different world of my own. The world of my comic, Missing.

There's a Right way, and a Wong way...

Bloggery time again. I need to look back and see where I got up to with my nostalgic retrospective of my gaming history, but in the meantime I've been catching up on reading. Something that I haven't really been doing recently due to NaNoWriMo.

Not that I've been reading much recently anyway. I'd been rereading House of Leaves, mostly because it is both incredibly spooky, and it's got some seriously cool typography and design. That was until I picked up David Wong's sequel to one of my favourite books.

John Dies at the End -
David Wong
(Titan Books)

I've already sung the praises of Wong's "John Dies at the End", and I finally managed to convince my wife to read it. JDATE is an odd one - it started as a blog, David Wong writing it for the internet, and then managed to get such a following for the strange occult adventures of David Wong and his slacker friend John, that it eventually became a small press book. When the legendary director of Phantasm (which I love!) Don Coscarelli showed interest and the book became a movie (going to be released in very soon VoD and limited theatrical run), the bigger book publishers took note and "John Dies at the End" hit the mainstream shelves.

The book itself is bonkers. It really does seem like Wong made the whole thing up as he went along, compiling three distinct stories into one crazy, meandering stream of consciousness that is incredibly addictive and I loved every moment of it.

The problem I had was that it felt like something I would have written. The tone, the bizarre nature of it all, it just felt like Wong had managed to plug into my brain and syphon my own strange ramblings and channel them into his book.

John Dies at the End
Film Poster edition

I read JDATE in about a week, and was left wondering what to read next. I ended up starting to read it again straight away, which is pretty odd. I never really re-read books. I've only really re-read a handful of books - "Falling Out of Cars" by Jeff Noon (my go-to read whenever I need inspiration, it's like my comfort blanket. I know, an odd choice), "Dune" by Frank Herbert (just because it's ace), "The Gunslinger" by Stephen King (mostly because I kept rereading the early ones every time a new Dark Tower book came out), and recently "House of Leaves" by Mark Danielewski.

It wasn't long after the trailer for the movie hit the internet that a sequel to the book was officially announced. It came out just before NaNoWriMo, and I launched myself into David and John's world again. I didn't do as the usual reviewers, I took my time, and enjoyed it. When NaNo started in November, I calmed down the reading because I was worried that my writing style would become... I don't know... more... "Wong" than my own style. Thankfully, NaNo has finished and I was able to finish the book this morning.

The sequel, "This book is full of spiders (seriously dude, don't touch it!)" really does what it says on the tin. It is full of spiders. Evil, parasitic, alien spiders that bore into your head, take over your brain, and turn you into a violent zombie (for want of a better word). Unlike JDATE, "Spiders" is really just one big story, as John, David and Amy find themselves at the core of the "outbreak" and the imminent destruction of their hometown of "Undisclosed". The same strange plot elements (especially the opening sequence with the strange military box and the last minute reveal of its contents) are there, but this is a more structured and coherent story.

The use of the bizarre alien drug "Soy Sauce", introduced in JDATE, is really cool, though the nature of the story having to rely on 2nd hand accounts when you're not following Wong does make it a little odd in places - but when you get to the end and read how the book was supposedly put together it makes sense.

I picked up the book on the day of release, and the first printing had a lot of typos, and three of the pages were in the wrong order, so hopefully that'll be rectified by the time you purchase it. And you should. It's still awesome, and together with John Dies at the End, they easily make my fave reads of the year!

NaNoWriMo Update 4 - The Price of Winning

WARNING! THIS POST HAS A SLIGHTLY GRAPHIC PHOTO OF INJURY!

So, NaNoWriMo is over for another year, this is my first attempt at doing it officially... so how did it go?

As I mentioned on the last post, I was on track. A little behind, but it had been a weird month in the day job requiring some exhausting extra hours. I guess it's to be expected working in retail at this time of the year. But I was recovering, the word count was slowly getting back on track, and I was just back on par at the beginning of this week when I fell ill.

And when I mean "FALL" I mean it in every sense of the word.

Not entirely sure what it was, it felt like some evil stomach bug, but it really knocked me out, quite literally. I had a moment when I collapsed on the kitchen floor from just being dizzy and breaking out in a cold sweat, but I thought that the worst was over after that. Luckily I was off work that day, so I just went to bed to recover...

The head injury from blacking out
starts scabbing up. Lovely...

My lovely wife came home, and while she was downstairs getting her food, I got up to use the bathroom and that's the last thing I remember. Next thing, the lovely wife is investigating the bang, and I come-to wondering why the floor is next to my face.

Two days of basically sleeping 18+ hours a day, trying to get my strength back was helped by not only Debs keeping an eye on me and keeping me well supplied with juice, fruit, and anything I could need, but also by the awesome staff I have in my relatively new shop who really showed their worth by covering for the days I couldn't make it in. Thanks ladies! You're all awesome.

I tweeted while I was ill, saying that I really couldn't manage the writing, and I had resigned myself to failing. It was a shame, I was about 8000 words short of hitting the 50K, but I felt crap.

But, saying that, I felt better by Wednesday afternoon, and while Debs was at her Mage: The Awakening game, I pondered trying to write and see if I could at least whittle away at those words. Strangely, the story I wanted to tell came to a logical conclusion by the end of Wednesday night. I could have typed "The End" and that would have been it, but the only problem was, I was still 3500 words short.

Seems I won! What did I win?
Do I get a prize?

Thursday was easier too. I returned to work, and miracle of miracles, I was inspired. The book breaks into three sections, and I'd named each section after the sleep-stage/brain waves. I had the idea to switch characters and have little journal asides in between each section to show the struggles that the lead character's father is going through, creating the dreamshare technology to try to reach his sleeping/comatose daughter. It resulted in some cool new stuff that I think builds on the story nicely, and I must admit some of it did make me fill-up while writing it.

The whole story has a lot of personal elements, in face the whole of the WILD RPG is quite a personal one to me, so I really hope that I can get it finished and do it justice. It's my key goal for the new year. I will finish the game, it'll be designed in a cool and interesting new way, the layout will be awesome, the illustrations will be revolutionary... Or I'll certainly do my hardest to try.

Having a tie-in novel to go with it is a great start. If it doesn't get published as a separate entity, it'll be fantastic background for the core rulebook.

Anyway, the extra sections tipped me over the 50,000 words, and by the end of Thursday, the NaNoWriMo site had verified that I'd officially "won".

And now? A rest. Just a little one, after all, I work in retail, and Xmas shopping has already started. So I guess, they say there's no rest for the wicked - I must have been pretty horrible in a previous life.

Until next time, stay multi-classy.

NaNoWriMo Update 3 - Running WILD excerpt...

Over 2/3 of the way through NaNoWriMo and I'm a little behind schedule. I need to do about 3000 words to get back on track, but at least it's getting me writing. Something I've struggled to do for a few months now.

Word count is currently at 32,000 words, and I've decided to put it out there... I know, this is a bit unlike me, revealing what I've written, but I'm pasting in a little from pages 20-22. It's raw, unedited, and a mess, the kind of thing you expect from the high-speed word factory that is NaNoWriMo, but it gives you an idea of what I've been doing for the last couple of weeks.

When I've been stuck for a direction, I've been using the game mechanics for "Out of Control" dreams to inspire the course of the story. Anyway, I'd best get back to it. Some of this will appear in the WILD corebook, maybe even in its entirety as a separate book, maybe as a stretch goal on Kickstarter or something. You never know...

Anyway, the story so far... Clarity is asleep, but she doesn't realise it. She's trapped in a sleeping state, and in her dream, she's gone to the hospital where the previous night the doctor transformed into a hideous monster and tried to attack her. She's gone back to try and get her bag...

>

The corridor was strangely dark, but I guessed that was only to be expected as it ran down the middle of the building, away from any windows or natural light. The strip lights overhead flickered again. What was it with the power in this place? Were they really that badly funded?

There was no sign of anyone. No nurses. No doctors doing their rounds. To the right were a number of private rooms, with their doors open. The first one contained an elderly lady who looked like she was strapped into her bed, the TV on one of those adjustable arms was positioned less than thirty centimetres away from her face, illuminating it with the horrors of daytime television, the sounds of chat-show applause could be heard through her headphones even out in the corridor. With her arms strapped down, I wondered if this was some form of brainwashing or torture. What had the poor lady done to deserve such a horrible treatment?

The next door was even worse. I could only see the peak in the blankets where the occupant’s feet remained. Surrounding her (I’m assuming it was female, I didn’t think they mixed genders on these wards) was a doctor, a man in a suit, and a teenage girl. Wait. That was... Lisa?

I pushed the door further open. It was Lisa, she was crying. The doctor looked familiar too. Wasn’t that the doctor who just saw to my head downstairs? And the man in the suit. I recognised his hair. Dad?

I edged further into the room, part of me knowing what I would see.

“I really can’t understand it,” the doctor said, “there’s no response to stimulus, but she’s showing a lot of brain activity. It’s not a coma, so to speak. She’s just not waking up. It may be the combination of the drugs in her system-”

“My daughter never used drugs,” Dad spat, interrupting the doctor mid-sentence.

I could see the patient’s face. 

It was me.

“Still, she did have large traces of Flunitrazepam, and Gamma-hydroxybutyrate in her system, there’s a good chance that her drink was spiked. She could have passed out, fell, and caused the head trauma. There’s not really much we can do except wait.”

“But I’m right here!” I said. Nothing. No response. 

Am I dead? A ghost? 

“Monitor her progress, doctor. I’ll make arrangements to have her transferred to York. I don’t care about the cost. I’m not losing her.” My father was doing what he always did when he felt helpless - he threw money at the situation and hoped it would improve.

“I’m RIGHT HERE!!” I shouted. 

The doctor turned to me. The real me. Not the one unconscious in the bed. That couldn’t be me. I was standing here in the room. He turned to me, his eyes white and pupil-less, and hissed.

“What the hell?” 

He started transforming again. His arms reaching out for me, while the rest of him grew to ridiculous proportions. He bent forward to fit in the room, the stilt-like legs having to bend as well. The lights flickered even more, and my ears were filled with the sound of a distant rumbling. Something really bad was happening, and no one else in the room seemed to notice. Lisa was crying still, my dad frozen in place, staring at my sleeping self. I had no choice. I had to back out of the room, out of the reach of the creature the doctor had become. It flailed at me, swiping with impossibly long arms. Its elbow knocked into my dad, but he didn’t even flinch. He didn’t feel it, he just stood there, deep in thought, oblivious.

“Daaaaad!” I screamed, but he didn’t move. There wasn’t even a flicker of motion or recognition. I may as well not have been there.

One of the doctor’s hands grabbed my jacket. I screamed, struggling to get free, but its pale and disgusting hands held the fabric like a vice. There was nothing in the pockets, it was a sacrifice I could bear. I slipped out of the jacket’s sleeves and almost fell back into the ward’s corridor, as the doctor-spider pulled my jacket into the room, jamming it into his face. His jaw extended and extended again. Becoming a hideous maw, lined with tiny teeth. It crammed the jacket into its mouth, devouring it, making horrific noises like a child faking the enjoyment of food.

I had to get out of here. It was a nightmare I kept returning to, and there was no waking.

Staggering back to my feet, I ran down the ward back to the lifts. The area had access to four lifts, and in front of me was a mass of windows overlooking the town. The storm clouds had returned, time had strangely passed and it was almost dark outside. On the beach, in the distance, a bonfire spat tiny, glowing sparks into the heavens. It looked like there were people being thrown onto the flames.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Am I dead? I don’t feel dead. If what I was seeing was true, I never regained consciousness after the party. I’d been drugged, and hit my head. If that’s true, then I’m actually asleep. I’m dreaming all of this. It’s all in my head. But how do I wake up from this?

I can’t jump out of the window. You can’t die in your dreams or you die in real life, isn’t that what they always say? One, two, Freddy’s coming for you? I can’t just splash water on my face to wake myself up, I’ve already splashed water, and been in the middle of that downpour.

C’mon, Clarity. What are you supposed to do?

>

I didn’t have time to think about it, as the sounds of splintering wood, shattering glass and the sparking of broken lighting echoed. I knew what was coming. Looking back at the ward, the doors had come off of their usually incredibly strong hinges, as the doctor-creature forced its way through.

Its huge hands grabbed the door frame, pulling its long body through. Its head a distorted mockery of what once was human. It screamed an unearthly howl, exposing those rows of hundreds of razor sharp teeth. I froze. I had no idea what to do. This was all too much.

I looked frantically from side to side. The lifts weren’t coming. There was the exit to the stairs. I forced my legs to move, and threw myself at the doors to the stairwell. They seemed to be chained shut. What kind of a fire exit was that? I always worried about fire exits in hospitals. They always seemed to make the buildings so high, but hardly any of the patients in there could use the stairs. The lifts always shut down in times of emergencies, so what, do they just expect you to roast in your bed? Was this a horrific act of revenge on the building’s designers, lock the fire exit so even the nurses and doctors couldn’t escape the fire? Why should they get out when the patients can’t?

The chain holding the doors shut wasn’t very tight, and I could almost force an arm through it. The doctor-creature was now in the room with me, at the lifts. Its arms and legs were enough to span the whole room, while its head edged ever closer to me. I could get my arm through right up to the shoulder. I glanced through the doors to see if I could make it, but the metal stairs beyond were a mass of rust, flames and decay. Parts of the stairs looked like they would crumble at any minute. This was it, I was in hell, and I was about to be ripped apart.

>

The windows overlooking the storm beaten town shattered inwards and my ears were deafened by a combination of wind, breaking glass and gunfire. The doctor-creature screamed in pain as parts of its body and arms were riddled with holes, sending masses of black, oozing blood splattering over the far walls. 

Crouched on the windowsill was a girl, about my age. Dressed in a leather jacket, skirt and boots, she held in her hands an assault rifle that continued to rattle out round upon round into the doctor. But that was not the most remarkable thing. Coming out of her back were two enormous wings. Not white like an angel, more the colour of a falcon.

“Stay down,” said my guardian angel, as she hopped into the room. The gun had ceased firing, and she held it upright while the empty magazine ejected onto the floor. She reached behind her and grabbed another and was about to slap the new cartridge into the gun when the doctor-creature swiped at her, grabbing her left wing.

She groaned, but didn’t make the sound of pain that I sort of expected as the creature ripped the wing off, and started ramming parts of it into his mouth.

Instead, she just cocked the rifle, levelling it against her shoulder, and simply said, “chew on this!” The gun spat round upon round into the doctor-creature’s face, forcing it back up against the wall. Its arms and legs twitched as the creature’s head was reduced to a mass of black ooze that decorated the pock-marked plaster wall behind it. The firing continued until the magazine was empty again, and it ejected onto the floor to join its spent cousin.

The creature was dead. It had taken so much damage to its face and body that parts of it were no longer connected. 

“Shit, shitting shit,” the angel said. Not exactly the words I would have expected to come from an angel’s mouth. But then, my religious education class didn’t really mention anything about assault rifles either. She took off the jacket, and the other wing (and the remains of the damaged one) came with it. She dumped it on the floor, “I really liked that jacket, too.”

“Thank you!” was about all I could squeak out at this point.

“No problem,” she said. She came over to me, slung the rifle under her arm and reached to help me up. She couldn’t have been much taller than me, blonde and very pretty. She radiated a sense of efficiency, calm and...

“Hope,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“I’m Hope. You looked like you were in trouble.”

NaNoWriMo Update 2

Yeah, I'm still writing, but it's still awful nonsense and I feel like out of desperation I've started regurgitating stuff from previous fiction efforts. Ho well, WILD is like my Magnum Opus, so I guess it's only fitting that it draws from lots of creative parts of my life so far...

Anyway, word count is on 21831, a little behind schedule (a little, I need to do over 3000 tomorrow to be on schedule) but we'll keep going!!

NaNoWriMo Update 1

Hi there,

No real blog post this week as I should be spending every waking hour trying to get my word count up on the NaNoWriMo project. I'm at 10,400+ at the moment, just about on schedule, but the day job is looking likely to be chaos this week (and probably the next) so my time to write is scarce.

The book's going okay, but I do think I'm making up absolute crap. Not entirely sure where it's going, but I guess that's half of the fun.

Until next time, stay multi-classy!