Category: Sci-fi

New Short Story opener

For those who haven’t noticed the twitter entry, Ordo Lupus has been accepted for publication by Createspace.

How is this for a short story opener. Is it worth pursuing?

“God’s body man, giveth me the 4th gear! Now!”
“Fucking press the damned clutch you madman!” I shouted back over the reverberating din of the V8 Chevy block, attempting some humility and knowing ‘damned’ was the only swear-word King Henry VIII would actually acknowledge.
The large pallid face broke into a toothy grin. “Raymond. You are an impertinent – what is the modern phrase – jackass, but I like you!” His big foot, somewhat incongruously contained in a size 14 Nike trainer, pressed clumsily down on the accelerator and I slammed the gearstick into 4th. A moment later the King, hunched over the royal Sparco steering wheel, turned the car to the left, and as, dirt spurting from the drifting rear wheels, we emerged from the turn, I realised we were actually going to finish in third place. Not yet a win, but for a man new, not only to the sport, but to the century, it was not a bad effort. Henry roared his approval as we crossed the line.

I Finished a New Short Story

I just finished a new story Eighteen, Blue. I am going to publish it on Kindle quickly along with the free first chapter of The Ice Boat Volume II. I am going to take my time to respond to Gary’s recent comment comment that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is depicted with wings in some cases. And either another short story Another One for No 19 or the free first chapter of Ordo Lupus and The Temple Gate – haven’t quite decided yet. It’s a formula that seems to work.

Writing Style : to be Short and Brief

Been thinking a bit about writing style – the fact that sometimes I am torn between short, really punchy writing like Warren Ellis and more discursive writing like Tolkien.

The thing is that I think very tight dialogue is great if the world is very familiar and so you don’t have to worry too much about the reader knowing his/her way round. It’s especially good too if the main character follows some kind of template – stereotype is too strong a word.
But since my writing is really mainly about people, my characters don’t comfortably fit into patterns so there really seems to be a limit to how often I can do that kind of brief writing.

Any thoughts anyone?

I find it quite nice to post brief thoughts to twitter but 140 characters is a bit short to really get anything down other than soundbites on philosophical matters.

Synopsis for Too Bright The Sun

Okay so I am playing around here. That may be the title of new book and may not. I finished the first draft anyway. It’s looking good but who am I to tell. Wait for the first reader to tell me it’s crap.

Been messing around doing the synopsise (is that the correct plural?) for my books so I can publish as E-books on createspace and kindle. I realised that the tags within createspace and kindle don’t work that great really and then I discovered that social tagging is the next big thing. In fact I have been investigating a product (or suite of products really) called OpenCalais (Link no longer available) which is for Web 3.0 stuff. Very technical really but they have this tool here:
(Link no longer available)
which allows you to paste in text and it works out the social tags for you. It’s really pretty good although its’s a bit freaky sometimes just how good it is. For instance I put in this text:

“He has a unique gift, but his daughter has been murdered by a Winged Serpent which only he believes in. His grandfather, a writer and occultist, is not where he should be; in his grave, and time is running out for a marriage forged in the resistance struggles of the Second World War. Can he use his gift to save his marriage and survive the mysterious events which threaten to overwhelm him?”

and one of the tags it came up with was Adam and Eve. I mean where is that from? And the freaky thing is that the book really does have a bit about Adam and Eve in a pivotal scene and this underpins everything in this paragraph.

Reploids or Cyblicants?

In figuring out the main crux of my pending sci-fi story I ended up with a bit of a dilemma. My main character has some issues with whether he is human or not – Of course, this has been explored in Blade Runner and it’s not the main theme of my story so I didn’t want to get too involved with it but I did need to find a platform for his ‘kind of person’.

Originally I had conceived this part of the story in quite simple terms using just androids or cyborgs but this didn’t quite seem to cover all the possibilities I needed. Then I thought of sticking to Replicants – a-la-Blade Runner but this just seemed to dilute things and, in fact, make the story almost pointless. Continue reading “Reploids or Cyblicants?” →