lecteur de tarot

"The skies filled with karura."

Recently, the first draft/promo copy of lecteur de tarot arrived for final editing.

This isn’t the actual book as you will see it as, more than likely, it will still be Mister Watts’ Particle Surge Productions that handle the final product but what you see here is the earliest edition of the book ~ think of it as the ‘pilot episode’ for the book proper.

I don’t think it would look half as impressive as it actually does without Mister Rasbury of razterized’s avian filled imagery and the interior picture of our friend the zebra-magpie, illustrated by my long-suffering wife and as seen on the sampler cover.

Both images have a history longer than their association with this title. My wife’s illustration comes from the well-worn sketchbook she used to carry about in her over-sized Paul’s Boutique leopard flower padlock bag, whilst Mister Rasbury’s cover was originally one of several designs for the new Love Amongst Strangers reissue.

More on that later.

As we come closer and closer to the publication date of lecteur de tarot, the first of the freebies is now available to download from lulu.

The lecteur de tarot sampler contains the first two chapters of the novel, introducing you to the characters of Maus, Shugo and Luc as they begin their quest to the phantom forests in the east. The idea of putting out these two chapters like this and of including the prologue in January’s Cultivating Howlers is an attempt to win favour and find a larger audience for the project. Whether this will actually work out or not is another matter.

The e-book clocks in at 34 pages and features the original rules for the card game combat system used in the book as well as a new and exclusive page of The Black Iron Prison.

Yet the best part of this project is that it’s free, therefore you have no excuse really not to hit lulu and download yourself a copy and, if you like it, hopefully you’ll be impressed enough to want to follow the story through to its natural conclusion once the book proper is released.

Whatever the case, I appreciate every and any attempt made to download this project. Please feel free to link to the title or mail it to friends as you see fit but, most of all, please make sure you enjoy it.

Thanks once again for your support!

Back to drinking strong, black coffee from the same old familiar Starbucks mug in the morning. I’ve been drinking a ‘green’ blend lately, which, I’m assured, is apparently good for me. It’s not as overtly sweet as green tea latte, but it’s not as sharp as my usual coffee. Musically, I’ve been listening to a lot of Arcade Fire, thanks to a friend’s recommendation, but it’s more the coffee than the musique that has influenced the shape and feeling of the new book.

This isn’t to say however that musique hasn’t played its fair share in inspiring the new book because, in many ways, it’s more about musique and pop culture than anything else I’ve thus far done.

If it sounds like I’m being vague, it’s because I am. The new book doesn’t have a title yet so I can’t properly tag this post and am somewhat loath to go into too many details about its narrative. Suffice to say it is something different, something I haven’t tried before.

Regarding things that I have tried before, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that the planned Artifice Comics novellas will not be happening any time soon. Initially, the plan was to craft four short books designed to deal with issues in AC continuity that I’d like to revisit – Millennium Man’s trip into space and his eventual return, an Artifice Albion ‘movie’ and a ‘year one’ type story dealing with a Bush43 reboot. Right now though, AC can’t really support such a plan and, if I’m honest, I don’t really have the time to commit to it. It’s a shame, but maybe one day the project will be resurrected (again).

It’s not all doom and gloom though. lecteur de tarot’s cover is almost complete, which means that the project will be well and truly out of my hands soon. We’re working hard to get this done before we move back to more civilised areas of the country, after which point I’ll keep you updated on when you can expect the book to hit the shops.

I’m also working on something for September – more on this later.

Until then, please look forward to both the new book and to lecteur de tarot.

http://jacobmilnestein.co.uk/omake.htm

Once again, it’s that time of year. Mulled wine warms on the stove and mince pies await nothing but a dash of cream for the adventurous. For those of you far from both home and such simple comforts, this year’s Christmas story is a discussion taking place in a dank and festering pit in an unknown field in France, circa early 1915.

Initially, having removed the older stories from the omake page earlier this month, I wanted to attempt to provide an introduction to lecteur de tarot. This story is not said introduction. Instead there is a touch of Sophistry and a further examination of Mononoke theological themes first mentioned in The Winter House last year. I want to tell you that you can read this without prior knowledge of the Mononoke or of lecteur de tarot, but I’m increasingly feeling that the only person who understands how these ideas fit together is now typing you this missive and needs to learn to express his thoughts in a clearer fashion.

Which isn’t to say I’m trying to dissuade you from reading, but I wanted to warn you all in advance.

Yet fear not! If the warning puts you off, I promise I have a few more aces up my sleeve for this holiday season. All tastes will be catered for!

…

Well, perhaps not, but certainly this is far from the last of my seasonal posts for the month.

So, now that everything has been explained in as awkward a manner as possible, it only remains for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Thank you once again for reading.

And so December in England begins with a downpour, a torrent of rain that leaves a residue of mud on cracked paving stones that the council declines to fix, having already squandered the money on pointless pursuits and cheap fairy lights for the town centre.

There’s a saying in this godforsaken part of the country that it’s ‘too cold for snow’, certainly right now it’s too wet for it, but we can at least bring everything else required for the beginning of Christmas festivities, commencing with a trip to the unedited highlights of last year’s Christmas story languishes still on the jacobmilnestein omake page.

I made a recent decision to remove the years prior as they need a bit of editing and they somewhat ruin the surprise of the forthcoming lecteur de tarot novel (due next year, I have been told). If they had still been there, then I would have recommended them as a perfect entry into the lecteur de tarot story… but it would have been an entry into the deep end, so you might be better off waiting until next year when you are assured a physical copy of the central text to leaf through.

If you’re looking for something more current then I can confess to being hard at work on this year’s Christmas story and that the opening word of the tale is ‘The‘. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter until later on in the month.

In other news, a copy of Mister Watts’ Guardian Force Roboman v1: Let’s Go Robo! arrived here last month with something of a surprise inside. You shouldn’t need me to tell you about it as the contents of Mister Watts’ story speak well enough without need of me trying to sell it. Head over to amazon and take a look inside the book, certainly it’s a title deserving of a place on the shelves of any tokusatsu fan.

Last but not least, the elventh part of The Black Iron Prison is available within the pages of Artifice Comics’ Obento #2. As promised, the series is set in a world where it would be impossible for any of the established Artifice heroes to come into existence. It is a world of cruelty and vindictiveness, a world presided over by the ethics of the four libertines who once holed themselves up in the Château de Silling. The story will unfold over twelve installments presented out of sequence.

I won’t ask you to enjoy it but, if you do read it, I will ask you to understand that this is a cautionary tale with no morals. Their world, extreme and absurd as it may seem, is not far removed from our own.

As a coda to last month’s Hallowe’en tale, the haunted knight and his youthful companion return once more for a brief foray into the wilderness of the Home Counties on the fifth of November.

This brief little tale, no more than 900-odd words, is available on fauxnoir.

One of the traditions of [fauxnoir] as a mailing list has been to produce a Hallowe’en story and a Christmas story every year.

This year’s festive fright is the tale of a former knight and a funeral procession, the tale of a lost London and an oni with a dark gift.

This year’s tale, boys and ghouls, is called Pumpkin Night and can be read at leisure in your inbox or at the mailing list’s homepage.

Happy Hallowe’en!

human/mage/17/Star

This morning I finally laid the lecteur de tarot novel to rest, at least from a writing point of view. The editing goes on and, after that, the refinement and then the attempts to sell it to Mister Adrian J. Watts and, failing that, anyone who will look at it, but for now the core text of the book is complete.

Chapter 12 clocked in at 17123 words, surpassing even Adeste Fideles‘ 16395 words. This is of interest to no one but me, yet as the latter story is one of my favourite lecteur de tarot stories to date and as the events overlap somewhat, I thought it worth mentioning. Needless to say, reading Adeste Fideles now will spoil large sections of the novel’s final scenes so please do so at your own peril.

Writing the finale of this book, set mostly around Christmas on a distant world, and watching as the sunlight crawled down the front of the houses in the street outside, the clock turning slowly from 5AM to 2PM as the air became stifling and I drunk black coffee and Lipton’s lemon iced tea, was a painful experience. For every mention of chill winter air or falling snow, the room seemed to increase in temperature, the air settling like a dead weight upon my shoulders. Between the end of chapter 12 and the epilogue, I was forced to go and shower just to cool down.

The above image is the 17th card of the Major Arcana in the human/mage deck. This card plays a role in chapter 12, though I won’t tell you how and why.

I started making these little cards, cut out from the backs of cereal boxes and any other sources of cardboard I was able to find, way back in 2004 when I first started devising the idea of lecteur de tarot. They’ve been really helpful in that, for some of those early mythical 27+ stories, I plotted out the battles using the variety of moves and equipment in the cards I had made. Soon after that though, I began to write stories as a method of filling in the gaps in the decks. To this day, the human/mage deck, the Mononoke basic deck and its three derivative classes and the decks of the higher class Sin Mage characters remain unfinished, though gradually, with every completed story, they expand.

The trouble with this method is that, as the class decks expand, so do the assorted alternate cards – the 2nd edition cards that, were this a commercial game, would be found in booster packs, providing an alternative to the cards found in the main decks. This can be awkward in that, sometimes, I end up with a million variants of the same type of spell at different levels but I still lack the one thing I need to make the deck balanced, but such are the evils of writing in such a way, I guess. It does mean however, that hypothetically, any battle you read in a lecteur de tarot story could plausibly be recreated in your own front room if you had the right cards. Don’t quote me on that though.

For a more detailed explanation of the lecteur de tarot rules, please visit the tarot section of jacobmilnestein.co.uk.

It’s too early to talk about the things that I felt worked in the story and the things that weren’t as good as they could have been as there’s still room to change – some characters are only now receiving their names, having gone through several chapters with tags like [villain!name] and [realname] in the spaces were their actual names should have been found – surprisingly, this is actually quite common for the way I write. Characters seem to reveal the details of themselves with painstaking reservedness sometimes.

As things develop on the publishing front, I’ll attempt to post some snippets and teasers from the book’s text, until then, I hope you at least will be content with these enigmatic musings.

Tomorrow morning I plan to wake up just before dawn in order to complete the final chapter and epilogue of lecteur de tarot. This is something of an attempt to reclaim the winter, to welcome back grey skies and the whispering ghosts of the morning breeze.

It is also, sadly, what I consider to be a ‘fun idea’.

I have only four scenes left of lecteur de tarot’s final chapter. There will be a giant bird in it.

Please look forward to this.