winter

And so January draws to a close, paving the way for February, and eventually the changing of the seasons. As I write this, there remains but one hour of the first month of the year, which means that by the time you read this, the last chance to download Cultivating Howlers will probably have passed.

Thank you all, both downloading and reading, and expect word of new projects and old projects nearing completion soon.

Fukubukuro is a tradition amongst Japanese retailers of bagging up old stock in random, assorted bags and selling them as grab bags for a small amount. It’s a way for shops to clear their stockrooms of old goods and a chance for diligent shoppers to obtain sometimes expensive products for the discounted price of the fukubukuro bag. The catch is, of course, that whatever is in the bag is entirely random, therefore you might indeed get that much sought after Sega Dreamcast title, but you might also just find yourself with yet another copy of ChuChu Rocket!. As an example of this sort of lucky bag policy being implemented outside of Japan, the notable and highly mentionable natural cosmetics company Lush offered similar lucky bags in their stores during New Year 2009.

In the spirit of New Year festivities and with a mind to clearing out some of my own random backlog of stories, I thought I’d put together my own fukubukuro.

Cultivating Howlers is a collection of assorted stories ranging from 1999 to 2009 and available for free download from the 1st of this month right up until the 31st. After the 31st, I’ll be taking it down and laying to rest the older pieces, which means that this may be the only time I offer them for your attention, dear reader. Other pieces are intended as previews for projects currently awaiting publication whilst others still are an attempt to persuade you to part with your pennies for previously published work.

Yet just because I will be ceasing distribution of this work at the end of January, it doesn’t mean you have to. The collection is made available under a Creative Commons license, which means you have the right to re-publish, adapt and fashion sequels featuring the characters involved here as long as it remains on a purely non-commercial level.

As a last note, for those of you with a long memory, you may also be pleased to note the ‘publisher’ mentioned by name on page 4.

Please enjoy this mixed bag of New Year’s festivity and, if you should find it worthy of merit, please pass either the link, the file or your own re-published version of it on to anyone you think might be interested.

Thank you very much in advance.

Now that chestnuts have roasted by open fires, presents have been opened and mummers and wrenboys alike have had their merriment, in order to preserve the sense of festivity and absurdity, I have mutilated Wizards of the Coast’s d20 system on your behalf. This is something akin to giving a guitar to someone with no musical skill whatsoever and then ushering them onto a stage in front of a crowd expecting some minor celebrity.

I won’t pretend to understand the d20 system or its ancestor, the equally celebrated and maligned Dungeons & Dragons, and having failed to come to terms with some of the more complicated aspects of the rules – I have thus thrown them out of the window in favour of references to the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon and Final Fantasy. This isn’t to say that I have some particular dislike for the rules… but I am a simpleton. Therefore, in the name of fun you may find some aspects of the rules and monster statistics skewed in favour of simplicity. This of course means that the entire project will appeal to neither people well versed in pen-and-paper role playing games or to people who are oblivious to the rules. I, however, am more than content with this, having spent three days merrily scribbling notes and looking up profiles of various different monsters. So obsessive was I about said monsters, that I even managed to borrow some festive Final Fantasy derived sketches my wife made as part of a friend’s Christmas present.

Therefore, if you can put up with simplified rules, my godawful handwriting on a poor scan of the ‘map’ and various other handicaps, then I welcome you, one and all, to the Hall of the Owlbear King.

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.

"Once we are close to St. Paul’s, we shall await nightfall."

On Saturday, my wife and I took a short walk around St. Paul’s in order to take a few photos for the cover of the ‘remastered’ edition of A Nation of Shadows.

Walking back along Ludgate Hill, I tried to suggest that in order to sell more copies of Sophistry, she should dress up as an old lady whilst I dressed up as a bear and we could walk up and down between Ludgate Circus and St. Paul’s Churchyard, yet she seemed oddly resistant to this idea.

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.

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’.

Music is an important part of my life, possibly one of the most important aspects of my life. It has been there since I was a child, the familiar crackle and hiss of the family record player and the skip of the occasional line or beat in worn LPs. I wrote my first book almost entirely with headphones on and, ever since then have found music to be as significant part of my writing rituals as it is any of my other daily routines.

As I have grown older, many elements of the regime by which I write have been stripped away, I’d be tempted to say ‘refined‘ if I believed that, but in truth I don’t. Nonetheless, I still find it important to listen to music whilst writing, not all the time and not every time but I often find that the right song can set a scene or inspire an emotion with much better results than diving into something cold.

This type of writing is the second form that I find the creative act dresses in. It’s a little less inspired, a little less eager to confess its words onto paper than the spontaneous grab for pen and paper or the quickfire feed of paper in the typewriter or click on the mouse but it’s no less important.

As the weekend just gone was bank holiday, I took time to begin the first part of heronaut, a project I’ve promised to Adrian Watts for PSP’s Astonishing Adventures. The soundtrack for most of this has been a combination of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade album and After the Goldrush by Neil Young – a fact that is evidenced in the prologue’s faux!Young lyrics.

The Love Amongst Strangers (Again) project has so far consisted of a variety of Paramore songs from their two studio albums, the Veronicas and a very specific song by American Goth revival band, ThouShaltNot whereas the playlist for the pretentiously titled lecteur de tarot side-story, 『天国のお嬢様』 has acquired two very specific Aly & AJ songs from their Insomniatic album and even a track from the original High School Musical.

These are still early days and, as I’m first admitting my obsessions with music here, I hope to go into detail later about the ’soundtrack’ of heronaut as it evolves, along with a possible breakdown of the library of tokusatsu songs that were used in my stint on Millennium Man.

By way of comparison, lecteur de tarot’s playlist is over 4GB of mostly orchestral music.

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

Winter is, I’m assured, the coolest time of year.

Not one to protest such a definitive sentiment I have, for the past few years been quietly working on yearly Christmas stories.

A few years back, I encountered a piece of music called Alice in Winterland by PopKorn & HaraKara for the game Prism Seal. By itself, the track isn’t really inspiring but the idea of Lewis Carroll’s most famous semi-fictional child heroine wondering about a landscape populated by characters from Christmas related mythology was really striking.

So…I sat on the idea for several years, until now that is.

Represented on the above URL is the full collection of seven or so annual Christmas stories, including my take on the Alice theme, plus the odd little random extra. Perhaps this isn’t the best present you’ll receive this year but if you’re looking for distraction or have a few minutes to spare, then perhaps you’ll get some amusement value out of it.

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!