Posts Tagged ‘Adrian J. Watts’

Whilst I’ve been flailing around in an attempt to master the skills required to be a better editors, I seem to have forgotten that sometimes, other people are better at presenting your ideas than you are. Such is the case with the Particle Surge Productions re-release of A Nation of Shadows, now available on amazon.com.

The reasons for buying this volume are, if you don’t mind me saying, myriad. The most important however, is that it is a much cheaper volume than the 2003 edition, weighing in at $19.99 as opposed to $27.95. This new edition also corrects the mistakes that so beleaguered the initial version as well as incorporating additional extras by myself and new pieces by the very talented Lee Smith and, of course, Mister Watts himself.

For me personally, one of the most important additions to the text are the brief notes I wrote for my website at the time of publication.

At this point, I genuinely felt A Nation of Shadows was the abortive end of my attempt at carving out a niche for myself as a semi-professional writer.

I had lost my agent to very important real life matters, we were living in a tiny flat in an area I disliked and I was working uncomfortable shifts for a company that I had little respect for. From start to finish, the book was like passing blood with the final editing period seeing myself and my wonderful wife holed up and struggling – and, sadly failing – to proof read the text ourselves in an attempt to eradicate errors. Many of the corrections did not make it into the first edition of the book and many more went unseen.

The book became the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The release of this version corrects much, if not all, of what was at fault with the original, making this, without a doubt the ‘author’s preferred text’ edition of the title.

Hopefully, second time around, this book will find more of a home than it did with iUniverse.

"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.

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.

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of stuff for Artifice Comics, a site that I enjoy a very love/hate relationship with.

I first joined the site in 2001 after seeing an appeal for new writers on USEnet and later, when then site editor, Dorin, felt that he could no longer find motivation to lead the site, I took over editorial duties for several years…with mixed results.

Whilst now is not the time to give a history of my involvement with online shared universe fiction sites, there’s a lot about Artifice that keeps calling to me – just as there’s a lot about the site that endures despite best efforts to kill it off. So, many years after writing my first story there, I’m currently playing around with four semi-regular serials.

The trouble with writing these projects is that it often leads to a sense of claustrophobia for me. I feel that I have to crank them out as quickly as possible in order to stay ahead of myself and that means that I often don’t spare the time to fall in love with what I’m writing. Now that I’m committed to a regular schedule with heronaut and TetsuMan for Mister Watts, I’m hoping that I will be forced to take a break from my crazy 4891 words a day schedule for work on the site and come up with a better plan that can accommodate more freedom.

I really find writing serials more difficult than books, even when the serial has a projected end. Each chapter of a serial is like a thorn I have to pick out with my fingers and each thorn is bigger than the previous month’s. The only exception to this rule has been TetsuMan which has, touch wood, thus been a joy to write.

Whilst brainstorming for directions I could take my work I came up with a variety of notions, some which I think will work, others which probably won’t. The following text is an edited version of an email I sent out to the staff list on the 27th May explaining how I felt a new Artifice status- quo could be developed:

In order to complicate things but with the intention of making things easier, I’m going to suggest that, as well as steering away from concepts/characters that may or may not be touched on elsewhere, the site dateline be shifted up to round about 2015. Even if this means creating another gap, I’m still for it because the space between 2015 and the Artifice ‘present’ of 2007 is big enough to accommodate lots of new things and to use lots of ideas that don’t relate to Pacific City/non-Pacific City stuff and can be exploited over several books.

So I’m thinking, what would the setting of 2015 be like?

Well, my first thought/suggestion is FaceCam – a social networking application that operates, like tumblr, on a sense of immediacy. FaceCam runs from a wireless Blátönn (TM & (C) Burke Enterprises) dongle incorporated into the frames of glasses/sunglasses, the material of contact lenses or worn as an independent earpiece that advances the idea of ‘predictive text’ seen in mobile phones to incorporate a feature called ‘predictive thought’ – this feature automatically takes images of its surroundings corresponding to certain factors such as an increase in heart rate, blood pressure and adrenaline – i.e. if you pass a pretty girl in a red dress, your heartbeat might increase, blood might rush to your cheeks and the Blátönn dongle, sensing this increase, will take a photo of anything in your immediate line of vision, assuming that the change in your bodily functions is a result of external stimuli. This information will then be uploaded to your FaceCam account online and be visible to anyone on your friends list, depending on your security settings.

FaceCam has an addition manual interface but, for the most part, it is sold as a daily, up-to-the-minute record of your waking life.

In addition to this, everyone is on FaceCam. It is *the* social networking app of 2015.

The second thought/suggestion comes in the shape of pop culture. In Millennium Man, it is suggested that, up until her disappearance, Komatsubara Eumi is a very well known talent in both Japan and PC. Following the theme of musical trends and the idea that superheroes are so commonplace that everyday heroes of the past have been reinvented as fictional television dramas (again, MM states there is a drama ‘adaptation’ of Albert Weisz’s adventures on Saturday morning TV), I would like to introduce you…to the band.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you could please put your hands together…for Magenta and the Magicians.

Guitar, bass, drums and sugar sweet vocals, Magenta and the Magicians are the ultimate in pop/rock. Taking their influence from everything from 50s doo-wop to losercore, Magenta and the Magicians are the current music industry’s darlings, outselling their rivals at an unbelievable rate. Their lead singer, the aforementioned Magenta, seems very cautious about preserving her on-stage persona and not mentioning her real name but, aside from that, no one has a bad thing to say about this band. Subscribers to their official FaceCam feed number in the millions.

As an aside, this version of Magenta did make an appearance in Artifice’s recent Anthology 2 special, The Broken, the Beaten and the Damned and, of course, the idea of FaceCam originally appeared in a short story that was intended as part of an alternate history anthology that never happen.

More on that later perhaps.

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.

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.