Posts Tagged ‘omake’

I don’t usually pay much attention to these things but seeing as this was sent through by my wonderful wife on this quiet, rainy Wednesday and seeing as I’m incredibly flattered by the result, I thought I’d post it here.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

"FUSSELWAG...

FUSSELWAG landed with a flutter of feathers upon the cobbled stone, his one maimed foot offsetting his landing slightly and causing him to stumble forward. It was a far from perfect return to the ground, an act that would cause amusement amongst his peers, he was sure.

Fusselwag however no longer cared for such things. The cruel jibes of the others who gathered in the stone artifice beneath the blue skies of their home no longer mattered to him.

He was, as in so many other things, above such matters.

Unlike the others, Fusselwag – poor, lame-legged Fusselwag – had not forgotten that the endless blue skies and the breaking clouds were the home from which they had been exiled but also to which they rightfully belonged. The stone artifice was but a prison, a gaol, and, like any other gaol, with all its wardens and cruelty, it was unable to truly hold one of such noble spirit as he.

For even though his body was wounded, his right foot severed, the flesh poorly healed, leaving only a raw stump as reminder, his spirit was indomitable; received from a far greater power than that which had conceived of his poorly designed body.

"poorly healed...

For all the beauty of his wings, his keen dark eyes and his varied shaded feathers, Fusselwag knew his body was as much a prison as the stone artifice around him.

Abruptly, he felt his daydreaming interrupted by the presence of another – swift-footed and silent, given away only by the nervous cooing as his large, black eyes blinked quickly, scanning the cobbled stones for signs of food and predators.

“Still dreaming, Fusselwag?” he asked nervously between the noises Fusselwag suspected were made to reassure himself rather than locate others.

“As much as you are, Cindersoot,” the older bird replied, “the difference being that we dream of very different matters.”

Cindersoot did not look up at the other bird, keeping his eyes fixed solely on the stones before him,

“You should concern yourself with more important matters, you know – like eating or mating or, I don’t know, just being warm or something.

“This city is our home, you know. I don’t know why you don’t make the most of it. Honestly, the Parliament are beginning to talk of you, you know – and not favourable talk either, Fusselwag; cruel talk, nasty talk.”

“Let them talk,” Fusselwag said angrily, “there are more important things than the concerns of the Parliament of Fowls’ gossip.”

Cindersoot blinked more nervously than Fusselwag would have thought possible had he not known the other bird since he was a nestling.

In the short years that dragged them down like centuries in the stone artifice, Fuselwag had seen Cindersoot raised from sickly newborn to subordinate adult, an anxious and weary member of their circle, forever on the outside, pecking at leftovers abandoned by bigger birds as he dreamed of nothing but being accepted as one of their number.

“L-Like what?” the younger bird questioned, paused and, for the fist time, as he lifted his head, slowly turned his dark eyes towards Fusselwag.

"lifted his head...

“Don’t tell me you’re still going on about that sky business, that old heaven nonsense, are you?”

Fusselwag’s feathers ruffled in annoyance, a sea of greys, whites and blacks rising along the curve of his spine.

“It’s not nonsense, Cindersoot,” he joined.

Cindersoot affected a look of disinterest, the kind of look he hoped would win him favour with others of their kind.

“If I’ve heard you say that once, I’ve heard you say it a million times,” the younger bird said sharply – far sharper than he would have been with any of the others, Fusselwag noted.

“You have to give these things up, you know. They’re not healthy – they’re not real.”

Fusselwag lifted his head, staring up at the breaking down, the endless horizon occluded by the minarets and towers of the stone artifice, those perches the wardens of the artifice had raised up in order that they too might be elevated to the blue skies beyond.

His body was old, he reflected, riddled with the parasites that bred in the gutters of the artifice, the parasites that had never existed in their first home.

Yet he was not defeated.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on National Express coaches recently. The great thing about this is that it affords me a lot of time to think, the bad thing about it is that I rarely get to act on such thoughts. This means that a lot of ideas get abandoned in those halfway lands between the initial creative spark and actualisation. It also means that a lot of current projects remain in limbo.

As a means to tie up loose ends and to inspire new ideas, I’ve recently begun to email a few very old friends about some of these ideas. My first email, on the 26th June went something like this:

"doomed to repeat the same cycle..."

The result was even better than I could have imagined.

ROLAND (For Jac)

There is just no way to argue with the stance and posture of the man.

Having been realised, Roland, of course, soon started to talk.

The following is a brief excerpt from notes made this morning on yet another National Express coach:

“There’s not much to recommend Stratford. If you’re not from here, you probably think Stratford’s that place where Shakespeare lived and all that but you’re wrong, that’s Stratford-upon-Avon, that ain’t even in London.

“Why you even looking at me like that? Do I look like tourist information?

“Anyway, Stratford. It’s all right. It’s nothing special. Better than Hackney, certainly better than where you’re from.

“It’s not bad, you know. You’re not far from Bow and you can get into Leytonstone or Romford or Walthamstow – that’s where I come from properly, you know – if that’s what you need. From there you can go into Chingford maybe, or Edmonton or something but you probably don’t need to.

“Like I said, Stratford’s got connexions to all of East London so you’re all right, if you know what I mean; Bow, Mile End, Aldgate and the city proper.

“Me, I work in the city for real, you know. Weird shit happens in there, the stuff they don’t tell you about on Wikipedia. You get past Stepney Green and Whitechapel and into Cheapside in the shadow of St. Paul’s and it’s like there’s something really old watching over you. Something serious, man.

“That’s my job, yeah. Dealing with all the serious stuff that comes in and out of the ghost gate on Ludgate Circus.

“You might want to call me a private detective or a ghostbuster or whatever but you’re wrong. I’m not no black Harry Potter… but I am wise to this shit.

“And that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m telling you this story and not the other way around.

“Now shut up and listen to me and shit, yeah?”

Last September, I posted a brief snippet from a project involving some suggestions of Arthurian imagery and mythology. There’s not much to say about it other than the fact that it’s still going along but, due to concerns of time and the demands of the new book, it took from the end of November to tea-time yesterday to write 7645 words.

This means of course, dear reader, that there is nothing at all I can say of interest about the project. What I can do however is post a scene that takes place following last September’s episode:

The king did not rise from his throne as the rude and humble goblet was slammed down upon the table before him.
  
“This is it, my king,” Bors proclaimed loudly, his voice trembling and his face still smeared with blood and dirt. “This is that for which Galahad died.”
  
Upon his throne, Arthur remained impassive, his expression indifferent and his eyes staring ahead, beyond those who gathered in his presence, beyond even the tarnished and stained metal of the sole goblet on the wooden table before him.
  
Bors stood waiting, his beard unkempt and his armour decimated. At his side, Perceval remained, holding the older knight up and waiting in silence, tears in his blue eyes.
  
“My king,” Bors said again, “this is the san gréal, that for which you sent us out to all corners of Christendom in search of…”
  
Slowly, Arthur lifted his head, his dark eyes looking upon Bors as if for the first time.
  
“The… Grail?” he asked softly.
  
The older man nodded with uncommon enthusiasm.
  
“Yes, my liege, the Grail!”
  
There was silence for a long moment and then slowly Arthur nodded and turned away.
  
“Of course… the Grail…” he murmured, lapsing again into his own private reflection.
  
“Yes, Arthur, damn you!” Bors roared with fury. “The Grail! The Grail you sent us out to reclaim! The Grail that cost us the loss of the best of our number! Don’t you care for what happened? Galahad is gone, Arthur, he’s gone!”
  
Tears sprung unbidden from his eyes as his knees gave way beneath him and Perceval stooped to catch him, pulling him away from the throne.
  
“Galahad is dead!” he roared through his tears. “Taken from us! What king sends but a boy on a quest such as this, I ask you? What God exacts such a high price for a worthless trinket? Who is it that can fix the world, Arthur? Who can give us back what we have lost?”
  
The king did not respond, instead he remained in silence, his eyes staring at the empty table before him.
  
Screaming wildly, Bors struggled and eventually collapsed, his voice falling at last quiet as Perceval dragged him from the throne room and away into the darkness.
  
“The Grail,” Arthur whispered once more and yet still he did not cast his gaze upon it.

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!

Recently, we’ve been clearing out a lot of older stuff as we prepare to move. It’s all been stuff that has just sort of accumulated over the years and now, as we realise our next place is probably going to be a bit smaller than this due to the fact that we’re moving back to civilisation, we’ve been attempting to clean out all the random junk that we haven’t looked at in three or four years and probably don’t need.

Whilst going through the cupboard under the stairs, I found, in amongst various Christmas decorations and paperwork relating to previous flats, several boxes of floppy disks. At first, I thought there was nothing really special about them. I don’t really know anyone who uses a disk drive for their PC anymore, in fact I thought the majority of PCs made nowadays don’t actually have disk drives. It wasn’t until I opened up the boxes and found that, in amongst various Commodore Amiga games and creatively titled back up disks named after Diamanda Galas lyrics, that some of these discs were host to creative works dating further back than Love Amongst Strangers.

History Lesson

Many of them appear to feature works relating to the second incarnation of the old Doctor Who fanzine, The Other, that Jonathan Hibberd and myself used to work on, one seems to have an early draft of Do Not Choose to Ask My Name from the days when I imagined the book would have more Heinlein-esque political wrangling about the ‘copyright’ of recorded angel song, but the first disc predates all of them and seems to include writing from long before I’d even left school. I can’t look at the files directly as I have suspicion that the disk is formatted for use on an Amiga but given the title and the shaky pre-teen writing, I’m given to think that what lies upon that disk is another Jonathan Hibberd associated production from sometime after 1988.

The Terrible Trio Rise Again!

In many ways, I’m kind of relieved to not be able to see inside that disk properly because I know that, if I could, I’d have to write an updated tale featuring said characters and I don’t think the world is ready for an army of semi-sentient Green Slimes led by a man with a soup ladle for a hand attempting to defeat three plucky pre-teen adventurers.

However, having completed a sequel to Love Amongst Strangers, I can’t say that the thought isn’t there. I can’t help but wonder if the lives of those three children and the world they existed in, populated by annoying robot sidekicks and semi-divine galactic architects forged from pure light, somehow took a different path from our own. I can’t help but wonder what happened to those children after they grew up.

Yet I’m also scared to find out as I can only assume that my own life and the standards I have settled for fall somehow short of the lofty ideals of children who dared to antagonise demi-gods.

Perhaps one day I’ll have a chance to meet those three kids again and, on that day, perhaps they’ll tell me all about what’s happened to them in the years we’ve been apart. Perhaps they’ll also enlighten me as to the whereabouts of Dinosaur Man and Doctor Dacarack, of Estella Calohan and Jennifer McLain also, and, who knows, perhaps I’ll still have a thing or two to learn from them.

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.