Posts Tagged ‘The Black Iron Prison’

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!

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.

The Royal Family of the Black Iron Prison

One of the projects I’ve been quietly developing, with no real potential release date yet, was initially a series of shorts for Artifice Comics’ Obento project based around the idea of a world in which the Artifice heroes could not exist. This started with the premise of characters named Johnny Carter, Victoria Darling and Alfonse Saint Libatique as members of a band under the ever watchful gaze of numerous TV Eyes to the accompaniment of a big, sprawling Dog Man Star era Suede soundtrack.

The idea then evolved through a series of twists and turns, becoming not just a world where the Artifice heroes could not exist but a world where no heroes existed, a world of petty cruelties and unspoken abuses wrote large in headlines and met only with unblinking indifference. It became a world forged in parody of our own, its extravagances in reference only to the way we treat both animals and our peers. The Philip K. Dick coined term ‘Black Iron Prison‘, most frequently used in Valis as a phrase to describe the ignorance that surrounded the Earth on all sides, preventing understanding of gnostic truth, came into play and suddenly I found myself confronted with a world of terrible possibilities.

A school established itself upon this world, a king settled upon the throne and a secret regarding the world’s isolation was buried at the heart of its educational institution, and then characters appeared, two boys and two girls, and thus the story began.