Sarah Cawkwell's Blog, page 9

The Birth of a Warrior Queen

[Cross-posted from its original publication on the Fifty Shades of Geek website, here]

The guys at Fifty Shades asked me if I’d write a little piece on how I approached writing Valkia the Bloody. Here is that piece, with additional ridiculousness.

“Um…” said my editor, a heavy pause at the end of his words, “you don’t actually mind writing about a girl do you?”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is sensible armour.

When the girl in question happened to be Valkia the Bloody, there was never any chance I was likely to turn it down, was there? I mean come on, look at her. This is a woman who struts around the Warhammer universe armed with a killer spear and a shield adorned with the head of an upstart Slaaneshi daemon. This is not your average fantasy female heroine. For a start, she has sensible armour.

At the same time, when I was planning out her story, there were a few things I set out to show. This was not just going to be a book about how astonishingly kick ass Valkia can be. This was going to be a book that showed how she ended up as Khorne’s consort; about what it was she possessed that made the Blood God sit up straighter in his skull throne (he is prone to slouching, you see) and pay close interest to her. After all, there are many champions and heroes in the Old World. Why this woman in particular? So I sat down with a pen and a bit of paper. After doodling endless eyes and cubes, I started to get inside her head. Who was Valkia the Bloody? What made her tick?  She needed to come to life and so here’s the process that took her to the feet of the Blood God.

To start with, Valkia needed a family. She needed people  around her to offset the sparkle of her homicidal brilliance and she needed a LBK. (Life Before Khorne). So I gave her a father, but not a mother. Without a mother’s guiding hand and a father who was the tribe’s chieftain, Valkia was  always going to lean towards tomboyish; a young woman who resented the idea that the only route to battle for her was as a shield bearer. So from the very beginning of the book, Valkia takes charge of her own destiny. Even as a child who sits on her father’s shoulders and marvels at the wonders of the aurora, Valkia knows that she wants more out of life than to just ‘stand at the side of her men’. She wants to lead. She wants to be all she can be – and more.

When faced with a seductive daemon, she almost gives into base feminine urges and desires that she believed she had overcome. There must have been immense satisfaction in nailing his head to a shield afterwards.

She takes what she wants and rarely gives thought to the consequences. Or does she? Perhaps it’s more that she takes what she wants regardless of the consequences.

Wait, hang on. This woman is starting to sound like she is everything I’m not. I would never take what I wanted without written requests signed in triplicate and even then, I’d be apologising the whole time… and there, gentle readers, is the crux of the matter. Valkia is all those things that I wish I could be. Apart from the mad killing machine, naturally. That bit’s sort of… tacked on at the end. But she’s confident, capable, knows what she wants, she’s strong and relentless… and yet, in order to make her more of a person, she also has weaknesses and vulnerabilities during her

LBK.

Not sensible. Or even comfortable, looking at it.

So Valkia has foibles and chinks in her sensible armour.  These are exploited by a few people – and daemons – in her tale. The self-realisation of this drives her to an effort to divest herself of her  perceived weaknesses. She becomes cold and closed to all those around her, even her own children. She moves from being a woman driven by passion to a woman driven by bloodlust. Before Khorne takes her up to his realm and recreates her, Valkia has already become a daemon in many ways. The useful addition of wings and claws is merely cosmetic.

She was a joy to create. The world around her grew naturally to fit her Viking-esque style and those who followed her took on life and personalities of their own. One in particular – a young tribesman named Kormak – was originally meant to appear in one scene and only then to lose his

arm. He became something entirely different. And entirely awesome.

She led me on a remarkable journey, this self-confident, unbreakable woman. Even when her own mortality was being hacked away, she does not give up. Even when she is completely beaten, her last breath contains defiance and strength. She sort of became my hero for a few months. When  writing any character, it’s always a pleasure to let yourself slip into their heads, to wear their shoes (or power armour) and live their lives through your fingertips. Valkia, although cosmetically a ‘bad guy’ is a powerful, focused woman who knows her own mind and sets out with a belief that she can accomplish anything she sets her mind to.

In the context of Valkia’s world, that’s not such a bad thing to be.

When Inspiration Strikes…

Inspiration is a funny beast, isn’t it? It strikes at the strangest of times and decides to up-sticks and leave you alone at others. For example, I almost invariably get most of my favourite plot ideas whilst driving home from any sort of gathering (be it LRP, or convention or similar). Then, when I get home and try to translate it from the terrifying interiority that exists inside my skull to the screen… nothing. Gibberish. Seriously, the screen may as well read ‘sdkldblkjb lkm lkdsgk lk mlefjlkmcv’ for all the sense it makes.

In my head, I scream silently, this was bloody amazing! 

The first person to invent a device that allows you to plug your brain directly into a USB socket and get those thoughts down before they turn to mush will be a fine individual indeed.

Generally, I do OK getting thoughts and ideas out of my brain and onto the keyboard. I type infuriatingly fast (accordingly to one of my friends) and that helps with the brain to keyboard process wonderfully well. The real problem for me stems from the fact that when I talk, I am always thinking about four or five sentences ahead of myself. Does that make any sense? I have no idea why it is that I do that, but every so often it means that in the middle of a conversation I’ll just stop dead and completely and utterly forget where I was. So even with the infuriating level typing speed, this means that occasionally, when I’m writing down thoughts and ideas, the same thing happens. My way around this has become quite simple. Initial plot ideas now get produced as stream of consciousness. Silly comments and all. Then I go back over them and refine them; take out the silly comments and make them into more acceptable working documents.

For example, when brainstorming with m’colleague John French on our tied-together stories that appear in Architect of Fate, the following was in the original outline that I shared with him before the story was completed. Apparently it made him giggle.

‘Another fight breaks out with I don’t know, a giant hot dog with legs, firing mustard. This is the Warp, man.’

This sentence gave rise to the story’s ‘code name’ of Project: Hotdog. Note: all my stories end up with code names. I’ve never quite been sure why this is, but it’s entertaining and allows me to happily discuss something I’m working on without the worry of openly acknowledging what it is. For example, I recently turned Project: Needles into the editor, am working on edits for Project: Comeuppance and working hard(ish) on Project: Carpark. For reference, The Gildar Rift is the only story that never had a project codename. Going on how excited I was to be writing a novel which was rapidly tempered by the discovery of how hard it actually is to write a novel whilst working full time, it should have been Project: Harsh Reality.

I enjoy stream of consciousness plotting. It allows me to express what I’m feeling without the constraints of the formality a pitch requires. I should really have kept some of the early drafts of the plot development of The Gildar Rift, for example. Had my former hard drive not imploded with the spiteful force of a device hellbent on eating 67k words of a manuscript – which it also accomplished, hooray for the 47k previous emailed-to-self back-up copy – I’d have had that to hand.

Most of my blogs are stream of consciousness style actually. Today, for example. I was contemplating what to write about and asked The Son for his ideas. ‘Inspiration,’ he said, looking up briefly from where he was caught up playing Deus Ex. So today’s blog became about inspiration. It rapidly devolved into an inward-looking self-criticism of my own inability to capture the darned stuff properly. I mean, I’ve got better at it over the last couple of a years. I have a notebook that goes everywhere with me now and I jot down things as they occur to me. Sometimes, however, I’ll turn the page of the notebook, see something written there and wonder ‘uh… OK. What the hell is that about?’ Example: we saw a ‘For Sale’ sign somewhere and the name of the estate agents was ‘Gadsby Orridge’. If that isn’t a name for a noir-esque Private Detective…

(Which automatically reminds me of a back-burner project called ‘Project: Time Freeze’. The previous may give you some idea what it entails…)

So inspiration strikes in the strangest of places. Whilst driving along and catching a glimpse of roadsigns (the A1, for example, features many would-be Hollywood actors. Burton Coggles. Kirk Smeaton to name but two). For Sale signs, or… any number of things. A half-empty field with a single van parked in the almost exact dead centre. Why is that van there? What is it doing? Ever since I was little, I made up stories based on things I saw as we were driving along – a pastime my mum encouraged to stop me being car sick, I suspect.

Now fully open!

Inspiration does not yet come in some kind of handy ‘tap-turning’ form. There’s no magic switch to press that turns humdrum reality off and switches over to the delightful silliness of idea forming. It just happens. I wish it was more controllable though. There’s not much more embarrassing than white-noising out an entire meeting whilst your brain contemplates exactly how it is you’re going to deal with that Silver Skulls Space Marine who is demanding you pick up his story and create Project: Surprise!

Someone get to work on that USB device, please. Chop, chop.

I’m the Batman

And right on cue after yesterday’s observation that everyone is entitled to an opinion, the internet obliges me by providing a highly entertaining round of OMGENRAGED responses to this morning’s revelation that a new Batman has been cast. It’s still early days yet, but poor Mr. Affleck has already been condemned. Given the time difference between the UK and the USA, he’s possibly been horribly condemned before he even wakes up.

I’d watch the shit out of batunicorn. Unibatman. Whatever.

Let’s just get one thing out of the way before I go any further. I didn’t think Christian Bale was ‘all that’ as Batman. Sure, he had a couple of decent film scripts to work with, but I never felt comfortable with him in the role. I’m afraid I’m one of these people who would much prefer a comic-book feel to comic-book adaptations instead of layer on layer of ‘real-world’ angst. Yeah, yeah, Batman is about as angsty as they come, but he’s still a comic book character. Let’s have more of the deliciously over-the-top villainy and less of the ‘argh, terrible inner torment’.

Batman doesn’t like chocolate. The later films could have spun this out for a good quarter of the storyline.

Tim Burton’s Batman back in the eighties captured, for me, the look and feel of the whole thing beautifully. It was deliciously gothic and Michael Keaton just carried off the character so well. (We ignore George Clooney and Val Kilmer, OK? They never, ever happened. There was only one Batman film). I enjoyed that film enormously. I also liked the second one – although not as much – and thought that Danny DeVito was an outstanding Penguin. But if I’m brutally honest, I’ve never been much of a Batman fan anyway. I’m entertained at the fallout surrounding the announcement of Ben Affleck filling Christian Bale’s ranty shoes, though.

I used to read lots of comics – now… not so much. I never really got into DC, being more of a Marvel girl (X-Men, mainly, with some Spiderman thrown in for good measure). I found them more… breezy and entertaining. After all:-

No further comment required.

I loved the reboot of several Marvel series, with the Ultimate range. Ultimate Avengers was one of the best things I’ve read for a long time in comics, but was totally made for me by the sheer beauty of Bryan Hitch’s artwork. Every frame in that comic was so well drawn, and the gatefold battle scene was just eye-popping. I’m one of those boringly traditional types who prefers detailed artwork in comics to the minimalistic approach that you see every now and then. But – to reiterate yesterday – that’s just my personal opinion. It’s what I like.

In large, the comments I’ve read this morning in reaction to this news have all been of the ‘OMG, it’s doomed’ ilk. Strangely, this was the general reception that the internet gave to the announcement of Heath Ledger’s casting as the Joker. Most people seem happy enough to sing his praises in that role (although I still prefer Nicholson’s take) and it can’t all be down to the fact the poor bastard died, right? Ben Affleck was frankly awesome in Dogma. Yes, he’s been in some pretty dreadful films, but let’s get a bit of perspective in place. The role is that of a fantasy super-hero, not a biopic of some great philanthropist. Superhero movies should be fast, furious, tongue-in-cheek and above all else entertaining. Give the man a decent script and for the love of all that’s good and holy, give him a chance.

But you won’t do that, will you Internet? No. You’ll happily condemn him, arrange his execution and start digging his grave before his alarm clock has gone off and I Got You Babe starts playing. (Film cross-pollenation; see what I did there?)

Give the guy a break. Get over yourselves. Be grateful that they’re still prepared to fund Batman movies at all and enjoy it. Also, have this for good measure.

It’s all true. True.

Sheesh.

Meanwhile, the sun is shining, Project: Carpark awaits my loving (snrk) attention and Project: Comeuppance is all but edited. And I have another week off work to look forward to. My husband and son are in the next room, my cats are basking in the sunshine… these. These are the important things in life. (The lamentation of the women is also cool, but… well. Not today).

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice…

So Mystery Men was on TV last night. Now, I love that film. I find it amusing and entertaining in equal measure. OK, it’s no Shawshank Redemption or American Beauty, but it’s good old-fashioned entertainment. It makes me laugh, I enjoy watching it (‘I am Pencilhead!’ ‘I am Son of Pencilhead!’) Yet over at the IMDB, it gets an average viewer rating of 5.9/10. Only 5.9. I’d happily rate it an ’8′ on my personal score, but that’s where the whole thng falls down of course.

Films – like books, foodstuffs or music – are an entirely personal thing. What one person loves and thinks is THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD may not appeal at all to someone else. I seem to find that I frequently fall into the category of ‘person who liked the thing that nobody else seemed to’. Maybe I’m just easily pleased, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have no problem at all with someone else having a differing opinion to me. What I have problems with is people who essentially say ‘you don’t agree with me. I am right, therefore, your opinion counts for absolutely nothing.’

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, absolutely. And those opinions don’t always gel. For example, here are two separate comments from two separate reviews of one of my novels from Amazon:-

“It’s wonderfully written, contains cleverly crafted space battles and hand to hand which when all brought together gives the reader a story that they’ll remember for quite some time.”

vs

“In some parts it was good, characters gelled the story flowed, then out of the blue it would become stilted and jarring, over-long or poorly placed descriptions, bad dialogue, poor plotting, then it would switch again.”

So immediately you can see that these two people (both of whom spent the time to review my book – for which I am immensely grateful, thank you both if you’re out there and I’m directly quoting you) disagree. If you put them in a room to discuss their differing opinion, I feel sure that the conversation would be mature, sensible and lively. I like to think so, anyway. Whilst no writer enjoys negative feedback on something they’ve written, that was nonetheless politely worded and contained at least a trace of usefulness. Compare that with this ‘opinion’ taken this morning from one of the Warhammer fora regarding another novel, by a different author:-

“But [the novel] is….Not good,i’ll leave it at that.“  [sic]

That kind of comment is hardly useful by any stretch of the imagination.

I’ve tried, really really hard to avoid reading reviews or getting online opinions of my work. This may seem somehow counter-productive, but when the majority of comments you see tend to be in the format of the forum example given above, you learn very quickly to just not bother. Every so often, I’ll get an email or message from someone who says ‘hey, you might want to read this review’ and I’ll always oblige. But I no longer ‘ego surf’. I believe it was someone awesome like Marilyn Monroe who said (and I parrot-phrase) ‘you only ever remember the bad reviews’. It’s absolutely true. You could have ten people praise your stuff and then see a comment like the one above. And that’s the comment you remember.

People often ask what it’s like to receive negative reviews. Well, if it’s non-constructive and simply dismissive in nature, it’s a little like getting gut-punched. No matter who you are, you’ve poured your heart and soul into the finished product. You’ve had sleepless nights over it. You’ve torn your hair out over it. You’ve made changes given to you by your editor that you later notice someone saying ‘xxx should have happened, not yyy’ and you can’t help shouting at the computer screen saying ‘but xxx DID happen originally’… and so on.

By contrast, constructive criticism is welcome. That way, you can learn from your mistakes and hopefully improve. Snark is not appreciated. If you don’t like something, justify it. ‘Not good, I’ll leave it at that‘ is genuinely silly and attention seeking. It smacks of ‘go on, ask me why I didn’t think it was any good’ and in its brevity, hints that nothing, absolutely nothing you can say will change that person’s mind.

I feel that I’ve been quite lucky and have avoided out and out nastiness, apart from over at a couple of Warhammer fora where they seem to have taken against me. And despite some of the incredibly hurtful – and occasionally personal – comments that are made, I no longer find myself bothered by them. Because at the end of the day, those people don’t know me. I also suspect that they wouldn’t imagine saying those things to my face were I standing right in front of them. Remember… always remember… the Internet Fuckwad Theory.

This is completely and utterly correct.

To the people who have read and reviewed my works, positively or otherwise – thank you for taking the time to do so. I appreciate it.

Right. Time to stop procrastinating and get back to Project: Carpark and the edits on Project: Comeuppance. And to email an editor to clarify something about Project: Needles…

Hiatus

I’ve missed writing the blog. Been down south doing the Family Visits thing and that’s taken all my time. Headed home today and have several days of writing to catch up on.

Was quietly gratifying to receive a couple of messages from people saying they missed the blog.

Normality will be resumed shortly.

Whatever counts as normal in these parts anyway.

Gold Medal Procrastinator

Nah, I’ll write about procrastinating tomorrow.

Joking aside, procrastination is such an art form when you’re trying to write. I am possibly the most easily distracted person in the entire world when I’m trying hard to concentrate. I try – really try – to structure my day. It goes something like this.

4pm – get home from work. Make cup of tea, check emails/Facebook/Twitter/kitten feeds/guild forum/anything else I can think of to drag out time.

4.30pm – 6pm – WRITING TIME! In an hour and a half, I can produce a –lot- of words when the writing flow grabs me. But in that hour and a half, I probably spend about half an hour of it poking around the internet. Ooh, an email. Ooh, a Tweet. I wonder what the kittens are doing?

6.05pm – wonder why I haven’t done as much as I promised myself I would.

6.10pm – make more tea. Tell self off. Focus. Write more in the next 20 minutes than I managed in the previous hour and a half.

Everyone says ‘switching it all off’ and sometimes I do actually manage to do that. But when I close off my social feeds, I feel horrendously lonely. I write best when I’m the only person in the house and don’t have the distraction of being spoken to, but just knowing that my Facebook friends and Tweeties are there is oddly comforting.

Writing is a lonely pastime. Most writers I know would agree with that. It suits me in that regard; much as I get a bit frustrated at being by myself weekend after weekend, I also rather enjoy my own space. But no matter how hard I task myself to an hour and a half stretch (usually with extra half hour-hours thrown in at weekends or when I’m particularly productive), I rarely stick to it.

One of my school reports from years ago included the advice from a teacher to other teachers. ‘Don’t let Sarah sit next to a window’. That’s true enough; whilst things are going on, if I have a window, I’ll frequently gaze outside, letting my soul soar on the wings of a passing bird whilst my physical self goes through the motions of being present and correct. Or incorrect. I’m a daydreamer and always have been. My head is in the clouds most of the time apparently. Wouldn’t that get a bit cold after a while?

Silly saying.

But… actually, that’s a perfect example of what an amazing procrastinator I can be. Even as I typed the phrase ‘head in the clouds’ in this blog, I thought ‘ooh, shall I go Google for pictures? For other suitably corny phrases?’ That’s how my brain works. I can take hours to look up a word in a dictionary or thesaurus. Another word on the page will catch my attention – particularly in the case of a thesaurus – and I’ll book-jump for ages and ages and eventually realise that I’m about a million miles from where I started.

I meander through the internet in much the same way. Someone might link a YouTube video and I’ll end up mooching off down the sidebar until I go from a Comedy Kitten Clip to a sand artist. I love the way things are linked together and enjoy following trails, particularly when they never end.

I don’t mind though. I enjoy having the multi-tasking capability of being able to be out the window fighting dragons whilst being present in the ‘real world’. I like to walk through the corridors of the hospital from meeting to meeting whilst plotting out the next scene of my story in my head. Sometimes I mutter dialogue to myself when I’m driving. I must look slightly insane whilst doing it, but I don’t care.

I’m always thinking. My brain is always creating and sometimes it gets more enthusiastic than it is at the important times. It’s a cruel trick of nature that my most productive time for writing has statistically proven itself to be 2am on a work night.

Curse you, brain.

Curse you.

You Live and Learn

It’s crunch day for many people out there. Today is the day their futures are decided, all on a slip of paper that tells them how their last years of government education have gone. Today, many young people will be excitedly looking forward to a new life; perhaps going away to university, or taking up an apprenticeship. Good luck to each and every one of you.

I didn’t go to university and it probably is one of my greatest regrets. I finished school at sixteen, went to college for a term (where I discovered that my inherent shyness and lack of confidence was a major hindrance to full-time education away from home and left) – and went straight into a job. Bar two weeks when I first moved to the north east twenty years ago, I’ve been in constant employment ever since. Make no bones about it, I know just how lucky I am. Even when I’ve not been happy in my work, I’ve been grateful to simply be in employment. People seem confused when I say I neither did A levels nor went to university. For the record, I went to night school to do A level English Literature when I was in my late 20’s. I did this to prove a point to myself. I walked away with an ‘A’ grade and a fervent, heartfelt plea from my tutor that I would look into doing an English degree.

I didn’t. I gave up my university aspirations the year I fell pregnant with the Son. I’d been accepted onto a full-time course at a local university with a view to doing special effects for film and TV. I got the offer the same day I found out I was expecting him. I chose him. And I’ve never regretted it.

The Ex and I have been saving for the Son to go to Uni – if that is his choice – since he was born. I see how bright he is, particularly in maths and science, and I hope that one day he will stand in front of me, dressed in a black gown and mortar board collecting his BSc. If he doesn’t choose to go to university, he will no doubt have very good reasons for it. I’ll certainly be encouraging him to consider it and at the moment, he is definitely thinking down that path. The realisation that to study what he’s interested in doing means he’ll likely have to move ‘down-country’ is also sinking in.

I didn’t enjoy school. I enjoyed the learning element – I’m one of those people who loves to learn new things and that’s true now. One of my favourite things ever is finding tutorials for computer packages and teaching myself something new and shiny. I didn’t enjoy school because I was basically miserable from the age of eleven to the age of sixteen, when I left. This was because of the ‘cool’ kids in my class. The ones with whom I failed to connect because I was more interested in books than clothes. They treated me with the kind of disdain that only teenage girls and clothes shop sales assistants can master.

Sometimes I yearned to be a part of the Cool Kid Set, but it never happened. I was never a Cool Kid. I was too awkward, too shy, too easily upset. I found a group of like-minded misfits and we used to hide in the drama studio at lunchtime. We were safe there. Safe from the sneering disapproval and destructive comments. We’d usually just slouch about and chat, but sometimes we got creative and acted out scenes from whatever plays we were studying in English Lit or Drama. (The year I did my exams, we did ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in both English AND Drama – I got to analyse that damned play far too much to be healthy).

I loved drama. I wanted to go into acting as a career, but the years of being miserable because of snark took their toll. I sloped off to Chichester to do a foundation theatre arts course. I loved it, but I didn’t last. I missed home, I felt permanently self-conscious – even though the people on the course were unanimously lovely – and spent the entire time putting myself down.

I gave up my aspirations of going into theatre then and instead got my first job. So here I am, years down the line. I’ve belonged to a couple of drama groups since I came to the north east, including one that featured situations so ludicrous they could be turned into a comedy show in their own right. I may tell the tale of St. Cuthbert’s Drama Group sometime, but I’m fairly sure you’ll all think I’m making stuff up.

I mean, you just won’t believe where the prompt used to sit…

I found, as an adult, that I was much less self-conscious on stage. I’d got over the whole ‘STOP LOOKING AT ME’ teenager thing and was able to lose myself in the character I was playing. I think that’s why I enjoy MMO RP so much as well. I get to be someone else entirely for a few hours. And of course, the writing thing. When you’re writing for a character, you can forget the mundane just for a little while. For a couple of hours, you are no longer Sarah the NHS Employee, but you are Sergeant Gileas Ur’ten, Silver Skulls Tenth Company, charging around the galaxy with your jump pack and chainsword and Smiting Where Appropriate. Or you are Valkia the Bloody, er… also Smiting Where Appropriate. Or… er…

Oh dear. There’s a lot of smiting going on.

I may have problems.

I’ve Started, So I’ll Finish. Eventually.

So I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIII again. Apart from the obvious obsession with Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’m not really that much of a gamer. I used to be, but it’s ebbed off in the last couple of years – perhaps due to the writing taking up so much more of my time. Also, it’s probably partly tied in with my lack of attention span. I get bored with games really quickly – and that does include SW:TOR. I have evenings where I can sit in front of it and hours pass without my noticing – and then I have evenings where I sit there and go ‘meh’. But since my first Final Fantasy game (VII, on the original Playstation), I have thoroughly enjoyed the series.

Mind, that game also gave me my first ever ‘OH MY GOD I WANT TO HIDE BEHIND THE SOFA’ jump moment whilst I was happily chugging around the ocean floor in my cute little submarine, only to plough headlong into Emerald Weapon who loomed up out of the deep like an unexpected tax bill.

The FF games seem a bit ‘marmite’ amongst what we shall loosely refer to as ‘serious’ gamers. Some people love them, other people don’t. Personally, I enjoy them for the stories that come with them. I can remember being utterly caught up in the story of Final Fantasy VII as it unfolded. X had a great story too, as did XII and XIII. I have a particularly soft spot for VIII because everyone else seemed to hate it whilst I didn’t.

So what exactly is it that I like about them? I like the linear nature of the gameplay. Himself wrote a ranty blog post about this the other day (see here for evidence). I suppose that’s why I’ve been enjoying SW:TOR as much as I have as well – the fact that there’s a story that unfolds as you go along. Yes, there are side-quests and PvP and raids and the ability to role play – but the class storylines have been great so far. (I’ve completed 4/8 of them and am about 75% through the fifth). With the Final Fantasy games as well, the music is generally outstandingly good.

But there are very few games that I’ve actually sat down and played through to the end. Devil May Cry was the first game I completed. I’ve completed all the Final Fantasy games I’ve played. News yesterday was that the HD release of FFX is out later in the year for the PS3… just in time for the PS4. What timing. But it means that I can play that game again without the necessity of plugging in the PS2. Also out later this year on HD for the PS3 is the Kingdom Hearts series. Another one that I finished and another one that I enjoyed hugely.

Spellforce: The Order of Dawn – this is another game that captures my attention for longer than five minutes at a time. I enjoy resource building. I like to get my busy little workers collecting wood, stone and iron and try to build the neatest little settlements you’ve ever seen. It was like the old days of Sim City (the original!) when all my houses and buildings were in neat little squares. OCD, you see?

The Monkey Island games – well, just point and click adventures in general. I adore the Monkey Island series because the humour was just outstanding. Also from that Lucasarts stable came the mighty Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, again, two games with more humour than you see in the OMG SO SRS games that seem to be the norm now.

As an aside, because I really am so very old, I remember when Lemmings first came out on the Amiga. We used to spend hours just making them explode before we realised that wasn’t actually the point of the game. Turn back the dial a little further and my friends and I used to spend a veritable fortune on the Outrun machine down on Brighton pier every Sunday evening. I knew those tracks so well and actually finished it. On of the biggest anticlimactic moments of my life, that was.

Did Pac-Man ever have a final level? Or Frogger? My god, can you imagine the final level of Frogger? Also, shut up young people who don’t remember Frogger.

So I do finish some games. It’s just that it takes me a while. How about you? What games do you find you can play/replay with great relish?

Better Late Than Never

Late blog, due to having been in attendance on a training course all day. Appraisal Training for New Appraisers. Strangely entertaining, given how dry the subject could have been engaging trainer and just the right amount of content. Brain is not fried.

Came home and did some work on Project: Carpark. I’m behind on this project, but that’s self-inflicted. It’s because I decided, radically, to scrap the entire lot when I reached 35,000 words and have been re-writing and re-designing it all. This has put me behind schedule and that makes me pretty damned twitchy. Because that means I might, heaven forbid, be late.

Hence the title of this blog.

“Better late than never,” people cheerily say. Well, to those people, I say wrong! WRONG! I am cursed with being pathologically early for everything. I try, time and again, to be fashionably late, but arrive precisely five minutes ahead of schedule. If it does look like I’m going to be late arriving somewhere, I ring ahead and say ‘OH MY GOD I’M GOING TO BE LATE, THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD’. Invariably what happens in these circumstances, is the meeting I’m going to or whatever it is becomes unavoidably delayed due to other people’s lateness. Even my son was born two months early. Clearly he’s inherited this gene.

I blame it all on my dad. He worked for his entire life on the railways and worked with timetables. (Yes, yes, insert obligatory British Rail never being on time jokes here, heard them all). As such, whenever we went anywhere by train, there was an element of precision involved in the process. We needed to allow xxx minutes for parking, xxx minutes for walking to the station and platform, blah blah blah. Even now when I plan any kind of trip, I build these extra elements into the process. Checking in for a flight. Check in at least two hours prior to departure translates as ‘arrive an hour before check-in even opens’ in my bizarre trip-related lexicon. And when I’m writing – whether it be a short story or a novel – I plan out my targets and stress when I fall behind. I can’t help it. I hate inconveniencing other people by being late.

This is actually me. ACTUALLY ME.

Of course, the flip-side of that coin is those people to whom timekeeping means absolutely bugger all. Ladies and gentleman, exhibit A. The ex-husband. I now re-enact for you, via the medium of text, an exact conversation that took place and may perhaps give some clues as to the inclusion of the word ‘ex’ before ‘husband’.

ME: [The thing we're going to] starts at 7.30. It takes us about twenty minutes to get there, so we need to leave by 7.00 at the latest.

HIM: OK.

ME: It’s 6.45pm. Are you going to get ready? (At this point there is a small, but distinct twitch under my left eye).

HIM: OK.

ME: So we’re not going then?

HIM: What?

ME: With it being, like 7.15pm now. And you not being… ready or stuff?

HIM: Eh. It’ll be fine.

We arrived at 8.15pm on that particular occasion. I was a wreck.

So yes. Off my tangent. Project: Carpark is better for the delete and re-build, but it has put me about 18k words behind schedule. Given that I have the Rest of August coming up, during which I have two weeks off work and intend to slob out a little, it’s entirely possible that September is going to become a pretty stressful month for me. but it’s OK. I can cope with it. I have really got to grips with the writing vibe again over this last couple of weeks and am producing stuff at a happy pace once again. I’m confident I’ll be on time with the completed thing. I’ve only missed one deadline so far since I started writing ‘for a second living’ and I was mortified.

But… if I have to ask for an extra couple of weeks, I’m not afraid to do so. After all…

Please may I be second mouse?

You’re Damn Right I Got the Blues

(With apologies to Buddy Guy for the title…)

‘Whatcha gotta do, darlin’,’ drawled the musician, tilting his hat to a jaunty angle that surely once upon a time had the girls falling at his feet. His guitar swung easily, slung around his neck with a kind of casual ease. ‘Is jus’ go out there an’ take whatcha know is yours fer the takin’. An’ more than anythin’ else, be happy. Why, I’m damn near eighty five years old an’ do I look unhappy to you?”

He smiled, then. A wrinkled, old-man smile and I was completely captivated. This man was David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, a blues man from Mississippi. This man was a contemporary of Robert Johnson – actually with him on the night Johnson drank poisoned whisky and slid, just as he had allegedly requested in his deal with the devil, straight into blues history. This man was eighty three years old and he was still touring. He was performing in a small pub on the banks of the River Tyne – a long, long way from the vastness of the Mississippi Delta. He was taking his break between sets and, at my then-husband’s urging, I had shyly gone over to talk to him. He was completely amazing. It was an incredible conversation with a remarkable man. For reference, he carried on touring into his nineties, announcing his retirement in July 2011 at the age of ninety six, finally passing away a month later. I was genuinely sad when he passed away and grateful beyond measure that I was gifted with seeing him perform.

He seemed to enjoy talking to me, too. I can’t think why. I hadn’t done anything with my life. I said this to him and his brow wrinkled even more than it was already. ‘Whatcha mean?’ The question was easy enough, but the answer was complicated. Suddenly, I felt drawn into a confidence with a man I’d barely heard of and had only met a few minutes earlier. The packed little room faded into obscurity and for a brief moment, there was just me and this extraordinary blues guitarist.

I told him. Not everything, of course, but the summary version. ‘Oh,’ I said airily, with my best rueful smile. ‘I’ve thrown away and restarted my life about four times. All because of following my heart.’

‘Ain’t nothin’ wrong with followin’ your heart.’ He nodded, sagely. ‘It makes a change to talk to someone who ain’t scared to do it.’ He put a hand gently on my shoulder. ‘Ya happy now?’

Yes, I confirmed. I was happy. Another dazzle of that smile.

‘Then it’s all been worth it, right? Life ain’t about the place ya go to. It’s about the way ya get there. Don’tcha ever forget that.’

I didn’t ever forget that.

He asked me for my name. Later on in the set, he dedicated a track to me.

Honeyboy Edwards is just one of the remarkable artists I’ve been privileged to see perform before they died. Hubert Sumlin, Jet Harris, Gary Moore… all of these people. A few hours out of their lives that I got to see and each one was something special. Hubert Sumlin’s performance of Smokestack Lightnin’ was outstanding. (As a trivia note – when Sumlin died, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards paid his funeral costs).

The trip to see Jet Harris was a comedy adventure in its own right. My ex-husband, who is responsible for taking me to see all these artists – something I will be eternally grateful for – is a bassist and he is also quite a lot older than me. As such, Jet Harris, former bass player with the Shadows, was his hero when the ex was growing up and the reason he decided to play bass.

‘He was cool,’ ex used to say. ‘He got all the girls.’

So there we are, one Easter weekend, and he gets super-excited because Jet Harris is playing a gig down in Scarborough. In the same tone as an over-excited six year old, he said ‘shall we go shall we go shall we go shall we go shall we go shall we go shall we go?’ until I frog-marched him to the car. All the way down to Scarborough he rambled on an on about Jet Harris being the ‘good looking one with the amazing hair who got all the girls’.

We arrived at the venue. Without being disparaging, it was… a bingo hall on the seafront. Smoking certainly hadn’t been banned there, so an acrid, curling mist licked at the interior of this place. The smell of beer and cigarettes… and ex was almost visibly bouncing in his seat.

On came this little, bald-headed fella. I thought ‘ah, he’s here to announce the act’, and cast a glance at ex.

‘Don’t,’ he said, through clenched teeth, ‘say anything.’

The little bald fella was Jet Harris. I confess, I may have fallen off my chair laughing. I got back on it soon enough, because he may no longer have been in possession of amazing hair, but my word he was spectacular.

I’m still a fan of these guys. I have a lot of blues in my collection and I don’t listen to it anywhere near as much as I should. Whenever on of my blues tracks comes on shuffle play, I always think of those words from Honeyboy Edwards.

An’ more than anythin’ else, be happy.