Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Four years in the making I’ve just put DirkDangerous.com live including an exclusive short story One of THOSE days.

I was going to post about some work I did this afternoon with Vue, light filters, arrays of lights and other good stuff I’ve been working on to restart my series of lighting tutorials for Vue. However a reasonably decent bottle of red wine from M&S put pay to that idea as I got sidetracked into editing my accidental fantasy radio sitcom script. Back in June I came up with a list of changes I wanted to make having watched Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Lack of Innovation. I’ve just finished working through them. The up side is I think the script is now tighter. The down side is I’ve cut around 50% of the actual jokes when I cut the humorous narrator. However having seen KM I knew he had to get the axe and I’ve gained some space for new, original, funny stuff. So thats my next job for the script. Add funny stuff.

I’ve done an update of an old blog post about describing characters as though their food in an M&S advert and put it up as a page in the impworks site proper to make it easier to find: Sexy, Memorable Characters the Marks & Spencers Way.

Astonishing Adventures Magazine has accepted my short story Dirk Dangerous and the Giant Balls of Doom for issue 8.  I’ve one minor rewrite to do and I’m going to look at adding back in some of what I cut to get it down to 3000 words since their word limits gone up since I first wrote it.  Hopefully it will make more sense as a sequel to The Steward, the Kriegsherr, his Femme Fatale & her Brother with the addition of a few extra scenes.

Prompted by a discussion on the SFSFW’s mailing list about alternate history I’ve added a page for a revised version of my STEEPVM series of blog posts today.

Just sent off the finished draft of the The Panzerfauste Song Book to Ragnarok.

I’m not a coffee lover but I am a book lover so I sometimes find the replacement of shelving with books on in book shops by trendy coffee area a bit annoying. Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road now has an espresso machine I have no objections to.

Spotted on WWdN: In Exile

I’ve finished an article for Ragnarok, The Panzerfaüste Song Book, porting the shanty rules from Strange Grogge to Panzerfaüste and bringing the songs up to date. Needs a bit of checking before I send it off but hopefully its ok.

I’ve also just finished a short article for Ragnarok for the game Slag!. Three new systems and four ship designs using them. Need to make graphics for each of the designs but otherwise done. Frustratingly it would be done but when I finished the drawings last night the file not only failed to save but destroyed the earlier save in the process.

Issue 53 of Ragnarok, the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargamings magazine, is out now and includes an article by me – When Ants Attack – for use with the game Tusk.

This issue, and the last three back issues are also now available from Wargames Vault as PDFs.

Sometimes the biggest problem I find when writing isn’t writing too few words its writing too many. Stop heckling from the back – I know when you’re trying to get past the end of the first chapter of a three volume novel trilogy to propel you into the best seller list so you can spend your days at book signings and your nights at glittering functions with your favourite authors that doesn’t sound like much of a problem. However I like writing articles and short stories. One piece I’ve been working on is just about to pass the 15,000 word mark. There is no specific limit for it but it keeps wanting to go off in other directions to make it complete. Thank goodness for editing.

The punch line to the Star Wars joke that I’ve used as a title tonight is So Luke closed his eyes. If you know the rest of the joke please leave it as a comment.