Something different today. First though, the usual.
Harvey Duckman Presents….
Don’t forget that the Anthology containing the brand new Brennan and Riz short, A Walk Through The Pleasure Gardens, is out now from 6e Publishing!
Click here to order your copy, and go back to last weeks post to learn how I went about writing the story. There’s a great selection of stories in there to sink your teeth into…
A Boy and a Rat Update
Chapter 10 is finished, which means that one half of the Seeley Council content is finished. I estimate that this is a third of the book done at this point so I’ve still got an uphill struggle. I’ll post another short snippet next week for you all, where hopefully I can report on another chapter done…
Vector Unit Regen: Orphan’s War
Chapter 6 First Flight is the latest chapter for Orphan’s War over at Royal Road, click here to give it a read!I’m sorry that the quality for this chapter isn’t up to par as it should be. It’s no excuse but home life was more hectic, but it’s up now, and I know how I’ll approach it in the future.
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The main feature for today is actually a look back in something I like to call *dramatic voice* The Lost Writings. So join me for the first delve into the past…
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…In The Beginning
Let’s change the clock back, to say…the year 2004 where I was just seventeen years old. This was an important year for me, though it didn’t look it then. You see before then, I had done writing but it was mainly for English lessons in school. I had ideas, but I wanted to turn these into a different medium entirely. I had hoped then to become a games developer, so all those ideas were to become games that I wanted to make and thought would sell well.
What changed? An encounter with a friend from secondary school (I carried on into college, he went on to an apprenticeship, so we would only occasionally cross paths). Anyway, this time, he told me what he was doing outside of work, has he had been inspired to write stories of his own. This got me thinking. If he could do it, and it did look fun, maybe I could turn those ideas that were rattling around my head into something worthwhile. Unlike him, I had no intention of publishing what I was going to do, as I had no belief in my abilities (and the stories were rubbish, as I’m about to inflict on- I mean, get you to see), so while he finished his work and started to look at who would take such a work, I started writing…
The first idea I worked on, was heavily inspired by Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise for various games consoles, perhaps too inspired, now that I look back on it with hindsight. There was differences, as I didn’t use zombies in my story, but it was still a dodgy company making bio-weapons, and full of action set pieces galore! So in its very first incarnation of the story that I thought up, I had wanted it to be a third person (or first person depending on mood) game called Infect or Destroy, where players could either choose to be the military guys (I.e. the good guys) or the monsters (self explanatory but the idea here was that they could turn the good guys into monsters, hence the infect part of the title).
General plot was experiments gone awry, people sent into deal with it, simple. This idea joined the rest as time when on, till as I say, I started writing so I dragged it out and give it a makeover of sorts. Gone was the first title, instead I took a cue of a an old Red Dwarf episode I liked from Season 5 and ran with it (completely changing the meaning of the word in the process), this was how Terrorform: The Project came into existence. The plot is as basic as before, and I put a lot of tropes in, before I even knew what that word was.
The excerpt that follows is the first time the protagonist team meets one of the basic bio-weapons while searching the building. Please remember that this was written fifteen years ago, so I apologize for what you are about to read:
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Michael was the first to notice the huddled shape searching the desk, there was a slight moan, then the shape up-ended the desk. Ray shined his touch at the shape, it was shaped like a man, apart from that one of his arms seemed much longer than the other one, the person wasn’t wearing a shirt so they could see that there was a large wound on the guys back;
“S-top r-ight there” Michael said, the man turned around, now they could tell that the thing was anything but human, the thing body looked slightly bigger than a human’s, the skin was almost a dirty grey colour, the thing’s was sex-less, its feet were slightly bigger as well, it had a muscular body, the creature didn’t have any hair, its face looked like it had been scarred at one point, the scar going down from its left ear to it mouth face and the eyes were just white, the teeth were jagged and sharp, but the thing that attracted the most attention was the creatures arm, it was elongated, it seemed to drag on the ground, the elbow bone visibly sticking out of the skin, there was no blood though. The creature came towards them, Ray could have sworn that he saw it smile, if it knew how to that was, it looked at them in turn, there was a moments silence then it attacked;
ROAR!!!
The creature swept its long arm round, it hit Ray in the leg and knocked him over, Michael noticed the claws that were growing from the creature’s hands, it swept its arm round again in hopes of getting Michael or Rodger, both of them managed to get out of the way. Michael pulled out his gun and aimed at the creatures head , he fired 2 rounds, he saw that the rounds hit, as the creature stepped back, a black liquid coming out of the wounds, it was still moving though it cam up to Michael and picked him up with it’s other hand, Justas it was about to bite his head off, there was more shots and the creature dropped Michael, when Michael looked again he saw that the creatures are had virtually been blown off, he turned around to see who had saved his life. It was Rodger and his Ak-47, he ran over to where Ray had fallen and helped pick him up, but the creature was still live and coming to get them, Michael fired another 4 shots this time aimed at the creatures chest, the shots went thought the creature, there was a horrible wailing sound as the creature slumped to its knees and fell to the ground, the carpet being stained with the black liquid, the creature stopped moving.
“Ray are you okay?” Michael asked,
“I think I’m fine, what the hell was that thing?” Ray looked at the lifeless corpse, he walked over to it and looked at it, he looked at the wound on the creatures back, the was a black lump on it, it looked like it was going into the skin, it wasn’t a wound, Ray almost threw up when he realised what it was. It was another creature, he backed away from the creature, he turned to face Rodger and Michael, we better report back to Mark and the others, he not going to believe this.
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Still with me? Good. Now you may be asking yourself, why did I go down memory lane for this? The answer is, to show that time and practice can improve things and that I didn’t just hit the ground running. In this case you can see I hit the ground hard and then struggled to get up again for a few years. I’m now a published author, whose work is a million years away from this story here.
If you think your own work is no good, rest assured, it’s probably better then what you’ve just read. If for whatever reason you still want to read the rest of that train wreck (and it’s two sequels) just let me know and I may think about unleashing it all, but it will be on your head that I do so.
Anyway, thank you for your time today, and have a good week everyone, till next time, just remember you are your own harshest critic.
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