The Black Cat On The Prowl

Happy Blog Day Everyone!

To celebrate the recent launch of Harvey Duckman Presents… Volume 2, I thought it was only fitting to talk about the exclusive Brennan and Riz story found within, The Black Cat on the Prowl! Of course, that’s only after we get the Weekly Brief out of the way.

Weekly Briefs

Harvey Duckman Presents…Volume 2

So this past weekend saw the launch of Harvey Duckman Presents…Volume 2, and great fun was had by all, Riz enjoyed himself and all the attention he got.

Click here to purchase your copy and to read the Brennan and Riz story, and the excellent work by the other authors, some of which are first timers! Buy the book and say this Is where you found them before they became famous!

Of course, now the countdown can begin to volume 3…And yes, there is another exclusive Brennan and Riz story there as well, that’s right, they and Harvey Duckman get on very, very, well.

Crossing the Tees 2019

You’re probably tired of me going on about this, but I just want to bring as much attention to it as humanly possible, after all I owe everything to this competition.
If you live in the Teesside area, please check out this years Crossing the Tees literary festival. There’s some great workshops on for modest prices. My publisher is also holding a workshop or two, so attend and see if there’s anything they can help you with! That’s not all, the Short Story contest is also open again for entries, with the deadline being Midnight 31st July. All you need is a 3000 word story. Give it a go, as you never know, it’s through this competition that Brennan and Riz were given to the world (for bad or good, you decide).

Creator Chaos

 By the time you read this, either you’ll have a short wait, or you could already be listening to the latest episode of Creator Chaos! Zack has been working his arse off to get this ready for your listening pleasure, so please give it a listen.

The next in our, All About Me, series is lined up, and it’s everyone’s favorite #vss365 tweeter, Kelvin Rodriguez! He will be at the mercy of whatever questions you want to ask, so please throw some good ones our way…

A reminder of who the rest of Creator Chaos are:

Me – I don’t think I need to explain myself…

Kelvin Rodriguez – Fans and followers of the #vss365 tag will recognize this fellow and his creations, a master of the pun. He also has a mighty fine singing voice.

Zack Brooks – Author of the ‘Charlie the Cupid’ shorts and ‘The Trials of Amaford” novellas, the audio book version of ‘How Not To Be A Rogue’ is out now! This is a perfect chance to get in on this series, with a great narrator. A great guy and the defacto leader of our rabble.

Pete Hartog – Author of the novel Bloodlines, and currently working on its sequel. A great guy with a great taste in music and a fantastic name. He also has a blog you can find here, give it a read! He’s currently working on a sequel to Bloodlines.

Click here to listen to all the podcasts so far and look out for us on Spotify and Apples Music Service!

Vector Unit Regen Orphan’s War

Still on hiatus, hoping to resume it soon! Wish there was more to say at this time but, hopefully soon, soon I can catch up with what’s going on with Drake and Ava.
To catch up on the series so far, click here!

Brief Mentions

Liking what you’re hearing about Brennan and Riz? Click here to look at the short story collection of their adventures so far!

Looking for their newer stuff? Click here for their Christmas encounter with a Yeti, or click here for the anthology containing the short ‘A Walk Through The Pleasure Gardens’, get this one and you also get a whole host of brilliant short stories as well from fantastic authors.
Click here to find me on Goodreads
And now…time for our main feature presentation…

The Black Cat on the Prowl

Picture this, you’re lost on a desolate moor. You could have sworn that you were meant to go left, or was it right? The compass is no help and you always fell asleep during Geography, the one lesson that could have helped you read those little sign markers you keep coming across. The sun is waning in the sky and the wind is playing it’s best haunting hits, blowing through the rocky outcrops. Then you see it, or at least, you think you do. A flash of black, it’s movements giving the distinct impression that you’re being stalked. You try to run, but the ground is bog like, and as you fall, you see it again, in all it’s majesty. A Black Cat, a size belonging more in the zoo then some’s home, and it bares it’s claws...

The large cats of England, pets that got released, or just folklore is up for debate. Check out these stories for very recent sightings, and note that these are very typical of these kinds of tales. The Beast of Dartmoor, a leopard in Yorkshire, each region practically has it’s own variation on the same story, sometimes with proof, others just anecdotal accounts. It was a given that Brennan and Riz were going to encounter one at some point.

Now, given most tales, the Cat’s are rooted in the real world, while most people would no doubt offer a reward for one of these cat’s brought in alive, it still doesn’t seem like a job the pair would take up, which gave me an excuse to do a bit of tweaking. The tweaking this time led to me turning the big cats into something altogether...Different.

When creating a new creature, something that I haven’t found in folklore, I try to think about what it is they’ll end up doing, and if there is a future for them in the stories. For example, Water Ghouls and Ashen, will both be featured again at some point in the shorts. This was what I wanted for these big cats (and it’s also something I’d take into consideration for the story I’m planning for Volume 3).
The first thing I had to figure out was, what I wanted their purpose to be, are they just another animal? Are they man made? Can they talk? Answering these was simple, and I took the opportunity to tie these into Riz, in a very amusing way.

I began researching the name at this point, and decided to look into one of my other favourite sources of mythological tales, Ancient Egypt. I looked here because I knew of their reverence for cats, and that they had crafted a couple of deities to look like cats, carrying on their tradition of human animal hybrid gods. The god I homed in on, was Bast. Sadly I wasn’t able to carry out the link I really wanted, but the name give me the name I needed, and so the Bastlings came into being.
At the beginning of the story, I draw attention to the fact that this isn’t the first time that the boys are on the moors, and in true fashion it is a story that I have ready to go, another pleasant story of what happens when you let Riz navigate for you. I could have gone the other way though, but I wanted to remind the readers that the order the are reading in, isn’t necessarily the right order, and that I’ll end up slipping stories in at awkward times.
The story comes in at just about two thousand words, which makes it a slim rad compared to it’s contemporaries, but I think it gets the job done, especially at helping to prove that Riz is still capable of being afraid....

That’s all I have time for this week, remember keep writing!