Tag: Fantasy

Spell/Sword in 300 Words or Less

G. Derek Adams12 Comments

[ I’m entering into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, for my chance at fortune and glory. I’m frantically making some reckless edits to the manuscript and getting it ready to upload, but the hardest part has been the 300 word Pitch that I have to include.  I gave up trying to write a respectable pitch a few hours ago, what do you think of this one? Comments and suggestions are very much solicited, but on the hustle people! I’ve got to get this thing submitted before the entry window closes. Would you want to read this book if you read the description below on Amazon.com?]

Two lonely kids learn that they can be friends. That they are better together than apart. Isn’t that what all great tales are really about?

Oh, you need some sizzle do you?

There are wizards in this book. And a witch. And swords. And a minotaur, and frogs on roller skates, and bad dwarven singing. And a dinosaur. And a girl and a boy. Loss and death and sorrow and joy. A couple of kick-ass fight scenes and some witty banter.

What, you need more than that? That’s all fourteen-year-old-me would have needed.spellsword

An airship explodes. A giant robot disrupts the sale of a garish urn. The concept of a box social is thoroughly interrogated.

The Magic Wild burns and the White Sword bites and the Gray Witch laughs.

An assassin. A seer. A knight. A squire. A coward. A girl with the power of sun and winter and death held lightly in her hands.

An improbable mailbox. Poor dental hygiene. Hangovers.

And friendship. That’s what it’s really about.

Rime is the girl, a wild mage. She can bend the very fabric of reality, but at a cost – a cost to her health and her sanity. Her power is unstoppable but it leaves her empty, weak, and often unconscious.  Jonas is the boy, a squire on the run – running away from the shadow of murder. They travel together to find the one person that can save Rime from the wild magic, from the inexorable madness and death that comes to those who are born to ignore the rules of the universe. The Gray Witch of the Wheelbrake Marsh, a creature out of a fairy tale.

The anti-epic fantasy, the nascent genre of Swordpunk: Fantasy Action A La Carte. Earnestly written in the shadow of Lieber and Moorcock.

[It’s actually only 299 words, so if you see where I can squeeze in one more, I’d love to hear it.]

Moving Chapters

G. Derek Adams2 Comments

Moving chapters all at once is TERRIFYING. 

Image
Catbus laughs at your Editing Anxiety.

Just that moment when you’ve cut one chapter, and it’s hanging in word processing limbo before you paste it into its new location — WHAT IF. What if someone bumps your hand and it vanishes forever?

Coupled with the terror of change — the TERROR OF CHANGING THINGS.

No wonder writers drink.

Ramble Roses

G. Derek Adams3 Comments

Editing on Spell/Sword continues this week. I’ve stalled long enough, picking at the edges, making the easy fixes. Time to get in there — not with the fire and sword — but with the spade and the watering can. I will be cutting a few sections – mainly when I combine two chapters into one.  I come to raise Caesar, not to bury him. Time to make the good stuff — GOODER.

Most of my problems are with the first eight chapters. The story doesn’t really settle into a groove,

Artist Unknown
Artist Unknown

and “become good” until a third of the way through the book.  That’s, you know, kind of a problem.

The first chapters aren’t bad, per se. Just a little unfocused. I need to clarify the positive, and beat back the connective tissue. It had to be there to get me far enough into the book to know what it was about, but now it disgusts me. DISGUST.

Now that I’m getting closer to actually publishing the thing, I find myself worrying about the classical forms. Stupid, I know, for a book that heavily features wyverns. All of the great tales are a circle, the heroes return to the beginning with the Elixir and the world is made anew.  The full arc of Spell/Sword is a tragedy of course, but this first episode is tangentially heroic. Or faux-heroic?

Ha, do I even know anymore?

It’s a story about two people, two kids. Two people that are doing pretty shit-tastically on their own. They meet, become friends, and learn that together they can incrementally reduce their level of life pooch-screwing.

In classical terms: No Big Whoop.

Two characters, incomplete.  Then two characters, complete.

With no romance.  Moirails, to use the excellent term that Homestuck provided.

Blah, blah — time to get to it.

The Lines

G. Derek Adams1 Comment

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“Sit down, Lucas.”

The young boy took his place at the keys of the grand piano. He set his fingers carefully in the proper positions, the polished bone cool to the touch.

“Now play.” The madman leered. ” Play the lines, the lines of light in the dark. Play them. Play them well, and play them now.”

Lucas Grahd tried not to think of the blood that oozed down his shoulder from the thin puncture. He tried not to think of the dried blood on his knuckles, a friend’s blood. He tried and failed, but his eyes stayed dry and his fingers steady.

“Play them now,” the masked man howled. “The lines, connect the lines!”

Lucas could feel every whorl of his fingertips, as he touched the first key.

13 Devils

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

Lodestar interview collate. Reasonable approximations of iconography glimpsed on Inf. Mural during their sojourn to the plane of Hell. Cross reference with several sources for possible/potential identification. Most listed by description/popular epithet from lore. – PGRAM

1. ????? – The Knight with Brown Armor

Sean Andrew Murray - Artist
Sean Andrew Murray – Artist

2. Blackwire – The King of Move

3. Fairchild – The King of Glass

4. ????? – The King of Open and Shut

5. ????? – The King of Forever

6. ????? -The Hound with Blue Eyes

7. Beldran – The King of Forget

8. ????? – The Snake with Green Scales

9. ????? – The Maiden Illuminated

10. ????? – The Beast of Quiet

11. Cassandreia – The Lady in White

12. ????? – The Bleeding Lion

13. ????? – The Crow with Yellow Talons

The Dark

G. Derek Adams1 Comment

She’s in love

With her broken heart

She’s in love

With the dark

She’s in love

With her broken heart

She’s in love with the dark

– With the Dark / They Might Be Giants

I’ve been thinking about evil, lately. Or rather I’ve been thinking about Evil.

In Noctem, Audrey Benjaminsen
In Noctem, Audrey Benjaminsen

Mainly in a literary sense, but never just. The membrane that separates Fiction from Reality is quite porous, and I’ve never quite understood where one leaves off and the other begins — if there even is a clear demarcation. I don’t think they are binary, is what I’m saying. Our eyes, our hands, the senses five — all can lie, and the story of a hero can make pulses quick and move the heart blood of a nation. Things that aren’t Real still are. Certain ideas and stories and incarnate ideals have a weight, a presence. They matter. They have matter and mass, and gravity begins to bow at their approach.

Without dipping into too theological depths, allow me to elucidate. Superman, The Doctor, Jesus, Coyote, Heracles, the Monkey King, Shiva, Sam and Dean Winchester, Frodo, Katniss, Tyrion,Santa Claus, Odin, Horus. They aren’t just empty names — they have meaning, they have weight. They have a place in their own stories, but also in the stories of our own lives. As a symbol, a periodic element of courage, or grace, or love, or cunning — these names have wrought great change. Measurable, quantifiable change in the laboratory of Reality. I may be assuming a lot, but I know that in my own mind, my own psycho-chemistry these names have had their effect.  I try to align myself with the good, and avoid the evil.

So, as I tell my own stories — I realize that I’m creating my own pantheon.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that the Evil Ones, the dark shadows to these heroes’ light, they matter too. Sauron, Shai’tan, Lucifer, the Master, Lex Luthor. If there must be an absolute negative pole in my view of the cosmos, what am I to name it?

Names matter too, maybe most of all.

Which is an even more roundabout way of saying, I’m calling it The Dark. Whatever it is, that quiet force of End, the blotter of sunny skies, the sideways laughter in empty halls. The Option serves The Dark, of that I’m reasonably certain.

So, no one asked, isn’t this just the Nothing and the Gmork all over again? Probably. But I like to think I’m reflecting a universal truth, a universal name.  As a child I was afraid of the Nothing  and it’s servant — and now when I write I am afraid of  the Option and its master.

I’m honestly not sure what I’m getting at.

“It’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”
― Edward Albee, The American Dream & The Zoo Story

We Move West

G. Derek AdamsLeave a comment

And here I am, hey blog. HEY, HEY BLOG.

BLOG. HEY. HEY BLOG.

[This is what I do when I see a cow out the car window. Just replace ‘blog’ with ‘cow’ and it’s the same dialogue. It is incredibly endearing, and never annoys anyone else in the car.]

I know you can HEAR ME COW.
I know you can HEAR ME COW.

So, yeah — let’s shake some cobwebs off.  My production of Pippin is finished, so now I can reroute those system resources back to all of the other plates I have spinning in the ether. Let’s list them! YAY, LISTS.

1. Spell/Sword Zeta Draft.  This would be an amazing name for an anime. This is the big project, my  main focus. Incorporating all the feedback from my Beta Readers, and working my way to the penultimate draft. I’m planning to add about 5000 words to the draft, so I’ll need to get one last set of eyes on the manuscript before I move forward to Self Publishing Ragnarok.

2. Self Publishing Ragnarok. Also an amazing anime title. My goal is to get the book into a buy-able format, through CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon. I’m researching all of the technical knowledge needed for doing that, so when I am ready to move forward it won’t be a giant learning curve clusterfuck.

IS THE JPEG OF YOUR COVER ART BELOW THE MAXIMUM PIXEL LIMIT???
IS THE JPEG OF YOUR COVER ART BELOW THE MAXIMUM PIXEL LIMIT???

3. Cover Art.  I’ve seen some early sketches from Mike/Poopbird, and I can’t wait to see the finished product. Got to make sure I have all the specs for pixel limits, image size, etc. to make it easy and painless for him once the design is complete.

4. Titan’s Wake.  My occasional Pathfinder campaign. Time to kick it in the shins and get the PC’s moving toward something approaching the plot. Scheduling has been an issue, leading to some signal loss — gotta get the players on some sort of regular game night schedule, or the campaign is just going to fizzle.

5. The Ocean of Not. New and shiny Legend of the Five Rings campaign! Meeting with the players in early January to make characters, and hopefully kick off the game shortly thereafter. I’m planning on having a forum component for this one, and most of the players are Lodestar alumni —very excited to get back in the trenches.

6. Shadeaux Bros. Christmas Album. Got to jump on this one with both feet, as it does have a built in deadline. Unfamiliar with our previous work? Take a listen and be forever changed.

7. A Few Good Men.  I have a small part in the next Mainstage production at the theatre. I get to play an actual person, which is not my strong suit.

Broad physical comedy is what I do.
Broad physical comedy is what I do.

8. Regular Blogging. I need to get back on a regular update schedule, 3-5 times per week. Maybe I’ll bring back Story on Demand to prime the pump, but I’m hoping now that working on the book is moving back to my main creative focus, I’ll have more time and writerly thoughts to expound upon.

Lot of stuff. Lot of cows. I love the feeling of energy and mind-space coming online – really looking forward to all of these projects!