29th November: Blackout!

There was a power cut this morning. Followed by me playing the piano for 15 minutes until the power stopped being nasty to me and decided to play nicely for once. It was great... it got my little sister off of the computer, and as we do first come first served and I made sure I would know when the power came back on by some igenious means (that involved making sure a very bright light was waiting for power) and then got there first.

I did have some problems getting her to log it on for me, but with promises of letting her know when 'Hugsy' (or Dani to most of the normal world) came online. I'm not entirey sure where that name came from actually. It was about a month ago when it started. Early November prehaps. My little sister was chaperoning me, again, whilst I was talking to various people and Dani logged on. The first thing that dropped out of my sister's mouth was "IT'S HUGSY!" down my earhole and into the places which give you a headache.

I can only presume that as Dani insists on encouraging my very cold sister to hug me (and I'm generally enjoying my little spot of warmth) and she sends hugs over MSN to my little sister and vice versa (they actually were doing hi fives to each other down a network cable the other day... I got slightly worried) my sister connects Dani with hugging. And Hugsy must be some sort of description of hugging. However, the name has now stuck in my head forever, until Dani does something slightly more amusing to tease her about instead of calling her a pet name that my sister made up.

I've found a slightly more original way of saying hello to people now. Wheras before I claimed it was always morning, I now simply scream people's name at them. In case they forgot and needed reminding. I only use the 'good morning' greeting when talking to adults, as screaming adults' names at themselves would most probably prompt retribution of some form. I don't want to know what form it comes in. My curiousity doesn't extend that far.

Nor does my curiousity extend towards anything illegal. I refuse to know anything whatsoever about the teenage drug dealer, the gang of them that smoke and do drugs at lunchtime, the ones that keep a pint of beer tucked away in their locker. It's safer for me. I have a conscience you see. People call it 'snitching' to go and tell authorities, but it's a duty. A responsibility. On the downside of all of this, snitching relies on being able to remain anonymous or protect yourself. I fail miserably at both, normally, unless you count running away as protection. Temporary protection that is. It takes a special kind of person to escape just by running away.

Olympic speed sprinter might be able to do it. If all of the people he was running away from were behind him. Or her. And lets face it. Even chavs are clever enough to spread out and surround a target. Mob intelligence can just about amount to that.

I always wondered why the Mob call themselves the Mob. The intelligence of a Mob is the intelligence of the stupidest person divided by the amount of people in the Mob. Either the pyscologists are all wrong - it wouldn't be a first - or the Mob is full of intelligent people that want the world to think that a very clever criminal organisation is in fact some sort of dozos place to hide. I'll leave it up to you. Some of you might even class the Mob as idiots!

I wish you great luck in running away.

I recently went to one of these workshops that I get offered occasionally. This was for fantasy writing, and we were talked at for about 3 hours by Juliet E Mckenna. I'd never heard of her. Apparently she's a very good author, and from the 5 minutes or so I spent reading the first 3 chapters of her first book, she doesn't sound too stodgy or boring. Yet again, the beginnings of books are always good. It's how authors make sales.

Anyway, at the end of this fantasy writing workshop thingy, we were given this sheet of paper. I'll type it out, as I have it next to me.

"Short Story Competition

[place name] Library Service invites you to enter a story in our Fantasy Fiction Short Story Competition.
Dragons, wizards, elves, dwarves, faeries.... what do YOU want to write about today?
All you have to do is write your story of up to 500 words in the space below.

Entries are open to 11-17 year olds.

Entries close on Wednesday 31st December 2008."

Obviously the place name is the actual place where I was, but I omitted it. Just to make it a bit more of a pain in the arse for potential stalkers. Not that I suspect anyone but all of you of it. I don't honestly think any of you can be bothered to do it though. You either know it already, or you don't care enough about me to waste your time tracking me down so I can say hello to another random stranger who knows me.

I never know any of these random strangers that walk up to me on the street and say hello. The word 'stranger' sort of gives it away really...

Anyway, I'm seriously considering spending a few hours of my time to knock together two (maximum of two entries per entrant) 500 word stories that vaguely make a little sense and sound alright. However, the main problem comes from the 500 words bit. Since I started writing this blog, about 20 minutes ago, I've written nearly 1000 words. Or thereabouts. Most of it is total and utter junk, but it's besides the point. It's over 500 words.

So I could quickly knock together two fantasy stories and there I'd have it. 20 minutes work for something that they'd take one look at and then use it to fuel the fire to keep themselves warm a little longer. That's not worth it really.

What IS worth it is spending a few hours to plan and research a fantasy story, with a world that I don't make up (explaing my worlds, as in.. those I make from scratch... always takes more than 500 words) such as Tolkein's universe, or the Harry Potter reality, or the Terry Brooks world. I already have a character in mind. His name is (at the moment) Ylith. Only I don't like it. I might change it to something based on German or French - if I can find the French-English dictionary kicking around.

Taking other languages and using words from that language to make names for English stories is great. I get pronoucable names that look vaguely like a english or german word (as I change the word slightly, so as to not be too obvious, and german is fairly similar to english. Same Latin descent) instead of garbled rubbish that everyone pronounces wrong and sounds more like a sound you'd make when you found something stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

In the past, I've used some great names. These are a mixture of ones I've made up off the top of my head and ones I've derived from German or English or whatnot.

My first ever character that I made up was a particulary dark creature named Kadix. He and his brother - creatively named after the suicidal bird who burns itself to heat up the egg of the next generation - were counterpoints. Kadix was, at the beginning of the story, overlooking a research compound which he'd just broken out of. You overheard a brief conversation between two scientists where they're going crazy after discovering he's broken out, before you actually begin to explore his various skills. If I remember correctly - and this is going back a fair few years now - he visits a school, where one of the teachers just happens to be his not-so-evil twin brother whose metamorphed into a human shape to keep an eye into what is going on. Boy sees Kadix and brother fight, brother beats Kadix off with help of boy, boy rides brother to stonehenge where brother is killed by Kadix, brother tells Boy that he is actually Kadix and it's all back to front and book ends. Is great.

Then I had a boy named Zed (I never had a female character in any of my books. I could never write plausible dialogs for them... can't get inside women's heads. I'm going to try again with one of my various scribblings though) who wandered around inside of a school looking for some secret thing. It was probably the worst thing I can ever remember and it sticks because of that.

I had an unnamed character who crashlanded on a desert island and had to escape. I think he scrapes through about 6 feet of solid metal using a pair of scissors, finds an aeroplane engine with a manual start button and uses this to power a raft to escape the island along with vast quantities of food stored in some undefined manner on an incredibly small raft. I didn't really understand it myself at the time. It was the most copyedited piece of writing I ever wrote.

I rewrote the twelve tasks of Hercules into the Seven Tasks of Jason. I ran out of time and had to hand it in seven-twelths complete. It was fairly boring. Second most copyedited. Spears, shields, swords, big battle with gods and creatures at the end. Fairly typical bad book to be totally honest.

At my last school we only ever did one piece of creative writing. I used a character I'd been developing for sometime. His name was Karabis. I never gave a description of him twice in the same way. I think the only facts which stayed the same was the use of two swords - which is something that I've carried across into Ylith - and a military background which anyone would be proud of. His normally amazing use of the two swords is also typical. I think I have him fight with someone as skilled as him once, in an arena with spinning chains and whatnot.

It was quite imaginative I thought. Here's this arena. Okay, it's just these two men trying to hack each other with swords. Yeah, it's sort of interesting. But it's been done a million times before. So lets add in this giant wooden pole that is somehow attached to a thing that makes it spin at tremendous speeds, whistling chains around horizontally at varying heights and speeds, allowing the two combatants to not only fight each other on the ground, but also make them jump and dodge and use these chains - which are sturdy enough to stand on and run along - whilst fighting each other.

I think Karabis eventually got the bright idea of simply chopping the pole down with the unrealisticly sharp edge of his sword. And then watching his opponent go flying off into a wall as momentum stopped in an instant. Or something like that. It made sense at the time, but now - thinking about the science of it - it doesn't really work.

In my latest piece of writing I've started developing a small cast.

Firstly, and the main character, is the guy named Ylith. He's a Hunter. His job, believe it or not, is to hunt stuff down. People, creatures, the undead, whatever he gets paid for. He carries two sets of twin swords (One of them normal, one of them 'full of holy fire' for the abnormal things he has to kill in the course of his job), wears a cloak with a hood (generally up, excepting in a few circumstances - such as in one tavern where he takes it down and has a quick drink) to conceal them, a chain long enough to act as a whip and is quite tall.

He's amazingly quick. In the tavern scene I mentioned, four soldiers follow him in - having chased him, as he's a wanted man in 'more countries than officially exist' - and he simply walks up to their leader, talking to them. Then he kills them, before any of them even begin to strike out at him. He's also fairly strong, jumping into the second floor window of a house in the pursuit of a Stalker - a particulary nasty kind of monster that hunts children at night time. My version of a Boogeyman I suppose - and he is also confident.

He is a little racist, and isn't perfect. He walks right past the Stalker at one point, failing to see it in the dark and the rain. By the way one of his peers acts towards him after the Stalker has fled, you can tell it isn't the first time and that he should have spotted the Stalker. He manages to drop out of a third storey window though, at the end of the little bit I've written, so he does have some talents.

The second character you meet is another Hunter. It's a female, believe it or not. Her name is Hildreth ('Little Miss Hildreth and this one were most irritated by Ylith's rapid departure') She seems to tag along with Ylith. I've not really developed her yet. She and Ylith seem to normally work together, referring to past contracts and irritation at his running off and leaving her.

The third character is a peculiar human. I've not yet named him. He's a Belkrutian. He never refers to himself, instead referring to 'this one' (he says the quote in the above paragraph.) I do like him. He's the party's quartermaster. He ensures that they have supplies. He also seems to mention the rules a lot, although he never actually acts as the rules say claiming he 'has no time.' He serves as a reminder of how they should act, and what they should do. He apologises for his actions in killing other Hunters at one point, saying that it was the council's wishes and that he was simply following orders. He also refers to the 'councils wishes in regards to the Master' (the Master being Fieros.. see below) without saying what they are. Tagged on the end of having admitted to killing the rest, it could be presumed that he has been ordered to ensure Fieros' death, but hasn't yet got to it.

The final character I've decided on is an arrogant Hunter Assassin named Fieros. Like I said above, the Belkrutian has killed off all but one of the Hunter Assassins, and it's possible that there's a standing order to kill the last one as well. He seems to lack honour. When Hildreth says, ""But stabbing people in the back isn't honorable! That's what sneakthieves and assassins do!"" Fieros simply replies that he is a sneakthief and an assassin. He is also the only one that is able to sneak up on Ylith, as Ylith didn't detect him - despite him being closer than the Belkrutian, who Ylith did detect.

The world that they're in? This may take some time, but I'll try to make it as small as possible.

In their world - unnamed for the moment, as I've not got round to digging out the ancient Greek translator and naming the world in Greek, or some other equally outdated language - there is a problem. The undead - zombies, skeletons, the normal things - run rampant in the streets of the world. They used to be controlled by a group called 'The Hunters' but Hunters are slowly being wiped out by the immense pressure of their job. Most of the civilized world - in the daytime when the dead are mostly resting - is ruled by one empire, who periodically extend their borders further out into the world. There are some smaller 'states' and 'countries' around that aren't assimilated into the larger empire, but they will all be gone soonish. The empire doesn't extend overwater however, and this applies similarly with the authoriry of the empire government.

The Hunters, those dedicated to at least attempting to kill some of the undead problem, are a large group of people that travel in parties. I have a party of four in the above section, which is about as large as they will go. They are ruled by a Council, who occasionally order the Hunters what to do. The rest of the time, Hunters are left to their own devices and may go about their buisness of cleansing the world in anyway they see fit. Their authority extends across the whole of the civilized world, as they are not controlled by any government but are - in essence - normal people.

To become a Hunter requires next to no training. You just turn up at the gates of anyone of their recruitment centres and ask to become a Hunter. To remain a Hunter - and to be allowed to call yourself one - requires acceptance by the council, or by suitable authorities if the council are not easily available. To achieve this normally requires much greater training, which is supplied by the Hunters - at some cost - or may be self-taught. Obviously, the cost is minimal to allow people of any social class to join the percieved elite, but in reality - as the Council provides no equipment or training beyond the minimal for most Hunters - only the sons of noblemen and rich merchants can reliably expect to get a position as a Hunter. There are some sponsered training placements available. Ylith - my main character - was positioned in one of these.

Once you're out of training as a Hunter, you are expected to finance any further training and any equipment you need. Contracts are available from just about everyone - whether it be putting their deceased to a final rest to prevent them from wandering the streets at night as some semi-decomposed corpse or just wiping out a horde of Ghouls (carnivores that prey on humans, and on the dead) that are having feasts down at the local cemetary every night - and these provide a source of income. Some contracts are available to the most trusted of Hunters from the Council or from the more experienced Hunters to the newer ones, but these are infrequent and not relied upon.

Hunters, due to their expectations of recruits and what recruits must provide for themselves and due to the natural hazards of trying to kill those that, for the most part, are already dead, are slowly dying out. There are not enough being trained to replace those dying in the line of duty.

The dead are not organised in any particular way. They are normally out at night, whether it just be a few zombies stumbling around the streets (as even in the smallest village there's normally a resident zombie who they cannot get rid of, for one reason or another. Sentimentalism included) or something more serious such as a Lich in the sewers, or a Stalker in the rooftops or a haunting. They are strongest in the hour before midnight, from the eleventh toll of the eleventh hour to the twelth toll of the twelth hour. This is also the only period in which many of the undead can hunt, such as Stalkers who require that elevated power to kill innocents - who are their chosen prey, although they themselves can be killed at anytime and anything that isn't innocent (ie. anything that isn't relatively newborn) can be killed by them.



I'll stop boring you with my world. I'll try to write a fireside conversation or something with all my main characters in it where they talk about the world and each other so that you get some idea.

Y'know how I am. It'll either get done, or it'll get forgotten about.

Bit like the English homework I'm supposed to have done tonight...