Forum forays and feedback

Hello headspace...

As the wedding looms I've been rather side-tracked with anything other than writing, my own life taking more precedence than my characters, thankfully. However in between some roundabout rambling I’ve managed to join the Black Library Bolthole forums and have attempted to join their *gulp* fan fiction collective and contribute in some way. Initially I realise that this was because I felt like joining a support forum for ‘People who submit to Black Library and then can’t quit.

Before all of this I should admit that I am a vehement loving stickler for canon, to the degree that I tutt like a schoolboys unforgiving mother when something breaches it. The Bolthole can be a real breaker of the canon in some regards, other times it can be very much the equal stickler as I am. Personally, canon adherence can force me to refuse to continue a story if it is so dangerously divergent from the norm. Lord of the Night by Simon Spurrier I had to halt when the Night Lord became slightly too emotional, early Ragnar books fell equally into this trap. The Inquisition War books I dodged too after the protagonist met Mr Emperor in his own chambers. It put me off.

No people...just no.

Hypocritical

Wow, the hypocrite in me really needs to relax.

I always follow the big BL types in their collective bloggage and I’d been waiting for a new shiny something from Mr Abnett for some time (Mostly because he’s yet to write something that I haven’t immensely enjoyed but mainly because 9/10ths of all his posts have a tied-in competition or prizes, free stuff!) and I’d noted that none had been posted for several months. In my fan boy eagerness I sighed and jumped to this wretched collective of thoughts and saw that I myself hadn’t contributed anything either since the 25^th May. Wow.

Closing my own submissions window

Bloods Burden was the book manuscript that had always intended to write.

Short stories that finally formed into a cohesive whole. Admittedly, I’ve already submitted these to BL as separate short stories in the blind hope that quantity over quality would grant me a greater chance of consideration.

A bolter on burst-fire instead of a lascannon so to speak.

The three shorts were independent from one another, always with a link in mind. Rather than worrying about an overreaching story that needed to be padded with descriptive verse or uncharacteristic emotion it was instead liberally quick and racy to just get them OUT. I could describe the individual trajectory of each bullet or blade descent but the sheer block of text that such writing creates is laborious and looks far too heavy for a readers eyes. At best, combat is long when it itself is looooong. A Space Marine doesn’t fight or train or live slow so for the moment I kept things short and hopefully sweet.

One of those three submitted short stories simply didn’t fit, it didn’t even fit into the canon of Forty-Fighty-k itself so it was culled, yoinked gracefully from its sandwiched position to sit back in my ‘Harvest for ideas’ section of my Google drive. The other two meshed nicely, with the final manuscript clocking in at around 15k words in total and I was pleased with their bedding, the proposed arc of the book also looking far more epic than I’d initially thought.

Synopses though, less said the better. The summary to ‘Bloods Burden’ is after the break.

Synopses and panic

I rechecked some of the guidelines for Black Library’s manuscript submission period, boy am I glad I did. They altered the requirements for manuscripts and my thought process ran as follows.

’No more novels’. Meh.

‘Short stories now sample text only’. Hmmm.

‘Short stories no longer require synopses’. Ahhhh, nice.

‘Submissions period now 1^st April – 31^st July’. HOLY BALL-ACHING SHITFIRE!

A Pantone teacup and storm therein.

I've been 1st  draft editing, then 1st edit editing, last night I went as far as a 1st edit edit, I think that’s enough for now, no really. Put down the iPad and sleep.

No, don’t comment on an authors Facebook page, no don’t play any more ‘Where’s my water’ on your phone, sleep damn you!

Progress within fridges

Well its been almost a month since my last post, not that you can’t read a date stamp or anything and its been 23 days of short story goodness.

I began the year with a story about a daring, deadly youth that gets maliciously recruited in the dark of the Necromundan underhive, then moved to a story about a man locked in a fridge.

Well fridge-ship. And not really a man. He’s not really locked in either.

The First...

Here we go!
Free blogging service supplied by Google finally bent to my will, or rather I've flexed around it. More like flung it to one side to get on with this actually, the first blog post.
Which will indeed be just that.
Yes that. Go back up.  My 1st  post will be about my 1st post. Including a convoluted mishmash of metaphors designed to poorly convey my own inadequacy to create a decent 1st subject to write about.