Just Do It! The Process of Painting Pt1

This week I wanted to address what I've found to be my own worst enemy sometimes, and I feel it could also apply to many fellow gamers too. The actual process of Painting.

Farewell to the Sons

Very much self indulgently I wanted to say goodbye to the Sons of Omega Chapter as they become the Sons of Horus. Here follows their conception and an added chapter for their final days before they go for good.

History

Founding: 8th Founding, M33-M34

In late M33, an Administrative conclave of the Segmentum Solar determined that reported levels of insurrection arising from within the great and empty expanse of the Solarus Void had become too high to entirely ignore. For many centuries the scattered worlds that bridged the gap between Terra and the vast arm of the Segmentum Pacificus had been quiet, their remoteness being their own defence. Whilst the warp-routes that traversed the realm to the critical hiveworlds of Methalor and Macharia were amongst the most stable in the entire Imperium, those that turned into the lightless realms of the Void quickly became fractious and unreliable.

The Sons Of Omega

The Sons of Omega

Something happened...

A story, a story!

So this happened

Yes. Yes. YES! My family members and my wife (yes!) know that my excited face is pretty much the same as my 'its cold' face. So I was happy to discover that the guys at the The Bolthole had decided to publish another anthology after their 1st, a horror anthology was a success. 
Their newest anthology revolved around time travel and this was the editorial quote that I've just sent post-release.

'I'd like to think that writing for the Marching Time anthology changed my rather jaded opinion of time travel entirely.

I was very much of the fixed mindset that sees time travel as either A) A lazy plot device B) An easy-out for script writers C) An over saturated media format. When I see 'time travel' as a movie sub-genre it makes me wince, wishing for someone to look slightly outside of the opportunity simply to get a re-use from that damned period drama set.
Give me linearity and formula any day. Characters rather than character.

And yet, when viewing our editor He2etic's carefully worded recruitment poster that emphatically stated; "we want war stories" I felt the pocket of bile that I'd reserved for said topic dissolve into my intestine with nary a pop nor poke. Perhaps this was how to dissolve my disaffection. Perhaps now that time travel was a far less significant part of the story would I enjoy writing around it, rather than against it.
So I sucked up my own reservations and pitched a story. 

Thanks to the Editors everything went well, and now, my name is a fricking hyperlink!'

More on this tomorrow.

A lot happened, that's my excuse

So the last year in a whistle-stop tour

I got this

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.

IP for me?

Three shiny and new sample submissions sent in to Black Library since last I posted.

Warhammer submissions, fantasy. Not something I’ve written for about twelve years really, any dabbling has been 40k based, all of my mindset was geared towards one IP and not the other.

Shamelessly I’ll admit it was because I; as others had, labelled the Warhammer fantasy universe as having relatively restrictive borders compared to that of 40k. Whilst there are some very good arguments for both sides having the greater number of possibilities my opinion will always simply be biased towards Space Marines over Dwarves, which personally I think drills down to that ‘first contact’ moment.

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.