Dark Garret

 Hello everyone!

Now it's time for my weekly ramble - might make that the nickname of these blog posts - and it's straight onto what I've been doing with my writing.

I like to treat these posts like a diary entry, in many ways, with trying to be honest with precisely what I'm doing, with all the successes and lows and things. And I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but I think I've generally still been in the bad metal health zone recently and I trying to still dig myself out of it and subsequently getting frustrated because of it all.

This last week has felt a lot like that. It might be that I'm just getting under my own feet and tripping myself up. There's so much I want to try and do and that's probably overwhelming me.

I also got a bit frustrated with Twitter too. Whether I'm not 'doing Twitter right' or whether its the changes made by Mr Musk, I'm not sure. I thought I may be able to get over a few of my hurdles by asking Twitter, and no one responded. I got a retweet or two and a few likes, but did I got any responses? No. So I'm having a bit of a rethink with that.

I'm on Mastodon too, and posed the same questions there, but got even less of a response, so hum, not sure what to do about all of that. I think what's winding me up is that I'm trying to engage with things, but I'm not getting a response. Sometimes it just feels like I'm shouting into the wind to no avail.

So what does this mean in terms of my writing?

Well, that novella I was going to start last week? Well, I've re-planned it from the ground up because I wasn't happy with it. With the Tree of Life angle, there will now be a large cavern civilization of lost elves similar to Hollow Earth.

I also fully planned out another novella that will involve the reclamation of a lost hold, now populated by ghoul dwarves.

And now, I'm also wanting to lay all the plans for another novella... one inspired by how Sutton Hoo, the Saxon grave site, and Rendlesham Forest, famed for it's alien encounters, are surprisingly close to one another. I'm thinking there'll be undead and fairies involved in this, and a dungeon delve.

But yes, I think much of this is because I'm stressing out about a few other things. I really want to get a pair of novellas ready for publication as quickly as possible. There is something coming up soon that could change things drastically - I'm unsure if it will or not but I want things in place if things go badly - and I wanted to get stuff sorted out by then.

So far I have a lot of short stories in first draft form, a short novel that's partly complete and a novella in first draft form. I could really do with at least one more to put me in a place I need to be in and a lot of this stuff is just waylaying things and I think I'm beginning to panic. And today, I also woke up with a pinched nerve in my neck and can't move properly. It just all seems to be a case of there being a lot of things lining up to niggle away and really irritate. I'm finding it hard to focus through it all.

Regardless, I am still doing 'something', even if it isn't quite what I should be doing. There is a Discord server that I think I need to re-engage with and actually start talking to about some of this stuff. Some of this stuff is really beginning to bother me.

But, onto other things that are not so negative. I realise I'm winding myself up and you guys haven't necessarily come here to read that. I doubt me venting about things is very entertaining to read.

During the week, I did manage to get my copy of Tales From The Magician's Skull 9, which oddly, was on sale in England at the same time as issue 8.

Tales from the Magician's Skull,
Goodman games

Its a shame that issue 7 took so long to come on sale over here. But regardless, I'll be tucking into issue 9 straight after I've finished issue 8.

I plan to get a review done for issues 8 and 9, and realise that I want to do one for issue 7 too. I seem to have several books that I want to review once I've worked my way through reading my Pile of Shame.

Issue 8 seems to have a number of shorter tales from newer authors, which is nice. And also, in both of these two issues, James Enge returns with new Morlock Ambrosius tales. These are some of my favourites and I would like to actually get the novels that James Enge wrote about the character.

There isn't much in the way of wargaming news this week, I haven't really had the chance to do much. I've had other things on my mind. But plans are still in place. I want to start up a wargaming channel and play numerous games, including some Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Fantasy and some The Woods by Oakbound Studio.

I also want to play some RPG games on it. OSE and WFRP 4th seem to be my favourites at the moment. But I have wanted to try doing a Skyrim RPG too. I think there is one already out, but I was thinking of using DND 3rd edition or Pathfinder and then organising the background from there. I've always wanted to make Skyrim much bigger, doing things like making the cities actual cities and making The Reach big enough to have had several small kingdoms - one led by Red Eagle - and also add in things like Snow Elf ruins. Generally, I've always wanted to scale Skyrim up to something comparable to a real medieval country, where Solitude has a population comparable to a mid to late medieval capital, stuff like that.

Also, onto other news that isn't whinging or day dreaming, New Edge Sword & Sorcery still has it's Kickstarter up for its two official first issues. There will be a short story by Michael Moorcock, who has been a favourite of mine for decades, since I was in my early teens.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery

Michael Moorcock,
author of Elric of Melnibone

I've also backed another short RPG game on Kickstarter too, which you can check out here. There are four days left on this one and it does look fun, almost Pythonesque in a way, like their Holy Grail and Gilliam's Jabberwocky.

That's pretty much it for this week, sorry its been a bit of a downer blog post. I think I partly needed to vent. I hope there'll be a lot more to tell next week, a lot of progress to tell you all about, something that actually brings things nearer to something more tangible.

It just leaves me with the final thing, the usual slot that I'm not ending these posts on.

This week, while writing this post, I've had a lovely couple of mugs of tea, and have been listening to GopherLive play Skyrim in Virtual Reality, which I've found to be very entertaining indeed.

And so, to next week, I hope to see you there, and that I'll have something to actually tell you that's productive.