The Walking Dead Part One

Nothing whatsoever to do with the comic book of the same name, Walking Dead is one of those little fragments of a story which I just can't seem to turn into anything longer. I did start a second chapter but it wouldn't work. Perhaps some day I'll have another crack at it. Perhaps I just need to be in the right mood.

It's in kind of screenplay style because I find it much easier to get started if I can begin a story with "Exterior. Night." rather than "It was a dark and stormy night." Usually after a few paragraph it'll mutate into prose but it's a very useful method of simpy jumping right into the story without any headaches.

Re-Vamp

As you may have noticed the links to my stories here are currently down- I'm in the process of swapping over to a new ISP and so it'll be a day or two before this site is operational.

In the process of getting the place sorted out I'll hopefully post some new material- it's been a long time since I last did an update.

UPDATE- I've fixed the links.

Cavewoman Retold - Prologue

This started life as a writing exercise, re-telling the origin story of the comic character Cavewoman. I give it my usual action-twist and also included the girl's mother in the tale- that wasn't actually meant to happen but the story seemed to be writing itself at that point. It's also a good example of how you can get some good material by using writing exercises- from this starting point, I kept going on my own tale.

From this prologue jump off I began writing my own "town back in time" story but it was significantly different from the Budd Root tale and the more I wrote the less inclined I was to actually include a Cavewoman character in it. I had my own militaristic story going on and a lead character I was growing to like. Even now, about 60 pages into my tale, I'm not sure whether I should include a Cavewoman character (Cave-family in my case) or just keep the characters I have.

To read the original Cavewoman story by Budd Root, your best bet is to go to Amryl Entertainment where you'll find a complete list of the Cavewoman comics. Be warned though, Cavewoman is a busty lass and the artwork gets more than a bit racy. It's definitely a comic for adults-only.

The War - Chapter One

I wrote this one ages ago and had all but forgotten about it until I started this blog and was looking for bits and pieces to post. The idea came about after I'd been reading a fair bit of survival fiction and wanted to do some of my own. The end of the world was done pretty well in Jerry Ahern's Survivalist series but times have certainly moved on some since then. I also wanted to focus less on the horrors of a nuclear war in which the chances of survival would be pretty slim and more on the chaos of society collapsing. For a great example of this go and read Halffast's Lights Out. It's a fantastic work that in my opinion has set the bar for survival fiction writers pretty high.

The War is very much a vague notion at the moment but I will just say that the situation will change fairly drastically in coming chapters. I hadn't actually planned on writing more of this right now but my Other Half insists on reading more, and writing it- and posting it- will be a pretty effective test of my writing skills. If you want to see more do let me know because I'll be posting a variety of stuff soon and whatever turns out to be most popular will get the most focus.

One other note- the date and city are blanked out deliberately. The year might turn out to be slightly significant so I wanted to give myself a little leeway. The city is not mentioned because it's fiction and I'm making the area up as I go!

Writing Exercise 06

This first piece is nothing more than a quick and simple writing exercise. The brief was simple- pick a picture and write a story based on it.

The image is of the character the Baroness from the GI Joe range of toys/cartoon. The Cobra badguys were particular favourites of mine when I was a kid, with the silver-headed Destro was my all time favourite figure. Anyway, that's where the story came from and, as with almost all the writing exercises I've done, it was kept short and to the point. These pieces are good practice when you couldn't otherwise write and there's always the possibility that the piece can come to life and develop into a fully fledged story. I kind of like to leave this one as a fragment, let the reader imagine what else is going on.

Welcome

This page is designed purely to showcase some works of fiction written by my good self. The major theme of these pieces is old-school adventure, but also expect to see some horror (I have a thing for zombies) and perhaps the occasional bit of science fiction, depending on my mood.

I haven't quite made my mind up yet as to what I'm going to post but I have one or two things in mind. Please feel free to comment on the works - I'd appreciate the feedback. Hopefully, it'll not be long before the first works start to get posted.

Thanks for reading.