The B&B Writers Thread - The Bear and Badger

Tempy

Going to a 40k Narrative Event with some people of a discord channel next weekend, everyone's been writing backgrounds so I wrote one for myself - first bit of fiction i've done in ages. It's always fun to write in the OTT 40k universe.

Spoiler:

++ The Scourge Star, Noxias ++

The Grandfather always delivers his blessings in threes. Seven is his number, and three is the lack. The epilogue of life, the malignant spring of decay.

Beneath thrice-fold layers of tumultuous plague-fog on Noxias, foulest of the Scourge Stars, the pox cathedral of the Church of the Infinite Carcass thrums a sickly hymn of locusts and flies. In its innermost chamber sits the towering form of Asklepios Mallon.

From the narrow cavities in the helm of his cataphractii armour, foul smoke seeps forth. Attendants of the Church crawl through this inhuman discharge wheezing prayers of rot, their flesh suppurating as they undergo the sisyphean task of tending to the plaguereaper that lays at his feet. Asklepios cares not, for he is in deep communion with the plague father.

Seven winters of fire have been visited upon the Church of the Infinite Carcass by the agents of the False Emperor. But the Grandfather knows this number well, and he delivers his blessings in threes.

The first blessing: his colossal plaguereaper - touched by the hand of Nurgle himself - now leaks with an endless stream of vitriol that causes it to rot and rust in infinite and beautiful cycles of decay. His attendants worship it, its surface a microcosm of Nurgle’s Garden flourishing impossibly on its metallic surface, and in return it visits on them holy poxes.

The second blessing: The Tempus Interitus - his dreadnought during the Crusade against Terra - blossomed forth from the warp like a festering welt, his Vectorum already on board, replenished and gifted with blighted weapons from the god of decay

The third blessing: a vision - flowing through him like a malady - manifests itself as putrid energy burning his every cell with the fire of entropy. Nurgle’s words are clear to him - no longer will he retain the name of the Weeping Legion, now he leads a crusade for his grandfather’s rotting church. His holy task was clear, to turn the universe into a rotting carcass, a bed of decay for Nurgle’s Garden to flourish in.

A dread pilgrimage would be undertaken. The dirge of decay called to him from a dead world, a horde of ancient relics called to him in grim unison. They promised him the ability to cast all he touched into daemonic rot, they would facilitate the sowing of cosmic pathogens throughout the galaxy, from which the Garden of Nurgle could flourish once more.

In a glacial motion that dislodged the patina of rust and filth from his armour, Asklepios stood up. His pilgrimage had begun.

++ Jamisahra Rex - Orbit ++

In the breathless vastness of space the sky explodes with the effluent light of sickness. A roaring hemorrhage above a dead world signals the intrusion of a rusty blade - The decaying hull of the Tempus Interitus slicing through the skin of reality, spreading its malignant fire through space. At its helm sits a rusted censer. Within it is shackled the corpse of a man, the The Hymn of the Infinite Carcass drones throughout the belly of the Interitus. Its descent begins.

JonB

Not sure where to put this, but I guess here’ll do (crossposting from work thread).

I’ve just finished writing a short book about videogames, or at least how certain games reflect different ideological positions that are relevant in modern societies. It draws on my academic work in ideology theory, political theory and psychoanalysis, but isn’t written as an academic book, so should be reasonably accessible even if it’s still kind of ‘highbrow’ (for want of a better term).

So now I need to get a contract with a publisher, which means writing a proposal. Part of that involves giving as much info as possible about the target audience for the book and the kinds of publicity I could generate to try and sell it. I’m hoping some of you lot can help here.

Basically I want to know of any online outlets that might possibly want to talk about the book, or contain groups of potential buyers. For example: other games forums, blogs or podcasts that might interview me or review/discuss it, particular people on Twitter/FB/YT etc. with a good reach – pretty much anywhere there’s an interest in games that may overlap with an interest in (lefty) politics/cultural analysis. Any suggestions would be good here – I really don’t know much about the world of game discussion outside the academic stuff.

It would also be good if 1 or 2 of you could actually read the manuscript as it is. Just to see if it’s sufficiently easy to read and I haven’t missed anything important about the games. As I say, it’s a short book – about 29000 words – so shouldn’t take long. Perhaps send me a PM if you’d be up for this. Or, if anyone would be up for doing Amazon reviews if the time comes that would also help (unless you don’t like it of course).

Roujin

Hullo thread. Can I canvas opinion from any of the writemen in here?

Out of curiosity I would like to know when you are writing some kind of story, what is your writing strategy? Do some of you just literally bash out the manuscript as a single entity and keep all the info in your head? Are you covering a wall in post-it notes?

I'm not saying I'm writing something right now and I'm curious because I'm using excel to manage the scene order and story progression with a word doc on the side that's just full of info shit like links to websites for reference, out of order descriptions, random excerpts of dialogue and scenes that I need to stick into the manuscript like a giant messy aide memoir and then the manuscript itself. But I'm also not, not saying that either.

Tempy

Your method sounds better than mine, which leads to unfinished things.

Roujin

My method is only the result of my day job. Yung rouj would have been all over the shop. To be honest yung rouj wouldnt even have started it because when yung rouj sat at the keyboard the enormity of the task of going from nothing to a whole finished story seemed insurmountable to him, so he would go and lol at I can haz chzbrgr protomemes instead.

Tempy

All my computer time is spent refreshing here, twitter, discord and facebook, before going to bed very annoyed with myself.

My advice for writing is uh, don’t do that

Roujin

Sounds familiar. I have found that having a second monitor makes me a bit more productive at home as I can leave my work on one and it sits there in my eyeline bugging me while I tit about on the other screen doing nothing on the internet.

JonB

When I've done fiction I've always just been doing it for fun so tend to just start writing and see what comes out. If I wanted to do it properly though I think it would be the exact opposite. As much pre-planning as possible.

Certainly with non-fiction writing I'm doing all my research first, and then deciding on the order of all the points I want to make, pasting in all the quotes etc. I build the writing around that, usually with a very long first draft that's badly written, and then start editing it down. I think it takes me too long TBH, but it works well enough.

tigersgogrrr

I generally have a snapshot of something I find interesting on a thematic level, I guess, and then just make it up from there. My only good story (Mothgate) was inspired by the title cover and opening line of this and the idea of a cold, frosty night, with two people waiting for monsters to come from the trees. It snowballed from there.

Other stories I've written have generally come from the same thing - from single snapshots that I find to be beautiful (whether traditionally beautiful or not), or a particular line I like in a book, or just a general vibe. Fucking hell, my story 'My Girl, Kumiho' (which came really close at some decent markets and then I got fucked off, sent it somewhere scrub-tier, and have regretted ever since) was half inspired by fucking K-Pop and half inspired by some J-Gal t-shirt by an SRK guy?! Again, little planning behind it... just making it up as I went.

I think this works better for short form rather than long.

The Novel had a break down of what would happen chapter by chapter, but I'm not sure that works for me if I'm honest.

tigersgogrrr

Tempy wrote:

All my computer time is spent refreshing here, twitter, discord and facebook, before going to bed very annoyed with myself. My advice for writing is uh, don’t do that

I waste so much time doing this and am actually starting to think we're, like, shadows of one another.

tigersgogrrr

You're the brains, btw. I'm the bullshitter.

tin_robot

On the rare occasions that I finally get round to writing, I tend to do any planning in my head, rather than writing it down. At times I have literally just an image (which is what happened with the “man in a hole” thing), whilst with others I have a broad idea which I then just run with - usually messing about with it in my head in idle moments until it works.

I have about 3 books that I’ll probably never write banging about in my head, and with all of those I have “the idea” some general beats and the ending. I generally think that’s enough, and fear I would get bored if I had it pinned down too much more. I’m a real believer that if a story’s worth telling it will, to some degree, tell itself (like following the grains in wood) and that resisting it too much to make it fit what you had in mind originally can work against it.

Ironically one of the long works that I started has been sat unfinished precisely because I started it because I thought I should (long story), and as such it’s now languishing half done because I never really knew where it was going. So I think you’ve got to have an ending in mind - even if you ultimately scrap it when you get there.

Having said all that, I once cared for a very successful writer, who told me that they had absolutely everything mapped out for their novel, down to the menastrual cycles of each character, before she ever set pen to paper. So, erm, yeah. I think the answer is do whatever works for you.

Scout

I do some screenwriting as well as prose. With screenwriting I'm all about outlines, treatments and planning before I go anywhere near any actual script stuff. But with prose I tend to be a bit more free-flowing which is much more exciting but also more likely to cause problems.

I actually just finished a draft of my novel. Just over 106,000 words. It was a long, difficult process and existed in a constant state of rewriting.

Raiziel

Congratulations, Scout! That’s a huge achievement. I hope you have every success with it. Have a title yet?

Scout

Thanks! It's called Oakburn. I have an agent as a screenwriter and he's going to try and help get it out there. Fingers crossed.

Raiziel

I’m still doggedly plugging away at The Shield Thief. It can be difficult to find the energy and willpower when your day job is so demanding, but I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t do at least a little. It doesn’t feel much like I’m writing a second draft; almost nothing has made it over into the rewrite except a few bones from the plot.

I’ll drop a wee excerpt below, but what’s everyone up to? I’m wondering how Scout’s getting along with Oakburn?

She had been there in the Garden of Midnight when the Singing Tree had gone up in flames. The fire had caught quickly, licking up the quivering boughs with frightening speed. The spread of the fire was so rapid that all the sleeping birds were caught within the conflagration, and came up too late out of the treetop, feathers burning with orange flame. They had looked to the princess like a fountain of fiery confetti, and she had fled the garden in horror and despair as the unraveling of something beautiful began in earnest.

“You should fly away from here, little bird. The desert now is cursed.” She flicked her hand and the nightingale flew up into the pale blue sky. “Find for yourself other friends and a new sky to fly under!” she called out as the bird wheeled quickly upwards and turned west.

She watched it go until the little thing was lost in the distance. Alone again, she thought, turning her gaze to the vertiginous slip face of the dune that swept away before her crossed legs. Something flickered in the periphery of her vision. It was only slight, like the faintest twitch of a butterfly wing, but she couldn’t help but dart her eyes to look at it. There was nothing there. There was something there, she knew.

She was not alone, then. It had followed her out of the city and into the desert. It - whatever it was - swam in the far reaches of her sight, danced in the foggy margins of her awareness. She had only ever caught fleeting glimpses of the thing; once a shuddering apparition in the deep recesses of the palace keep, there one moment and gone the next, and again in the Silly Bazaar she had glanced a face like a shuffling mosaic staring out at her through the chattering crowd. Each time she had been possessed of an overwhelming sense of dread.

Amina had not been afraid. She had, she was sure, long since marshalled her fears and insecurities. But the almost seeing of the thing, the frequent sensing of its indefatigable presence filled her up with a disquieting unease. A wrongness that thickened her head and frayed her senses.

She had confronted it once in a dream - she could never be sure whether she had simply dreamed of it or the thing had actually invaded her subconscious - and remembered being equal parts dazzled and sickened within its dizzying proximity.

She had been standing on one the many terraces that spurred the western edifice of the Palace of the Severed Moon. The great and vibrant city of Ubar, enigmatic wonder of the deep sands, stretched out below her in the golden haze of the setting sun. The fine mist of a dozen white marble fountains wetted her face and slicked her long black hair.

Amina had smiled at the beauty in all the world around her; the burnished spires of the city wall, the rippling murmuration of starlings soon to roost in the dimming firmament, the vivid bands of coloured light that threaded through the fountain spray. It was all so beautiful.

And then suddenly it wasn’t.

The change was almost imperceptible; a tremulous shift in the pattern of reality. Everything looked the same and yet now there was an indefinable malice behind all that she saw. Now the golden light of the setting sun was an oppressive, noxious soup. Now the mighty pillars of the city walls towered above her like wrathful giants. Now the swarming mass of starlings pulsed in threatening beats.

She turned away from the clotted city sprawl and clasped her hands about her face. Go away, she screamed internally; to nothing, to everything. Then she saw it moving through the sickly splatter of the fountains. It moved lightly, purposefully; a slender figure robed in twitching fronds of crimson and ultraviolet light. The space around it warped and stretched as it closed the gap between them, buckling marble and sandstone into fluid streams that oozed like oily paint.

And then they were face to face. The shuddering phantom, only slightly taller than Amina, regarded her from beneath a cowl of seething shadow. Its face was barely a face at all, but instead a thousand constantly shifting puzzle pieces of livid matter and gelatinous light. Each piece worked furiously - slotting here, flipping there - in a seemingly desperate bid to make a face. Sometimes it teetered on the cusp of coherence and she would see the fleeting gleam of a green eye or the vaguest hint of parted lips.

It was, altogether, a bewildering and unsettling presence. The saturated light that quivered about its insubstantial form hurt her eyes and the constant reconfiguring of its fractal face made her giddy.

“What do you want of me?” her dreaming self had demanded, now reeling, now reaching for something to steady herself.

The impossible thing, the it of infinite complexity, the poisonous bruise on the fabric of her reality lifted its hand and pushed a finger against her chest. “Thief!” it screamed from a mouth half-formed, and Amina fell back and hit the floor. “Thief!” it screamed again with a voice like searing thunder, and then Amina had screamed herself.

It was a scream so harrowing, a scream of such unmitigated terror that it had collapsed the world around her and, in a moment of blessed relief, she was transported down through the vortex of her own dream. But she carried her scream with her into the stark light of a beautiful new day, and servents had come hurrying into her room to see what was the matter.

“It was nothing,” she had told them, wiping cold sweat from her face. It was something, she knew, and knew also that she had not marshalled her fears at all.

So now Princess Amina Shah sat on the crest of a sun-drenched sand dune and tried her best to ignore the vague stirrings along the borders of her vision. Soon I will be dead, she thought to herself again, and then the thing out-of-sight will have to find another poor soul to haunt.

tigersgogrrr

I've done nothing in a very long time. I've barely written anything since the cub was born, to be honest.

At least your post has prompted me to query a magazine where I've had a story sitting at the final round for 4 months (!).

Really, I'm awful, because I don't keep my few bits of work on constant submission. I write something, send it out a couple of times to the most popular places, then sit on it instead of continuing to fire it off to mid-tier markets. I've got 3 stories I could be submitting but haven't done anything with them in at least 6 months. Probably much longer.

Scout

Raiziel wrote:

I’m wondering how Scout’s getting along with Oakburn?

Lovely except! Very atmospheric I thought. It's slow progress with Oakburn. I'm well out of the honeymoon fantasy period of 'hey maybe I'll land a bumper book deal right away!' and firmly into the reality of just how hard it is. My screenwriting agent sent it to a few of his book agent contacts but no bites as yet. Thing is, all his contacts are in the YA world. It's tricky because my book might sound YA (teens in an apocalyptic situation) but in reality it's tonally much more adult.

I was starting to get a little disheartened but then just yesterday another agent requested the whole book after reading the first few chapters. So that's picked me up again. Let's see. I was chatting with another writer recently who has a published series of YA books. He was telling me it took two years to get his first one published. Tough stuff.

It's a tough situation. You pour your all into getting a full draft down. You re-write the crap out of it. You finally feel it's ready to send out and then... nothing. But yes, remaining positive for 2019!

Raiziel

Got everything crossed for you, Scout, and keep us posted. I look forward to buying the hardback!

Scout

Cheers dude!

mistercrayon

i wrote a story in my blog

Raiziel

mistercrayon wrote:

i wrote a story in my blog

A harrowing denouement.

mistercrayon

A true horror!

tigersgogrrr

I've just realised I haven't written a short story since Scarsong. Pathetic. Must make amends this year, particularly regarding submissions. Writing 1 story a year and only submitting it to a handful of places is unlikely to get me anywhere. I'm still waiting on one market where Scarsong has been for 5 months now (!) but had a rejection last night from a decent pro market (Deep Magic) that I had completely forgotten I had submitted it to.

For those who care what such things look like...

Spoiler:

Positive stuff, really. I know exactly what edits would need to be made but don't want to do this whilst it's still sitting at another mag. I guess I should write something new. I've been basically hopeless for that since Cub was born and have done next to no Focused Effort for 2 years.

Maybe I'll try SPACE OPERA.

tin_robot

Apologies, I’ve been away for a bit, and am now popping in from my work enforced exile for no better reason than self promotion, like the whore I am. (Also, I have a few days off. Go me.) Anyway... If any of you live down south, and are looking for something to do in April, Cast Iron Theatre in Brighton are doing an evening of short plays, and one of them is written by me. (I saw a thing promoting it on Twitter, and thought I’d give it a go...)

D0VNhFbX0AAAb9u?format=jpg&name=medium

My bit is literally just 10 minutes long, and is about friendship, death, space and time. Which is quite a lot to bundle in there I guess. I quite like it, but then I’m very biased. Still, if any of you are in Brighton, and fancy a night out you can get tickets here.

tin_robot

(That link went a bit wrong, but I can’t fix it on my phone, so I’m afraid it’s staying...)

Unlikely

Good to see you back, Tin.

tin_robot

Unlikely wrote:

Good to see you back, Tin.

Thanks! Good to see you too. I’m still completely blocked from accessing the site from work (shakes fist at faceless IT provider), but it’s nice to have time to pop back on and see what’s happening, even if every single thread now has approximately 4000 new posts since I was last here...

JonB

Obviously I can't go and see it, but well done nonetheless. Must be good seeing something you've written being acted out like that.

g.man

Nice to see you back Tin. Been wondering where you've been. Oh, and I fixed your link for you.

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