Monstrous Novels, Drones, Junk DNA, and More

I honestly don’t know how long I will keep this up. I tend to do blogs in spurts … sometimes it’s one a week; sometimes it’s one every few months or longer. I would like to say that you can expect one each week but I would only be lying; my track record proves that fact.

So I will attempt to get at least one a month posted, as long as I feel I have something meaningful or constructive to say.

I think that’s pretty much one of the major reasons that I don’t write blogs all that often. I just don’t believe that I have anything that is worthwhile writing down and sharing with the community in general.

But I digress …

For the past two weeks I have been talking about my impending novel Sword of kos: Dark Inheritance. I mentioned that I put those two magical words ‘The End’ almost a month ago and that I had started working on the first draft edits.

As it turns out that I was just fooling myself.

The novel is not finished. As a matter of fact last night the book broke the 100,000 word mark, and with the additional material that I’ve been thinking of, I fully expect to write a minimum of another 20,000 words before I can honestly say that it is finished.

I had hoped to submit it to Michael Varhola by the beginning of December so that he could start in with his edits and suggestions, but that simply is not going to happen. Although I have been doing quite well when it comes to writing by meeting self-imposed word counts per week, I have been exceedingly busy at my job and have had to skip over numerous breaks and lunches as a result.

And that has had a serious impact on the bottom line when it comes to how many words I am able to write in a single day.

Still, it is my wish to finish this novel once and for all and then get to work on the various issues of Wisdom from the Wastelands that I have brought up in my previous blogs.

Speaking of which, I am really considering doing a blog on Drones. Yes the drones you are thinking about, the unmanned armed vehicles that are being used so extensively by the US military.

Many might think that the issue would essentially just be a bunch of statistic blocks for robots, but what I envision is far more than that. I see it covering rules on piloting, electronic warfare (jamming), and the like.

And to top it off, Derek Holland created a mutation dealing with what are essentially organic drones (in the someday to be published trio of mutation books).

I want to take it a step further and go into how organic drones are created and controlled.

Last week I finished reading the ‘V-Wars’ anthology which contains several short novella’s by one of my favorite authors Jonathan Maberry and many other well-known authors. In a nutshell it’s about a virus that unlocks what was considered to be nothing more than ‘junk DNA’ in the victim’s genome and the end result is that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or more people suddenly mutate into vampires and werewolves across the globe.

I have to say that I did really enjoy the novel and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the comic version that is to come out in the near future.

Anyhow, it got me thinking. In Wisdom from the Wastelands #31: Nanotechnology III, I introduced a terror weapon that I called ‘Spreaders’ This bit of nanotechnology when it infected a target would reactivate a random number of diseases that were locked away in the victim’s DNA, or the junk DNA.

To take this one step further, I started to think about the ‘Pure Humans’, one of the core races in Mutant Future. What exactly are these so-called ‘Pure Humans’? When I think about them, I get horrific visions of Aryans and others, but I had to put those aside.

What if pure humans are what one gets when ALL junk DNA has been removed from the human genome?  That might explain why they are incapable of being mutated. Maybe as a result this particular race should be essentially immune to the nanotech weapon I designed.

Which brings me around to new races for the game. Last year I was thinking of writing up two new variants of humans for the Mutant Future game. These would be based on the Elites that were created and described in James Patterson’s ‘Toys’ novel and the New Humans that were described in Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series. Due to the complexity of both races I will probably have to devote a single issue of WftW to each. Yet another project that I will eventually get around to writing up.

With the Parasite Mutations created by Derek Holland, he came up with a way that Pure Humans could gain mutations.

In my personal view of Mutant Future I envision what I stated about Pure Humans above. They are free of Junk DNA and have many advantages. Still in the game they are somewhat overshadowed by Mutant Humans. After all I personally would much rather play a mutant and gain cool and bizarre powers as a result.

After spending the past two weeks playing X-Com: Enemy Within as is typically the case, I was inspired by the game.

One of the aspects of the game is that once you’ve taken out an alien and run an autopsy on it, you can introduce the alien’s DNA into your soldiers, improving their combative effectiveness. So why not do the same thing with Pure Humans? It’s a simple matter for the Ancients to code the appropriate DNA sequence and insert it into the hosts clean DNA.  After all I did touch in on that subject when I introduced several new races in Wisdom from the Wastelands #4: New Races.

And we have another potential issue or three of WftW.

One thing that I wanted to touch upon is that I love ideas. I am inspired by pretty much everything that I see, hear, read and experience.  I want to take the inspiration and turn it into something that GM’s can readily use in their games.

At the same time though I want more than just a suggestion or a bare-bones basic idea. I want to be able to incorporate anything that I create instantly into my games without having to sit down and spend the time coming up with rules to make it work.

Some, not all, GM’s are lazy. Some simply don’t have the time to work out the rules for their game as they just want to jump in and play. Others may even lack the imagination (heaven forbid!) to use an idea as the author originally envisioned it. The reasons are numerous and varied as one might expect.

That is why when I write something up for Wisdom from the Wastelands or any product mind you, that I take the time to give a little history (or simply a story for flavor) and come up with rules to use what I created. That is why there are no where as many entries in any of my issues as there could be.

I would much rather spread out my ideas and have them easily incorporated then have tons and tons of material, but the end result is that the GM would have to do a lot of work to explain or make the ideas workable in their game.

To me ideas are great. Being able to incorporate them instantly is even greater. That is why I put the time and effort into writing up the rules and descriptions as I do.

Anyhow, that’s pretty much it for this blog. Stay warm and happy no matter where you are.

Oh and before I forget, here is the third character concept sketch for my novel 'Dark Inheritance' This is Jaeger, the third main protagonist of the book, rendered by the very talented Giorgio Alfonso Maesa.

Peace.