First blog of February 2015. This one won’t be quite as long as last weeks but there are a few things I want to mention.

Let’s get right to the meat of this blog.

I finally finished the monk magical items for for Dungeonmasters and Dragonslayers (a Labyrinth Lord compatible publication). 11,000 words, 25 pages long, and over 100 items. I sent it off to Michael Varhola yesterday.

Glad that little project is over! Not that I didn’t mind working on it, quite the contrary! I enjoyed working on it, so don’t get me wrong there.

It did put me in the mood to work on a similar product for artifact equipment to be used in Mutant Future now.

And speaking of Mutant Future, I posted chapter 2 of ‘Buck Who?’ on Friday. The way things are going, I should post chapter 3 this week on Friday. That is going to be my goal – one chapter per week after two edits, hopefully on Fridays.

As I stated last week, it started out as a SF story, but it has now dropped directly into one of that genre’s sub-genres. It is now a post-apocalyptic story. This particular little yarn of mine will be incorporating many of the terms that I use when writing my Wisdom from the Wastelands series.

It is not what most people would call a ‘Mutant Future’ book, although that is the inspiration for it. Instead it is exactly how I would run a Gamma World or Mutant Future game. 

It won’t be pure ‘wild and wahoo’ that many fans of the game are looking for. I don’t really care for that, believe it or not.

Ah, please just read it and you’ll see what I mean.

One of my favorite authors, John Ringo (and that will become a top five list in the next few weeks) tends to use the lyrics of songs he likes. I figured, what the hell – I’m going to do the same.

So I used two songs from one of my favorite European Heavy Metal Bands called ‘Nightwish’. Specifically Nemo and Storytime.

Yes, I did not ask permission when I used them, and if the story ever gets published I will have to either get permission or cut the lyrics out. Still, I think I’m going to do that on a fairly regular basis – at least when it comes to certain types of stories. After all, I certainly could not use modern music when I’m writing my Sword of Kos novels.

Even to me it does not seem likely that someone living in 2668 would be singing a song that was written in the early years of the 21^st century. Still, it’s my world, so I can do what I want. Heh.

I decided to bounce an idea off the young man who does the artwork for my books. Alfonso Maesa, my regular readers will be familiar with his name. He did the cover for my someday to be published novel ‘Sword of Kos: Dark Inheritance’. I also asked Michael Varhola about this and he is quite interested.

Once Alfonso has some free time, we’re going to start talks regarding putting my first short story ‘The Rite’ (one of the many stories in ‘Sword of Kos: Hekaton’) into a brand new media format. We’re seriously thinking of doing it as a comic! If things go well, this could be something we do on a regular basis for all my work.

It’s just in the initial idea phase and projects like this are always time consuming, so I will keep folks posted.

Last week on Wednesday I posted my latest list. This was my top five sandbox video games. I still have ideas for five more, so that will take me straight through March.

Tuesday saw the release of ‘100 Oddities for a Thieves' Guild' I’m really pleased to see that it quickly shot up the top 100 small press best sellers list and stayed there at #6 for nearly the whole time!

I really need to write up one or two of those and get them published. Heh, that and about a hundred other projects!

I finally read the third and last book in Scott Sigler’s bizarre and horrifying alien invasion series that began with Infected, followed by Contagious and the last one entitled Pandemic. Excellent reads, all three, and takes a brand new twist in the old alien invasion premises. Actually that is kind of misleading. It’s more like aliens sending a probe to look for life so that they can exterminate it using bio-weapons. A simple way to keep any possible hostile species from coming for them at a later date.

He certainly isn’t shy when it comes to killing characters, that’s for sure.  It’s twisted, and can be hard to read at times, but well worth it in the end.

One thing that I have noticed when it comes to books is that distance is always measured out, as if people would know exactly how far 100’ would be, or the like.

As a writer I do that all the time as well. I write up the distance when describing a scene. But I ask you this – how many of you can look at distance and accurately judge how far it is? I know that I certainly can’t.

I tend to use certain objects now to help me judge distance. I’ve had to work with Semi-trailers so much over the years that I now can judge with pretty good accuracy how long 50’ is in real life.

So when an author talks about distance, I use that now to try and visually gauge it when I’m looking out.

It’s just one of those strange things that caught my interest and I figured I’d share it.

As usual, please give my personal author page on Facebook a like, and follow me on Twitter.

Anyhow, that’s it for this week. Stay warm, stay safe and enjoy life.

Peace!

Chris Van Deelen is the author of the Skirmisher Publishing LLC sourcebook  Creatures of the Tropical Wastes  sourcebook, co-author of its  Wisdom from the Wastelands  game supplement and contributor to the  'Sword of Kos: Hekaton'  Anthology.