Updates on Projects, Short Stories, and Several Mini-Reviews

Welcome to 2016!

This is (well duh!) my first blog of the year and it’s going to be a little longer than the past few. I have quite a lot on my mind, and I’ll get right to it.

I have kept my word. Despite having posted the very last part of Buck Who? several weeks ago, I’ve been continuing to post a new short story each Friday since. Now this does not mean that I will be writing about 52 short stories over the next year.

Far from it.

There will be stories, when I have the time to work on them and get them posted. I will not commit to a weekly story because I really need to get to work on re-writing my zombie novels. As a matter of fact, that is to begin tomorrow.

I did post the first of four Fantasy stories I wrote. This one is called ‘Good Luck, Bad Luck’. I won’t bother telling you what it is about, other than its high fantasy. Just read it and that’ll be that.

Well maybe I will say a little about it. It is more than anything going to be a series of short stories about an Elf who becomes an adoptive parent to a little girl, and how it changes him. It will be a fatherhood series of stories, and this one is essentially to introduce him and a couple of companions who will be more often than not in the background.

I currently have four stories completed, and I will be posting them approximately every other week.

And it was nice to have a couple of readers ask me to write more when it comes to Ra’naa, Declan, Babs, Tara and Otres. I will, but not for a while. I don’t know if I want to write such an epic again, not for a long time! It really did take a lot out of me.

It was quite the learning experience and for that I am grateful and I know I can do it!

If you think that’s all I’ve been working on, you’ll be mistaken. I’ve put a lot of effort into the weapons compilation book that you’ve read about. This takes all my weapon issues from Wisdom From the Wastelands and compiles them into a single source, and there is a ton of brand new material as well.

When I started to compile this book, I had three and a half pages of notes. As of today, I’m down to half a page. There will be more new material being added as well from various sources, and once that is done I have some formatting to attend to and a little cleaning up.

I hope that my readers will be happy with the final result.

Oh and speaking of WftW, it turns out that issue 52 will be my Nanotech Undead issue, which is in line for finalization and publication. Here’s hoping by the end of the month.

Two new creatures went up for New Mutant Monday, as you have long since come to expect. I posted the Krampians (a Christmas themed monster) and the Land Bobbet. Yes I wrote up two more and they will be posted first thing tomorrow morning before I head off to work.

For those of you who love my conversions, three went up this week. I could have written four, but I was lazy today. No – that’s not true, I was busy working on the compilation book! I wrote up the Vampire, Hive-mind, Stingwing (from Fallout 4) and the Nocturns. Will I be writing more this week? Most likely yes.

It being the holiday season, my wife and I were able to watch a few DVD’s. First we watched 'Monsters Dark Continent'. This is a sequel to the low-budget but very well done movie called 'Monsters'.

The spores brought back to Earth have spread to the Middle East and now the American soldiers are fighting on two fronts - against the insurgents and against the ever increasing population of aliens. I was pretty disappointed in the movie. Don't get me wrong, it was very well done, but it was more a story about soldiers and their fight in the Middle East than against the monsters. They were pretty much on the back burner.

Still, if you want to watch a movie that gives you a soldier's perspective on being caught in serious conflict and watching your brothers in arms die around you, this movie got that perfectly!

The other was called ‘Navy Seals vs. Zombies’.

God above, it was terrible. Typically I enjoy a bad movie, but this one I simply couldn't. First I have major problems with the SEALS being as fat as most of them were!

Um... you have to be in peak physical condition to be a SEAL for starters. These guys were FAT! The acting was terrible, but that was to be expected.

And the way the military was presented? You don't wait a day or longer to try and quarantine a location, once you know something REALLY bad is happening. By then the infection would easily have spread out of the city. Still, trying to stop such an outbreak would be all but impossible.

Finally, I had to laugh at all the scenes where you could see cars driving in the background, shoppers casually walking from store to store, and so on.

Don't waste your time with this - it wasn't even good fodder for my conversions.

And finally we watched a strange little monster movie called ‘Spring’. It’s a story about a young troubled man whose mother recently died. He leaves the country after getting into a fight with a drunk at a bar.

His trip takes him to Italy, where he meets a beautiful young student who is studying genetic evolution. Of course things are not as they appear.

It’s a love story with a monster twist. I have to admit that I really enjoyed it, and yes, there will be a conversion coming in the near future. I just haven’t decided how to write it up yet!

For books, I finished ‘Purge of Babylon’. This is the book that inspired the ‘Vampire, Hive-mind conversion’ that I talked about earlier. The novel begins with a couple of former Rangers turned Swat dealing with strange and practically unstoppable creatures inside an old condemned apartment.

It is apparent that something apocalyptic has happened, and they are but a handful of survivors left in a world that was taken over in a single night by these nightmarish creatures they call ‘ghouls’.

Overall, the book was pretty entertaining. The writer clearly knows a thing or two about the military, although how much is accurate I couldn’t say, as I don’t have a military background. I did not find myself caring for the characters however, and they seemed to be far too detached for the situation they were in.

Can’t be too bad though – there are currently 8 books in the series!

A couple of observations for the new year – oh hell, let’s call them what they are… Rants!  

A few days ago I read a post about a couple of pedestrians that were hit by cars yesterday at 5 PM on the Deerfoot trail.

What the F#%k were you two thinking? Probably the same kinds of idiots that I see blithely crossing the roads, no matter where they air, ignoring all the traffic, expecting them to stop because they are pedestrians.

You don't think that sort of thing doesn't happen? It does, and all the time! These people are the arrogant fools who believe that just because they're walking, they can do whatever they damned well please.

The worst part is that right now in Calgary at 5, it's already getting pretty damned dark! Sun sets at this time of year at 4:40. So unless you're wearing reflective vests or the like, there's a damn good chance you won't be seen.

I hope that they will be fine, but let that be a lesson to pedestrians everywhere.

Use your damned head!

Also, saw several different posts bashing Star Wars, and even more praising it. This should not surprise anyone. I liked the movie - I had issues with several scenes that made absolutely no sense at all (RE: Starkiller Base). I won't say anything else because I know a few friends still haven't seen it.

Just realize this - Beware of trolls. There will be plenty of people talking shit about the movie, and a lot are doing it just to stir the pot.

If you liked it, awesome. If you hated, awesome. That's the way life is.

One more thing... God I'm starting to sound like Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures.

The fucktard who jacked up the prices of that drug to combat aids from $16 to $750 was arrested and faces jail time.

To make the story even better, the company he ran is now declaring bankruptcy.

Of course that could be a hoax, as people should always take whatever they read online with a grain of salt, but damn, ain't Karma wonderful?

And that’s it for this blog. I did warn you it was longer than usual!

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Let the new year begin!