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Hello and welcome to my blog.
I'll be voicing my thoughts and opinions on the creative process as well as other random topics that enter my mind. I can't promise to be entertaining or informative, but if you like genre fiction, movies, TV or comics then there should be something to interest you.
Any errors and foul language are my own.


Wednesday 19 March 2014

History Lessons

History is fascinating.

I've learned that this week, simply by dipping my toe into the waters of research for no more than fifteen to twenty minutes. The sad thing - which I'll brush over, although I'm sure it's incredibly important - is that humanity doesn't seem to have learned too many lessons over that last couple of centuries. Wars are still fought for all the wrong reasons (is there a good one?), the divide between rich and poor is huge, and politicians are still, well... politicians, I guess.

A bfief aside: Tony Benn has died in the last week and, whatever may have been thought of him, I'll always remember him (albiet vaguely) as someone who stood up for what he believed and never swayed from it. His best quote? I'd go for "I left parliament so I could become a politician", which sums it all up quite nicely. Aside ends.

What's amazed me about my research is the discovery of what's happened over the last two-hundred years in the area where I live. It's steeped in history, both good and bad, most of which has come as a surprise. Bryan Talbot's Alice In Sunderland had much the same effect, making me feel sadly ignorant of the nearby world around me. I've known about the myths of dragons in these here parts, but to know that I may have walked on the same paths as Lewis Carroll is equally amazing.

Anyway, all this history has given me a world for my two characters - Adamson and Wood - to inhabit. That world ties in with a role-playing campaign I'm about to start, along with a completed short story set several decades later in the 1960's. And, while I'm still riding on the enthusiasm I encountered at Newcastle Film and Comic Con, if there's anyone in the know who would like to help me create a comic based on any of the above, I wouldn't be adverse to having a chat.

I'm ridiculously excited about all of this, and enjoying the writing too, in a way I haven't been since finishing my fantasy novel Requiem for the Grey Man. A couple of years of struggle, trying to come up with the next 'great' idea, have resulted in several starts, but nothing concrete, other that that short story I've just mentioned. I'm feeling good about this one.

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