Flash Fiction Challenge: Who The Fuck Is My D&D Character?

Chuck Wendig posted a challenge on his Terrible Minds blog, to write 1000 words about a randomly-generated Dungeons and Dragons character (see the link below for full details).

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/01/09/flash-fiction-challenge-who-the-fuck-is-my-dd-character/

I thought I'd give it a go. Turns out I'm a bigoted Half-Orc from a carnival freak show searching for the perfect culinary dish. Who knew? Anyway, armed with this information, here's 897 words, my first attempt at a flash fiction challenge, a story called Grak's Grub.

I ate my father.

I know, it’s not the done thing in what you humans call your civilised society. It makes me a barbarian and, I’m sure you think, justifies your persecution of my race.

Let me tell you about myself. As you can see, I’m not tainted with skin the colour of snot - well, maybe the snot that came with the nosebleed I gave you for staring too long – I’m more a deep red like the wine Ambrose likes so much. Why? It’s heritage, my unique parentage that makes me so much better than everyone else. See, there’s this perception of my race, that daddy was a beast, part of a horde that raped and pillaged its way across the continent, leaving death and destruction and a litter of bastards in its wake.

Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. My father – like you – was human, an ambassador to the Fringe who must have upset the wrong politician at some point and found himself on the edge of the world, negotiating with the Red Orcs for what would prove to be a fragile peace. While some men like skinny women and others those with more meat on their bones, my father preferred his with red skin and warty tits; there’s no accounting for taste.

He stayed with my mother when the lengthy negotiations were at an end, living with the tribe as one of their own. Four years the truce lasted, with me born part way through the first. Like all my kind, I grew quickly and learned much; training to be a warrior from the moment I could walk, learning to live off the land, hunting and fighting to survive. It’s said that a Red Orc knows its vocation within the first few months of its life. It took me a little longer.

Humans came back, as they do, this time with steel and fire. My father tried to intervene, taking an arrow in the stomach for his troubles. A few of us escaped, but your lot are like dogs at broth, and pursued us relentlessly. We gave you a good chase, but out capture was inevitable. My father was dying, so my mother did the only thing she could to appease the gods and secure the afterlife.

She cooked him.

The Reds were cunning. What was never mentioned in the talks was how the women eat their mates once a child is born. It keeps our numbers down, our species pure. Life on the Fringe is tough, but a human cooked at the right temperature for the right length of time is a succulent delight. How was my mother to know she’d fall in love with what would become her final meal?

You know the rest, how the Expeditioners cleansed the world of the Red menace, but not everything made it into your books. I survived, taken in by the wizard Melvyn Ambrose. He’s fallen on hard times lately, forced to roam the continent with his circus, but back then he was a man of some standing and I became his apprentice. He’s never said what made him take me that morning, but what he saw came to fruition and I too am a spellcaster.

Not what you expected, am I? A Half-Orc who can read, write and create a fireball to generate just the right amount of heat. I’m intelligent, there’s so much more that “Me Grak!” to my vocabulary, but I suspect you were correct about one thing. I am a freak, which is why I stayed with Ambrose as part of his show. Granted, it’s not the greatest – the Dog-faced Boy is a Kobold and the Bearded Lady is nothing more than a female dwarf – but we make a living, touring and searching.

That’s right; searching. Melvyn Ambrose fell out of favour because people went missing and it was suspected he was taking them for vile experiments. Nothing was proved, because he was innocent, but accusations and stigma don’t wash away. I was taking those men, you see, in my quest for culinary perfection.

My fault, which is why I’ve stayed with him, along with the debt of owing him my life. It was a long time ago when he saved me, but I’ll never forget it, nor the night that preceded it. I was young, I know, but such things stick in minds as sharp as mine. I don’t expect a lesser being like yourself to comprehend entirely, but know this. The Grak: Fringe Mage you can see in the freak-show tent is everything Ambrose wants me to be, an enigma wrapped in a mystery; how, they always wonder, can such a brute demonstrate such reasoning and talent? He taught me well, showed me how to master control, but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes you have to surrender to those base, primal desires. You have to remember who or what you were if you’re to rise above it.

And that’s why I’ve brought you here tonight, cousin.

You see, in all the places I’ve looked, all the towns and cities the circus has entertained, you’re the closest branch of our family tree I’ve found. You’re something special – you even look like him – and I’m sure that there are more similarities, including the one I’ve been seeking all my life.  

I’ll never forget my father. He tasted so good.

THE END

Hinterkind: The Waking World

I picked up the first volume of Hinterkind on a whim, purely because I liked the concept. Humanity has almost been wiped out by a plague called The Blight; streets are deserted, while plants have been left to grow unfettered. Wildlife has spread into the empty cities, but so has something else. Mythical creatures - cyclopes and goblins, fawns and sidhe - have left their darkened corners, proving they are more than fiction, more than a tale told at night-time.

Hinterkind takes two teenagers and throws them out of their comfort zone (a village in what used to be Central Park) and into this world of the mythic. Unaware of what's happened to the world, they're our eyes and ears and they and we explore writer Ian Edgington's creation. It's a harsh world, where humans are now an endangered species, and along the way we meet various species, such as a troll who lives under a bridge (where else?) as well as a foul-mouthed punk-rock fairy. It's incredibly entertaining and, naturally, raises the topic of racial persecution and prejudice, but in a way that's never preaching but certainly thought-provoking. For all the strangeness, it's still what humans are capable of doing to each other that shocks and frightens the most.

Perhaps inevitably, it's been compared in a good light to Vertigo's Fables, which I absolutely adore. It's a fair comparison, what with creatures from fairy-tales kicking around, but Hinterkind is a different beast altogether. I'm a huge fan of the 'mythic monsters in our world' style of tale (more so than I am of elves and the like in fantasy novels, for some strange reason), but Hinterkind takes that a step further with its post-apocalyptic vision and unknown threats looming over the horizon.

Edginton's script is accompanied by beautiful art from Francesco Trifogli, who is equally adept at panoramic cityscapes and facial expressions, giving away a character's mood with a kink of the lips or a narrowing of an eye. This is enhanced by sublime colouring from Cris Peter (that troll I mentioned? It's pink, and suitably so), a palette that changes to suit the location, giving the eye that first impression of the atmosphere the scene intends to evoke. Add to this the lettering from Dezi Sienty, whose scratching-style on the penultimate page captures the menace of those speaking, and it's easy to see why Hinterkind has attracted so much praise.

A Reason To Change

A nip and a punch for the first of the month – welcome to October. It’ll soon be Christmas, I’m told.

The last couple of months have been very interesting. I’ve spent most of 2014 wondering what novel to write. Should I go with a world I created for a short story, or try to emulate my favourite authors? Believe me, I tried both and more besides. Nothing seemed to gel, I ran out of steam, there was stuff to watch on TV.

Then, at the start of August, I made myself a promise – write every day. Get my backside in the chair, and just write. My problem is I want a first draft to be perfect, tweak it for spelling, make sure characters have the same colour eyes at the end as they did at the start, then get it sent away. Of course, it doesn’t happen like that; I read a comment on Twitter that the first draft is the clay, which will be re-shaped and moulded until it’s correct. I like that image. I also recalled something Stephen King said in his book On Writing (I’ve read far too many books, ahem, on writing, but King’s is the only one I’ve kept hold of, along with Sometimes The Magic Works by Terry Brooks) that the first draft should be done in three months. That works out at just over 1000 words a day.

Pessimist that I am, I aimed for six months, 500 a day. I blitzed it, doing 7000 words in the first week, so I decided to take Mr King’s advice. Today, two months on, my first draft stands at 64400 words. How pleased am I? Very. And yet, I haven’t made any spectacular changes in my life, other than just write when I have the time. My first draft is a mess, but that’s ok. It’s allowed to be; it’s meant to be.

I knew the end of my story before I started, as well as the half way point, so I’m sure that’s helped, but it all feels very organic, as if something more than the word count has grown with each day. I’ve surprised myself with some of the turns the story has taken, but they all feel right, true to the characters and the world I’ve created. I’ve fought my fear (yes, fear; stupid, I know, but that’s me) and won, simply by doing what I love.

Why the change of name for my blog, then? Truth is, as the trees are starting to lose their leaves, so I’ve shed some (not all) of my doubts as to my abilities as writer. I feel different, but the last thing I wanted to do was ignore the past, all the posts that have gone before this one. I’d already tried creating another blog this year, yet killed it off in its infancy. Another reason is that there’s a book called Flash Of Midnight, and I wanted that writer’s work to be as original as (and separate from) my blog.

So, here we are. New web address, based on a name a favourite manager called me years ago; a new title inspired by the combination of that nickname, a documentary Jonathan Ross made about Steve Ditko, and a song by The Hoosiers that is one of my favourites. I’ve changed my approach to my fiction, simply by just doing it, now it’s time to do so with this blog, too, and put the effort in to make it all it can be.

Keeping Summer Special

This week, I travelled back in time.

Fortunately, rather than find out I’m my own great-grandfather or accidently erase a relative from history (meaning I wouldn’t be here to type this), it was a simple trip: for half an hour, sat in the garden on a sunny summer’s day, I was ten-years-old again.

Back in the summer of 1981 – when I was about to turn eleven and start the ‘big school’ – the 2000AD Sci-fi Special made an appearance in my home. I can’t remember if it was bought for me or if I picked it up while shopping with my mum. Perhaps I asked for it; I was no stranger to the comic, having read it a couple of years beforehand when Judge Dredd was on the cover, about to be sacrificed to a dinosaur in the Cursed Earth – “This is so good, I’m going to get it forever”, I remember saying.

Suffice to say, for reasons I can’t recall, I didn’t. But, in 1981, the Sci-fi Special changed everything. It had a cover by Brian Bolland – one of his immaculate Dredd images – but the story inside outshone even that. Drawn by Colin Wilson, this art was even cleaner than Bolland’s, those crisp images almost shining out of the page. It was a great story, too; if I haven’t confused myself, it was Dredd on the trail of supplier of ‘white powder’, an illegal substance that turned out to be sugar. What other stories I read in those pages escape me (I could have a look on the internet later, I suppose), other than a Nemesis the Warlock story that would, as the cover promised, see NEMESIS REVEALED! Now, I didn’t even know who Nemesis was, but I can recall the story of a young man sent on a quest – “you may kiss the hem of my garment,” says Torquemada – only to be scuppered at the end by Nemesis himself. This story is more vivid in my mind than the Dredd one, because it’s in the collected Nemesis stories from a few years ago. Having had a look at it again, it was every bit as good as I remembered. Possibly, now I’m a bit older and wiser, it’s even better. Back then, it got me hooked on the weekly comic (that was its job, I suppose) and memories from that time include moving house, and having to wait three weeks to have the complete Rogue Trooper Total War poster on my new bedroom wall, cut out to perfection from four back covers and mounted on cardboard, no less.

Back to the present, and this year sees the first Sci-fi Special released for eighteen years. It’s good – it’s very good – filled with familiar characters and not-so-familiar writers and artists. The Special feels like an ideal outlet for new voices, and I have to applaud 2000AD for making this happen. I was wary initially, but that quickly passed, and I found myself immersed in the stories, just as I had all those years ago. The stories are all brand new and self-contained, all to a high standard, but for me it’s Robo-Hunter that stands out; Sam Slade was always one of my favourites, and The Bodj Job – although told by a new writer – contains the same dry wit and cynicism of the character, while placing him in a situation that is both highly amusing, as well as being a commentary on a certain aspect of society.

If hadn’t already jumped back on the 2000AD spaceship, this year’s Sci-Fi Special would have me rushing out for it. As a showcase for new talent – the faces of the future – it works perfectly, and as a teaser for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, I hope it gets 2000AD the extra readers it deserves. Me, I’d like to thank them for making me young again, even if it was just for half an hour.

MULP Fiction

"MULP is an anthropomorphic comic book, a Pulp adventure set in a world of mice, by Matt Gibbs and Sara Dunkerton."

As soon as I heard about MULP, back in the beginning of April, I was intrigued. As a fan of Blacksad, Mouse Guard and Grandville, it sounded like another comic book that would be right up my street. As such, I wanted it to be my first review.

When an ancient stone tablet is unearthed in Egypt, it leads to the disappearance of Professor Walter Harvest-Scott's assistant, Sellsey. This prompts Cornelius Field to call in his friend Jack Redpath; Jack's an adventurer, and we can tell he's been around from what looks like a bite out of his ear. Also drawn into this is plucky reporter Victoria Jones who, along with the Professor's daughter Elizabeth, forms our tight band of heroes.

MULP hooked me from the very first page and didn't let go until the last. Sceptre of the Sun is an Indiana Jones-esque style of adventure that not only introduces its reader to an array of wonderful characters, but does the job of setting-up the world without ever feeling like the exposition gets in the way of the story. It's an entertaining plot - one told brilliantly by writer and artist alike - with every panel leaping from the page to capture the reader's attention; there's an intricacy to almost every panel that keeps the eye on it long after the words have been read.

Colours add to the period feel and no two characters look the same. There are some wonderful transitions between scenes (that trick of not-quite-overlapping dialogue works brilliantly), some of which feature the characters looking out of the page to another whose point of view we share, drawing us into the action. There are double-crosses aplenty, fistfights, sinster henchmen, and a femme fatale which - combined with the myths and legends of the world - serve to emulate rather than imitate the genre. It never feels like a spoof, or something that's been made deliberately quirky to attract attention. The care and detail is evident on every page - even the pyramids are to scale, being no taller than the palm trees that grow next to them.

Matt and Sara have created something wonderful here, a tale that will appeal to fans of Indiana Jones and Rick O'Connell, making MULP everything I hoped it would be, and more besides.

The Storm Passes...

... or "Why I Killed A Blog".

It seemed a good idea at the time. The End.

Back in the mists of time, before even this blog was a twinkle in the cat's eye, I setup a blog called Storm Brewing. It never saw a post until earlier this month, when I decided it would be my new site to review comics. Why a separate site? I don't know, but I supposed it was there for a reason, and I wanted to separate a 'serious' review site from this much more personal blog.

Now some time has passed, I've decided I can also review on A Flash Of Midnight, as well as share my usual witty banter/inane drivel* (*delete as applicable). You see, even in the three brief posts I've written for Storm Brewing, I wax nostalgic about comics and, admittedly, repeat a few things I've already said here in the past. I can't help myself; even my review of the Newcastle Comic Con was filled with the emotions that make me, rather than a straight-forward descriptive piece. It's hardly a world-shattering revelation, but perhaps it's one I had to make, to be comfortable with my presence in the blogverse.

There's no need for a 'new me', no need for another blog or another Twitter account. Just A Flash Of Midnight and @awdscrawl - along with all the right words, hopefully in the right order.

And you, of course. Thanks to everyone (both of you?) who reads this, has enjoyed it, and will hopefully enjoy it in the future. And, if you know anyone who makes comics, pass my name their way; I'd love to read and review their work. It warms my heart that those who followed my new (also soon to be erased) Twitter account now follow me on @awdscrawl, too.

So that's goodnight from me, and a farewell to Storm Brewing. I've not been away, yet it feels great to be back.

Book Reviews

I recently had the good fortune to review a couple of brilliant books for Starburst Magazine.

The first was The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler, a YA portal fantasy that really struck a chord with me. Click on the link below to see what I thought:

http://www.starburstmagazine.com/reviews/book-reviews-latest-literary-releases/8256-book-review-the-forbidden-library

The second was The Three by Sarah Lotz, which I devoured in a couple of days. The concept of it intrigued the 1990's Dean Koontz fan in me, but the book is utterly unique, thought-provoking and chilling. Again, the link is below:

http://www.starburstmagazine.com/reviews/book-reviews-latest-literary-releases/8257-book-review-the-three

It's difficult to condense thoughts and feelings into a few hundred words, suffice to say both books hooked me for different reasons. I haven't linked to reviews before, but I still feel the urge to SHOUT about these two.

Consider yourself shouted at, dear reader.