Blood Skies

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Check out my current site: Blood Skies. Trust me. You'll like it.

Daily Checklist to a Better Life

This little list of mine is inspired by "Life's Little Instruction Book" by H. Jackson Brown Jr., which I had the pleasure of reading this past weekend. It got me wondering if there was anything that I did on a regular basis to improve my life. I'm a creature of habit -- too much so, truth be told -- so it came as little surprise to me how easily this list came to mind.

It's worth noting that, by and large, I am not considered a "cheery" person, but this is something of a misconception. I do my absolute best to maintain a positive attitude, even if you'd never guess it from my outwardly sarcastic nature. Maybe that's why I made this list: to show that anyone can lead a positive life, even those of us who seem to channel the Grinch even when we don't mean to. =)

Doing these ten things, every day, have made me a better person. Maybe they can help someone else, too.

1. Tell your spouse or significant other how much you love them. You don't need to write a sonnet or an epic poem, but a heartfelt "I Love You" while looking your spouse in the eyes carries more meaning than you might know.

2. Exercise. Even a little. If you don't have time to work out, do some sit-ups, some push-ups, or go for a good walk or bike ride. You'll feel better.

3. Listen to a song that you love. Go and hide in a corner with your IPod if you have to. Don't be afraid to sing along.

4. Pause, take 5 minutes, and do nothing. This one is hard for me -- I'm always on the move, in some fashion or another -- but doing this can work wonders for the mind. Stare at a sunset, at a tree, or just watch as people pass by.

5. Make someone else laugh.

6. Make yourself laugh.

7. Listen to, taste, watch, read or otherwise try something recommended to you by someone else. It's good to open your mind, and listen to what others have to tell you. If someone loves something, there's a reason, and if nothing else it can be exciting to experience someone else's passions.

8. Take time to look at something that interests you. Surf the web and find an article about a movie you recently enjoyed or a book you read ten years ago and suddenly remembered the other day. Check in on your favorite sports team or the local news. Just be sure to feed whatever engages you.

9. Do something kind for someone that you don't know. Even if it's as simple as just holding open a door for someone behind you.

10. Hug your children. Tell them you love them. If your child is too old for hugging (in their mind), get creative, and find some other way to let them know how you feel. (If you don't have children, you likely have a pet, which has become something of a stand-in for children for many people my age. If you don't, get one.)

And a bonus item...

11. Look forward to something. Whether it be kissing your wife, watching that new Blu-Ray you bought over the weekend, or just taking off your shoes at the end of the day, it's good to have something positive you can bring to mind when the day throws unexpected challenges your way.

Get out there and live.

Blood Skies: Chapter One (Excerpt)

Here's another brief excerpt from my novel project, this time selected from the beginning of the first chapter, "White".

There was an apple on the tree. It was pure white: an orb like frozen snow. A tiny spider, as white as ice, crawled across its face. It stood in stark contrast to the small and withered tree, which sat lonely and decrepit against a bed of reeds in the shallow river bank. Muddy and dank waters drifted by in the bed, filled with foul runoff from the edge of The Reach. The wind echoed through the reeds, a slow, sad dirge powered by the wind that blew in from the vast tundra.

The sky felt low and flat, oppressive. The air was raw with cold. Cross stared out, past the lone tree and the dense skeletal foliage, at The Reach, an endless, colorless plain of ice floes, snow-covered hills, arctic waters and drifts of snow deep enough to drown in. The harsh white of The Reach marked the end of civilization: it was where the human haven of Thornn saw its sphere of influence end, and where the deadly hostility of the wilderness began. The horizon was dark, a thin line of shadow that lay compressed beneath the dead white sky.

“Eric? Are you okay?”

Snow was behind him, amidst the gravestones. The cold, hard ground was nearly blue, a thin and long field that stretched all of the way back to the lower defensive tiers of Thornn, which sat implacable, a funnel of reinforced red stone walls embalmed in arcane ice and surrounded by hexed concertina wire. The city was squat and ugly, a troglodyte atop a twisted snowbound hill. Thick plumes of dark smoke trailed from the industrial towers bound in Thornn’s outer walls like serpents into the stale sky. Cross heard the distant wail of klaxons and machinery.

His sister was bound in a pale cloak the color of her namesake. The ground, by comparison, was dirty and grey, as were the grave markers, low plates of steel and stone etched with the names of the departed. Thornn’s citizens could not actually be buried, but were cremated. The notion of the dead coming back as vampires was too much a possibility to be dismissed. Cross understood that it had been a real problem about ten years ago, back in the early days of the war. Now the melting down of the deceased was so standard a practice no one even thought twice about it.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Come and look at this.”

Cross’ eyes roamed upward, to the sentry gargoyles that hovered over Thornn like circling stone ravens. Arcane storms invisible to the naked eye formed a crown in the air, a quiet cyclone of protective magical energies that emitted a constantly collapsing field of destructive power specially attuned to necrotic flesh.

Cross’ spirit moved out and away, floated near the edge of the grave field, then drifted back close to him. There was no danger there, even a mile outside of Thornn’s walls and so close to the openness of The Reach, so his spirit was at peace, and her calm filled him. She fell around him as a warm vapor that enveloped his body, a second skin that constantly tickled against his flesh. She’d been with him since he was ten, the time it had been discovered that he was a warlock. He could barely recall having been without her.

“What is that?” Snow asked. She was shorter than Cross by several inches. There was little mistaking their relation, for she had the same coal black hair and large green eyes, and they were both pale to the point of looking deathly. Her hair was cut short along the sides and back but was longer on top, and there was a single streak of white that ran from the center of her temple. Her choker was black leather set with a black cross. “Is that an apple? God, it must be rotten to the core.”

“No,” Cross said with a shake of his head. “Look at it. I think it’s fresh. It’s just…white. Drained of color by this place, maybe.” It was common -- entire crops had been leeched of color near inhospitable regions like The Reach. Cross had heard stories of entire forests in the Bone March that had been rendered bone white by the necrotic landscape; the Wormwood was so corrupt that even vampires feared the vegetation there; and Cross knew firsthand the dangers of the Ebonsand, where intelligent crabs muttered arcane curses and Vuul pirates claimed control over waters literally infused with occult blood. The world was a diseased and broken place, torn apart and cursed. Cross knew that a better world had once existed, in his youth, but it was becoming harder and harder to remember it.

“It’s beautiful,” Snow said after a time. “Even if it is dead.”

“Yeah,” Cross nodded. “I guess it is.”

A Brainstorming Exercise

Years ago, back when I was but a wee geek who wasn't even social enough to find people to play Dungeons and Dragons with, I used to pour through old issues of Dragon Magazine, looking for validation to my largely pathetic existence. One day, I came across an article for TSR's classic spy game "Top Secret", which detailed how to make life easy for yourself when it came to writing spy adventures for the game.

Now, I will sheepishly admit a) I don't recall the author of this article or b) many of the specifics of the article itself. What I do remember is what I got out of it which, for today's purposes, is what's important. And what I took from this article is something I've been able to apply to most of the writing I've ever done.

It all comes down to brainstorming. "Duh", you might say, and you'd be right to do so. I mean...brainstorming? Everyone knows that, right? But when it comes to brainstorming, it often lacks a process, and that's what this is all about.

Let's say -- just for the fun of it -- that you did indeed want to write a fantasy story. You may or may not have a basic idea in your head; at this point it doesn't matter. The thing you need to do is unload some ideas. So, at this point, you come up with a list -- it can be 10 things, it can be 20, whatever -- of things that you like to see or would like to see in fantasy fiction. These can be scenes, characters, images, plot elements, or even bits of dialog. The list can be all your own ideas, things you've seen in movies or read in books, or a combination therein. You want to be fairly specific, but also still keep your ideas general enough that you can play with them later on. Write everything in your list down.

Here's a list I just came up with, as an example:

1) A dragon that lives under a city.

2) Vampire soldiers.

3) Evil dwarves with strange technology.

4) A magical prison inside a mundane object (mirror, ring, etc.)

5) A cross-country voyage across a desert of red sand.

6) A magical book.

7) A dark cult that sacrifices maidens.

8) A city of ghosts.

9) A sword fight atop an ancient and crumbling bridge.

10) A portal to a distant realm.

Ok, so most of this is fairly basis stuff that we've seen (in one form or another) through a smattering of novels, films, etc. Obviously, you want to take out the really specific details (like character names and whatnot) and make these your own.

The trick now is to cut this list in half. How you do that is largely up to you: you can roll a die, write each idea down on a notecard and deal half of the cards out on the table, or just quickly look back at the list and snatch those that strike you the most. Truth be told, the *less* time you spend on this part, the better. You'll put everything together and make it somewhat cohesive in a bit: right now all that's important is to narrow your list of great ideas down.

I'll take the "quick second glance" approach. Just a scan of the list gives me this new, shorter list:

1) A dragon that lives under a city.

3) Evil dwarves with strange technology.

4) A prison inside a mundane object (mirror, ring, etc.)

6) A magical book.

10) A portal to a distant realm.

Normally I'd be more drawn to #2 and #8, but both of those ideas (plus number #5, now that I think on it) are concepts featured fairly prominently in the novel I'm already working on. I also thought it would be a good idea to try and write about some things I usually flat-out try to avoid, which includes many of the so-called "staples" of fantasy...dragons, dwarves, etc.

So now I have a list of things I want to appear in my story. All we have to make them all fit together in some semblance of a sensible plot.

Generally speaking, a story needs a setting, characters, and some sort of conflict. Looking at the list above, we have several options for each. For the setting, we have a city, a magical prison, and a distant realm. For characters, we have a dragon and some evil dwarves. For a conflict, some are already implied in the items we've already looked at (the prison, the strange technology and the portal, all of which can a source of conflict between characters), and we also have the magic book, the only item from the list that has yet gone unused. So, in the end, we have...

Setting: A city which contains both a magical prison (disguised as a mundane object) and a portal to a distant realm. (Note that we can always combine things...the prison can also be a portal, just as the distant realm can be the city.)

Characters: Evil dwarves, and a dragon. (Note that when I first made the list, I didn't specify that it was an *evil* dragon...this wasn't an intentional omission, but one that I think will work out for me in the end.)

Conflict: The conflict of the story, I think, will involve the magical book, just to be all-inclusive.

Already we have the barest bones of a story in front of us, for what was, ultimately, only a moderate amount of work. Next we get to figure out how to pull all of those into a plot, but that's something to think about another time. For now we've done what we set out to do, and brainstormed our ways into a potential piece of fantasy writing.

Obviously you could do this for any sort of writing (the list concept works best with genre writing, I think, especially for beginners), and the "process" is free-flowing enough that there's really no wrong way to do it. (You may not, for example, derive Setting, Characters and Conflict from your list, which is really no big deal: you'll just have to fill in the blanks when you write.)

Sometimes this exercise will lead to a decent piece of writing; other times, the exercise is interesting in and of itself just to get the proverbial juices flowing.

Blood Skies: Prologue (excerpt)

I'm officially halfway done with the 4th draft revision of the novel "Blood Skies", and I'll be pursuing potential agents in the next month or two. In the meantime, to celebrate the revision's progress (as well as the fact that I've stuck with this project for so long), I thought I'd post another excerpt from early on in the novel. Enjoy!

Cross saw blood in the sky.

It was a trick of the dusk light: thick rays of dying crimson sunshine cut through dark shifting vapors over the battlefield and the drifts of caustic white smoke left in the wake of crawling war machines. The air was a den of rumbling motors, heavy treads and great iron wheels that crushed rocks and shattered bones. Cross smelled oil, and tasted exhaust.

I hate this place.

His entire body ached. Cross had slept perhaps five hours in as many days, scattered instances of half-slumber he’d caught amidst heaps of dirty blankets and piles of faulty bandages left discarded outside the medical bivouacs. All of his sleep had been half-filled with nightmarish images of hex-torn bodies and children drowning in burning arcane fuel.

Grime and filth covered his skin in a film. Cross’ stomach ached, long tired of thaumaturgically preserved rations and stale wine; whenever he ate much of anything beyond a slice of bread, his gut twisted and his urine burned. With his spirit always at hand, Cross normally didn’t get sick, which told him it wasn’t so much any actual infection as it was his inability to adjust to a military diet while he was there in the field.

He’d only been on the front lines of the war for two weeks.

He felt his spirit there with him, a slippery electric skin that hovered centimeters away from the next world. She was a wraith-like unguent that caressed and tickled against him. He breathed her in, and though the vapor of her spectral form turned his lungs cold he felt comfortable knowing she was there, surrounding him, a weapon and a friend, his own soul, intelligent, lost, cleaved to him and yet worlds distant. He knew her better than he knew his own sister, better than he knew himself.

Dark clouds twisted in the bitter, rot tainted wind that blew in from the east, out of the sodden wastes of Blackmarsh. Dismal fields of black mud stretched to the murky horizon, which was difficult to make out beneath a sky pregnant with shadows.

Dozens of dark tents lay like the wounded across the torn landscape. Thick trails of coal black smoke trailed in varicose lines into a darkening sky the color of uncooked meat. Cross tasted something like salt and soot there in the cold, dry air.

He sat with a host of soldiers that he didn’t know, save Graves, whom he’d known since boyhood. Graves fit in better than Cross did amongst the soldiers of Wolf Company; he was, after all, one of them, not a warlock like Cross: a weapon, a freak, and the closest thing the city of Thornn had to matching weapons with the enemy.

The tent shifted in the dank wind. The makeshift chairs stood unstable in the mud around the wide wooden stump they used as a game table. Cross sat idly, his cards clenched upside down in his hand, knowing full and well that he didn’t stand a chance. They were a sullen, dirty bunch, nearly impossible to tell apart with the black mud caked to their makeshift uniforms. Blunderbusses, rifles, blades and hammers hung from harnesses and stood against the iron tent poles; dozens of packs, as caked in filth as their owners, sat nearby in case an alarm went up.

“Why so grim?” Graves asked from Cross’ left. Graves’ scars were barely visible beneath his camouflage paint, charcoal runes, mud and hex soot, most of which had been set intentionally across the exposed skin of every soldier to prevent catching any vampiric infections or arcane diseases. Now all of that paint and fluid had sluiced together through the course of days, making even the fairer skinned men look black.

“Are you serious?” Cross asked in return.

“Wow. Is your hand that bad?” As ever, it was difficult for Cross to tell whether or not Graves was being serious. He was something of a redneck bumpkin at heart, but compared to his field experience Cross felt like a child most of the time. “You might as well just fold,” Graves added after he stared at the back of Cross’ cards, as if he possessed arcane vision.

“You should listen to him,” Malone smiled. “In fact, you should both probably just give up now.” Malone’s was tall and broad in the shoulder, and he was thin and muscular at once, with a chiseled face and crust of short dark hair. Graves had once joked that he looked like the lovechild of Superman and Frankenstein’s monster. “Full house.”

“That’s not possible,” Cala said after a moment. It was well known that she was the only card shark in the squad. “You can’t even spell, Malone. How do you expect us to believe you were able to put together a Full House?”

“He thinks we’re playing Go Fish,” Graves laughed.

Cross felt a stiff, dead wind carry through the camp. There were just under thirty individuals altogether – mostly soldiers, with a half-dozen mages and a single, lonely Doj engineer named Zender – cramped into the scattered tents, which seemed as occupied with equipment as they were with personnel. There were sacks of blessed soil stacked high like sandbags around each of the open tents, bundles of black iron poles bundled by hex wire, barrels of ash, boxes of pellet, shot and gun ammunition, raw moon rock and sacks of hexed salt. Little of that equipment was for the soldiers – most of it was for use by the mages. There was work to be done in the Blackmarsh…too important, he thought, to be handed to a bunch of young warlocks such as he.

What the hell am I doing here?

As if in answer, his spirit pushed against him. The breath of her form floated across his skin and filled him like living smoke. His fingers tingled, and he licked his lips to taste her electric hex. He unfolded his cards onto the table. Graves, Malone, Cala, Locke and Gage all nodded their appreciation that he’d folded, since he was just holding up the game with his indecision, but he saw that Gage and Cala were on edge, as well. A mage’s spirit was attenuated to subtle fluctuations and ebbs in the ethereal nodes of the living world: existing in the liminal space between living and dead, it was a witch’s or warlock’s spirit that granted them a sight that pierced illusion, that could seek out known individuals over a score of miles, that could detect hidden or unseen threats both mundane and magical. Being anchored to his spirit allowed Cross to cull bits of her shadowy form and transform it into potent energy, to create effects that humans had come to know as magic. It also meant that he was constantly exposed to the world of the dead, that he walked with a foot perpetually in the grave. Cross had lived with her since adolescence, after he’d nearly died at the hands of a sickness, but discovering her only meant he’d die young, later. No one could live long tied to an arcane spirit – by their very nature spirits were emotionally volatile and dangerous, lest they’d be unable to produce the energies they did.

Cross sat back and looked towards the low, dark trees, the border of the Blackmarsh. It was difficult to tell where the trees began or how far they ran, but luckily Wolf Company wouldn’t be pressing in any deeper than the outer perimeter, if and when their air support ever actually arrived. Unfortunately, in order to get close enough to set the hex rods and initiate the detonation sequence to clear out the vampire garrison located there in the marsh, they had to figure out a way to contend with the shadow-wings and hellwyrms, and that was where the airships came in.

Too bad they’re about three hours late. It would have been nice to have done this before dark.

Blood Skies: An Introduction

For roughly the past 10 months, I've been hard at work on a novel project called "Blood Skies". Originally entitled "Red", this work -- which I've been revising and expanding since about March of this year -- is a bit different from my previous novel attempts in that it is neither "traditional" high fantasy nor horror, but a combination of both, with healthy smatterings of post-apocalyptic science fiction and surreal drama thrown in for good measure.

As I've said before, revising my own work is NOT my strength, but with this project I feel as if I'm finally learning to embrace it. That could be growth. It could be the natural byproduct of having attempted six previous novels, only to leave the four for which I'd completed rough drafts languishing in "pending" status because I couldn't make myself comfortable with the notion that revision is somehow a lesser effort than writing something new. It could be a mental disorder. But whatever the case, if I've learned anything, it's this: revision is a bitch.

So here I am, roughly 1/3 of the way through Draft #4, comfortable that what I'm written isn't nearly as terrible as I thought it was...in fact, occassional passages are pretty darn good. =)

So what's it about? "Blood Skies" is a dark fantasy set in an uncertain time. Our world has been ravaged by a magical cataclysm known only as "The Black", an unnatural disaster that somehow fused the world we once knew with other, primeval places. Now the Earth is a barren waste, much of the population gone, its cities transformed into fortress towns where humans hold up against the hostile entities that have invaded from these other worlds. The biggest threat to our existence are the vampires, organized legions who focus their military campaigns on wiping out humankind. But there are other monstrous beings and dark arcane mysteries set poised to destroy us, and it is only humankind's stubborn determination and mastery of magic that has allowed them to survive.

Only now, the existence of magic is threatened. Without it, we have little chance.

So, with introductions aside, I'll post some tidbits while I continue to revise; now, as ever, I relish feedback and test readers whenever and from wherever I can get them. =)

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