Mittwoch, 24. Februar 2010

Home, home on the range...

Well, I'm off home tomorrow for a whole week and I can't wait.
So I'll catch you when I return, OK?
Tara.
Reg :-)

Sonntag, 21. Februar 2010

Competition time.

Well, I gave up on the freaky fable story, I missed the deadline. Well I would have if I had carried on. I started with Goldilocks being a warrior princess who kills three members of a bear cult. Then I scrapped it because it was tosh and not what they were looking for in the first place. The idea is to take a story and write it in such a way that it reads like a horror story, and not change an existing folktale into a horror story. My own fault, I should have read the guidelines properly in the first place.


I didn’t like the story anyway.
Whatever, it’s history, let’s move on Gingerboy, as they say in Angola.

On my manuscript I have to admit to being very lazy recently, I’ve hardly achieved anything.
In my defence, I have been writing lyrics; that’s translating German lyrics to English and scribbling down my own. I’ve a couple of good guitar riffs that I want to write some lines for as well but that will have to wait I’m afraid.


I entered a competition a couple of weeks ago; I can’t believe I haven’t told you. Anyway, it’s had a nice reaction from the other contestants, (some not so unbiased, thanks Rich from www.StrugglingAuthors.com ) which doesn’t mean it will win, but it was good for my flagging ego.

The competition itself is run by www.linkedin.com and the link to the page Competition itself is:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=2256570&discussionID=12660481&sik=1266735278724&split_page=1&goback=%2Egdr_1264155958216_1%2Eanb_2256570_*2%2Eana_2256570_1266735278724_3_1



But I’m not sure if you have to be a member to read it.

Click on the link and you’ll find out soon enough ;-)



Yeah, and that’s it for now.

Right, back to the lyrics then.

C.U.

Reg :-)

Mittwoch, 17. Februar 2010

The Witching Hour draws nigh...

It's five minutes to midnight and I'm shattered. I was on late shift earlier and now I'm plonking keys in front of a very tiresome computer.
Although originally I just wanted to shorten Division, I seem to have let myself be sucked into the story and cannot stop from tweaking bits here and modifying parts there.
Ah well, it's going well though and it's a surprisingly better read than my memory ever gave it credit for. Actually I'm quite chuffed with what I, (and George) did here.
It was your loss Snowbooks... (A case of sour grapes there Reggie? more like a freight train load actually)

Whatever, I'm thinking about taking a break from the manuscript and scribbling down another short story for an anthology of twisted fairy tales. The idea is to take a traditional story and bend it into a horror story. What story to do though?
Any ideas? In fact, don't bother because if it does reach print you'll just demand half of the royalties, (all 10 dollars of it) and I'll be angry and it could wreck our friendship.
So leave it, OK?
Good.
Right, I'm off. Have a good week.
Reg :-)

Donnerstag, 11. Februar 2010

The Division of the Damned Reduced and going for a song

So this is the plan.


I’m going to cut Division of the Damned down from 160,000 words to 120;000.
To be honest, it was a bit pie in the sky for me to expect a printing house to accept a manuscript of that size from an unknown author but I wasn’t to know and that’s that.

I mean it’s good, but the “Nu Shakespeare” it is not.

So there’s only one course of action to be taken, well two actually but I’m not going to bin it so therefore, I’ll have to cut it down.
The problem is, which parts do I delete?
Unfortunately the plot is so intertwined with itself that it’s like a four metre wide crossword puzzle and I’m only allowed to pull out the naughty words. What to do, what to do?
Obviously there were certain parts that I knew could be discarded straight away, so they went in the first day. Never the less, I’ve had my work cut out patching up the wounds of the pieces that are a germane to the story.

Basically it’s going to take longer than I thought.
It’s down to 125,000 words with a sprinkling of random vowels and phrases now but I’m not happy. Ideally it would be nice to drop it to 110,000 but, well I’m being ridiculous there, that won’t ever happen.

My next large project, the dinosaur book is going to ceiling at 90,000 and that’s that. No ifs and buts, 90’s the limit, take it or leave it Gingerboy!
Alas, that’s all in the future because for now, I’m tied up in the realms of the SS, vampire soldiers and do-gooder Russians and Werewolves.
I hope one day to see you there too.

Take it easy

Reg :-)

PS. What do you think of the layout? It’s dark but not overly so… or am I being a divvy?

Mittwoch, 10. Februar 2010

OK, I've changed it and I don't hate it too much...

OK, I've changed it and I don't hate it too much now.
I thought the black look was OK due to the SS connection but now I've renamed it it looks... OK, sort of.

Whatever, it's staying this way now until at least till tomorrow.
Tara.
Reg :-)

I've changed it and I hate it...

I've changed it and I hate it...

I'll have another go tomorrow, I'm tired now.

Montag, 8. Februar 2010

A new name, a new Blog?

I'm losing interest in my Blog name and I'm thinking about either changing it, or if that doesn't work, then starting a new Blog.
Any thoughts on the matter peeps?

Reg :-)

Montag, 1. Februar 2010

Regimental Reunion, Wolfenbüttel 2010.

This has nothing to do with my writing odyssey but I thought I’d write something about my old regiment and my relationship to it.



In case you didn’t know, I was once a soldier. I left school at 16 and joined the army to see the world and kill people.
Luckily I only managed the first half of that last statement of intent, but for seven and a half years I was employed by her Majesty the Queen to guard the frontiers of democracy against the Communist threat and impress the local German population with my drinking prowess and pathetic chat up lines.

I left the army in January 91 after meeting the future Mrs Jones and stayed in Germany, the rest is history.
I never felt any real close bond to my old regiment, 1st the Queen’s Dragoon Guards and was more than happy to leave that chapter in my life behind me. I made new friends and though I worked as a civilian for the army for the nine years after I left, I didn’t bother trying to keep in touch.

I watched my old unit from afar, tutting and shaking my head or nodding in approval at the people I saw rising through the ranks to go on to become the Colonels and RSMs of the Regiment. However, that was as far as my interest went; I was a civvy and had my own life to lead, my own plans and hopes and QDG was an all but forgotten period in my life.

It was the invasion of Kosovo that changed my ideas.
Kosovo, the break away Serbian state that demanded independence due to its large Albanian population was a where the Cold War finally came to ahead. For the first time NATO and ex-Warsaw Pact armies would face each other on the battlefield and my old unit, QDG was at the vanguard of the NATO advance.
I couldn’t read enough about it.

The first Gulf War was a wash out. After bombing the crap out of the unfortunate Iraqi army for 3 weeks, (or something like that), the coalition moved in. Though there were losses, the Iraqi ground forces had suffered so much from the enemy bombardment that resistance was negligible and there were more problems with how to house and feed the thousands of prisoners than there were with mopping up the resistance. The war came and went but I could only concentrate on my new drum set and the plans I had for world domination through the power of my drumming...

However Kosovo fired my imagination. The Serbian government had issued statements saying that they will not give Kosovo up. The Russian extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky told Western reporters that if NATO attacked Serbia then Russia would roll over Western Europe. It was hot stuff and I was glued to my television as the build up around the confrontation grew. And at the heart of my interest was the regiment I had all but forgotten about.

1999 was also the year that, for the first time since leaving, I thought to myself, “What have I done with my life?”

I was working at DPD, (starting at 4 AM) in the mornings and then in the afternoon I worked the buiding sites. I had just left my band, which had kept alive all my hopes in life and was stuck in a rut which saw me getting up at 0330 and then sometimes working through until eight or nine at night, just to get by and pay my bills. I grew my first grey hair in this year, so of course, the blithe, unfettered days of QDG and all that I had left behind played a large role in my thoughts.

History shows that nothing happened. Just as the first Gulf War had been decided by airpower, NATO bombs broke the will of the Serbian military and government. Never the less, my interest in my old regiment had been awakened.
Since 1999 I have kept in contact with my former employers. I’m in the Regimental Comrades Association and have found, through Facebook a whole Squadron of ex military buddies who had simply vanished from my radar.

The weekend just gone saw a group of lads from the Sergent’s and Officer’s mess come down to Wolfenbüttel to visit tour old haunts.
The faces I knew then as young troopers are all now senior NCOs and Officers but the banter hadn’t changed and it sent me back to those carefree, happier days when my only goal in life was to get on the ale with the lads and see my wagon through its next inspection.

It was great to see the unit that I left all those many moons ago still has a vibrant zest for the ridiculous and wanton in these all too sad days of political correctness and I hope to have more contact with the lads of 1st the Queen’s Dragoon Guards..

Pro Rege et Patria is the regimental motto, but as my mate Steve Burman once wrote, “Pro Rege et Patria but Pro Quaffing’s the norm.”

Who are you, who are you?

The Blue Army.

Reg :-)