I’ve been quiet on here, but it’s simply because I’ve been busy. There’s a number of serialised novellettes coming out to support the release of the supplement I wrote, The Dronescourge Returns.
The first of these episodic tales is ‘The Taking of TOR563’ and is published on the Warlord Games Antares Nexus, right here: https://www.gatesofantares.com/taking-tor-563-part-i/.
There’s a lot more to do – hope you enjoy!
Another novelette has been released in the saga of Batu and Baray in the Beyond the Gates of Antares universe. This time, we discover how Batu got his terrifying drone and how the cloud of bionanocytes he carries – and fears – was awakened, as well as why he is considered such a threat to the Isorian Senatex.
The novellete is called Freeborn and Family and is in PDF format accessible from this overview page. If it’s difficult to see, it can be downloaded directly from the Warlord Games website.
I’ve also built a Kindle .mobi format file that can be downloaded to a kindle directly or emailed to your amazon kindle account from your your own, approved emailed address.
Batu and Baray’s adventures started in The Claiming of Shamasai, continued in the Open Signal anthology and on the Beyond the Gates of Antares website (coming soon: to be assigned). Other stories include the series in Plaguespore, set in the timei between Shamasai and Family.
I’ve recently written a new serial and an accompanying short in preparation for Warlord Games’ new supplement, The Chryseis Shard. Once more, the series involves Batu and Baray, both key characters in The Chryseis Shard, and introduces readers to some of the capabilities of Batu’s annoying nano drone – now a sort of personal daemon.
All parts of the serial and the Chryseis prequel are now available on the Warlord website. I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this development in a small part of the Antares universe.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about ideas and how they link into imagination and, ultimately, into the process we call ‘creativity’. It was kicked off when I bumped into an acquaintance who claimed that they had no (or few) ideas compared to others.
It’s a common question for writers: ‘Where do your ideas come from?’ The answer is, almost always, ‘Everywhere and anything’. In fact, it’s difficult to stop having ideas and the real problem is being able to focus on one (or a few) to turn them into a coherent work. There si just so much around us: all you have to do is look, touch, listen, taste… and wonder.
So what happens? Even if we struggle, we all read about where ‘ideas’ come from, how they arise, and how to feed them, but what are the processes around them? How can we have more ideas? How can we turn those ideas into something tangible?
I’ve started another book this year, this time YA, but still SF. One of the things that stuck in my mind from last years helping out with the Summer Reading Challenge is just how much some of the younger readers loved the books they read – and what it was they liked about them.
It would be great, I hoped, if I could inspire that joy through a book.
It’s happened again: I’ve had to write the ending – the last scene or chapter – before I get there. Whilst I loosely plan out what’s needed, often rough out chapters and sections and use the Mythic Structure as an overall meta-structure, I occasionally write scenes out of sync with the rest of the flow. That’s fine – for me, it works. But I’m regularly writing the last scene way before I get there.
Tim's Sceap Tome 