Gears of War... Met familie

Alweer een tijdje terug, in juli van 2013, heb ik een beschrijving gemaakt van de verschillende games die ik niet in ging ruilen in de winkel, waaronder games als Army of Two, HAWX en, zoals de titel al suggereert, Gears of War.

Destijds had ik het er over dat ik Gears of War en Gears of War 2 allebei met mijn broertje had uitgespeeld, maar dat de XBOX van de woonkamer naar mijn slaapkamer was verplaatst voor Gears of War 3 uit kwam, wat betekende dat ik dat spel in mijn eentje uit heb gespeeld. Het was nog wel leuk, maar toch miste ik wat. In juli was ik er pessimistisch over dat ik ooit nog een keer de co-op van Gears 3 uit zou spelen, maar ik had me er bij neergelegd en kon er mee leven.

Wat ik niet had verwacht, was dat mijn broertje afgelopen zondag avond, nadat ik terug kwam van mijn werk, mijn kamer binnen kwam lopen en vroeg 'zullen we morgen avond eens Gears gaan doen?'.

Natuurlijk moest ik ja zeggen. Niet alleen was het voor mij nog steeds een doel om met hem de co-op campagne uit te spelen, ook had ik al een tijdje het gevoel dat de manier waarop we over onze relatie met elkaar praatten eigenlijk net iets te veel waarheid bevatte. We zitten allebei op onze kamer onze eigen dingen te doen, maar als we samen werken of aan tafel in gesprek zijn kan je zien dat we veel dingen gemeen hebben.

Dus, maandag avond, nadat hij terug was gekomen van zijn zwemmen, pakte ik mijn lang ongebruikte tweede controller, duwde die in zijn handen, en deed Gears of War 3 in de CD-lade van de XBOX.

Gears of War 3

Nu is die jongen een PS3 gamer, dus was het voor hem weer even wennen aan de XBOX controller, die toch enige verschillen toonde met die van het apparaat van Sony. Hij was er echter binnen no-time aan gewend en rende net zo hard achter mij aan, op zoek naar de volgende lading Lambent om te beschieten.

Hij vond al snel de Longshot, waarmee hij van een afstandje heerlijk de verschillende vijanden uit kon schakelen terwijl ik meer naar voren rende en alles bezig hield, waarbij ik helaas vaak snel overrompeld werd en weer geholpen moest worden. Toen de Retro Lancer beschikbaar werd, waarmee je een rennende aanval uit kan voeren die, als je contact maakt met een vijand na een korte aanloop, alle normale vijanden in één keer uit schakelde, merkte ik pas echt dat onze stijlen zo veel van elkaar verschilden dat we elkaar nog maar amper in de weg zaten. Hij werkte van een afstandje en schoot af en toe een doelwit van me af voor ik het kon bereiken en ik zat er midden in en spieste af en toe een vijand waar hij net op aan het richten was aan mijn bajonet.

De dag daarna, dinsdag, zou hij eigenlijk met zijn scouting groep een vuurtje gaan bouwen en gezellig gaan doen. Ik had die ochtend een BHV cursus en was die middag, in verband met de problemen met het spoor, met de auto naar het buurthuis gegaan. Onderweg terug naar huis ging ik nog even langs de Albert Heijn, waar ik een bericht binnen kreeg. Het was mijn broertje, die me vroeg of ik nog plannen had die avond. In verband met het slechte weer gingen zijn scoutingplannen niet door en had hij een avondje tijd te doden.

Op maandag avond hadden we twee van de vijf acts afgerond, we zouden net terug gaan naar Anvil Gate toen we besloten om er een einde aan te breien. Ik moest de volgende ochtend immers naar die eerder genoemde BHV cursus en moest er weer vroeg voor op. Dinsdag had mijn broertje duidelijk de smaak te pakken, want we rondden het spel meteen af, waarbij we tot in de kleine uurtjes door zijn gegaan. Tegen het einde hadden we een hoop lol en een hoop geschiet er op zitten. We waren allebei een paar keer de reden van een reload geweest. We hadden op elkaar gescholden, we hadden samen gelachen om stommiteiten.

Het was fantastisch.

Net, na het eten, vroeg hij of we verder konden gaan met Gears of War: Judgement. Natuurlijk zei ik ja.

Solliciteren

Na een periode van stilte besluit ik dan toch maar weer eens aan de slag te gaan met dat blogje van mij. Het is nu bijna negen maanden geleden dat ik het laatste verhaaltje heb geschreven, over een lading boeken die ik zelf had gelezen, maar recentelijk werd het mij toch maar weer aangeraden om weer eens te beginnen.

Sinds april ben ik aan het solliciteren om eens een keer de echte wereld in te kunnen gaan. Hiervoor heb ik een training gevolgd en ben ik naar verschillende lezingen en workshops gegaan van mensen die er verstand over hebben. Bij twee van deze workshops was een man aanwezig die heel lang bij de ING had gewerkt als Web Editor en Content Manager, naast vrijwilligerswerk bij de plaatselijke tak van RTV als redacteur. Allemaal fantastische dingen, waarvan ik weet dat het voor mij geen straf zou zijn als ik daar ook mijn carrière in zou kunnen maken.

We raakten in gesprek - hoe had ik anders al deze dingen over hem kunnen weten - en hij raadde mij aan om een portfolio op te bouwen. Ik zei hem dat ik wel een blogje had, maar dat het al enkele keren in ernstig verval was geraakt. Hij raadde me aan om gewoon weer te beginnen met schrijven en me geen zorgen te gaan maken dat ik schrijf over wat mensen interessant vinden, maar dat ik schrijf over dingen die mij bezig houden.

Dat deed me denken aan het blog dat mijn vader een lange tijd had onderhouden, Middelpunten. Hij was er mee begonnen om te schrijven over zijn tocht naar de verschillende middelpunten van Nederland, maar was vervolgens verder gegaan met vertellen over de verschillende dingen die hem gebeurden en die hem bezig hielden. Hier kwam vaak een heleboel onderzoek bij te pas, omdat hij een hekel heeft aan incorrecte informatie geven, dus was vaak te zien hoe hij peinzend achter zijn computer zat, met boeken voor zijn neus en hele verhalen uitgeschreven op kladblaadjes met schetsen en tekeningen er naast. Het was indrukwekkend om te zien, vooral als je keek naar de verhalen die er soms uit kwamen rollen over, bijvoorbeeld, de Watersnoodramp, die zijn vader - mijn opa, dus - had meegemaakt.

Ik had nooit nagedacht over het maken van een portfolio voor mijn sollicitaties. Volgens mij is dit blog wel ooit zo begonnen, omdat ik graag als collumnist wilde gaan werken en ik wilde oefenen in het schrijven van teksten, maar dat doel is verloren gegaan na de eerste grote stilte. Met dat in het achterhoofd heb ik vandaag dan toch weer een app gedownload voor mijn Microsoft Surface - want waarom zou je nog je browser gebruiken, tegenwoordig? - en ben ik begonnen met tikken terwijl mijn moeder en haar vriendin in de woonkamer aan het knutselen waren.

Gezellig!

Reading the 'Age of...' books

So, I've allowed a silence to fall for a couple of months again. I guess I never really felt like writing, especially after the writing extravaganza that was NaNoWriMo, which tired me out on the creative side quite a bit. Trust me when I say that I did feel the occasional pang of guilt for not writing about things like the fact that I started playing League of Legends (got bullied into it by my friends), or that I acquired myself a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 and have to admit that I don't see why people hate Windows 8 so badly.

After reading my way through 'Age of Godpunk', though, I suddenly felt the urge to start writing again. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I'm reading again, or the fact that I'm finally attending university again (I only really read while in transit, so I basically only read while I'm going to and from university, so the two really go hand in hand). It doesn't really matter, though, all that matters is the fact that I finally felt like writing again.

I found the 'Age of...' series, as it is written by James Lovegrove, the very first time I entered one of the two American Book Centers we have in the Netherlands. It was while I was waiting for a lecture to start, and the store happened to be across the street from the lecture hall.
I don't really remember what the lecture was about, but it's not really important to the story I want to tell.
In the store I saw three books of the series standing side by side, their covers pointed outwards instead of only the books being arranged side-by-side with the backsides facing out. The titles were 'Age of Ra', 'Age of Zeus', and 'Age of Odin', and I immediately went back to my youth and the hours of time I wasted on 'Age of Mythology' and its expansion, 'The Titans'. I remembered that I enjoyed playing the Norse the most while playing the game, so I picked up 'Age of Odin' first and made myself ready to read it.
Can you imagine my horror when I realized that 'Odin' was actually the third in the series?

Now, I have to admit that it's a little silly of me, but I'm very anal about reading books in the right order. I didn't know that the books could be read completely out of order back then, so I made it a point to put the book down and head back to buy 'Ra' and 'Zeus' as well and to read these two first. I was pretty much committed by then, so I picked up 'Age of Ra' and started reading, this time without putting it down after the first couple of pages.
Now, I'm going to go through the books (which are quite a few by now), and I hate typing 'spoiler warning' or 'spoiler alert' while talking about a book, so consider yourself warned. I won't spoil a lot, but... Yeah, consider yourself warned.

'Age of Ra' was, as I recall, a pretty bleak book that built itself on an interesting concept. Basically, the Egyptian pantheon had had it with the shit of the world roughly hundred years before the story of the book and started to take over. They killed the other gods (ALL of them) and divided the world amongst themselves by countries. The world map as we know it is mostly unchanged, but the technology and people are changed. Church and state are definitely no longer separated, nor are army and state, and the god that rules over a given country can actually send its own power down in a form that can be captured and stored for later usage in weapons and vehicles called 'Ba'.
Now, anyone who knows anything about the Egyptian pantheon knows that its mythology is filled with backstabbing, infighting, incest, and intrigue. This is translated by letting the book alternate between Ra, the Sun God, as he deals with the hijinks of his fellow gods, and David Westwynter, a British soldier. As the tensions between the gods start to build up, it also builds up between the countries that represent the respective gods as the rulers start to be influenced by the gods.
After an establishing fight, though, during which the main story twist is introduced, Wstwynter ends up in 'Freegypt', this world's Egypt, which is, ironically enough, the only state that makes it a point to remain aggressively atheist in a world enthralled by the gods and the knowledge that they are very real. These Freegyptians aren't atheist in the way that they don't believe there are gods, but they are atheists in the way that they actively wish for the gods to pack up and get the hell out of their world.
Which turns out to culminate in a Freegyptian masked man that is actively spurring everyone on to take up arms and deal with the gods, which, to a British soldier, is of course a big problem.
I don't really recall how the story went on after that. It had something to do with the protagonist's brother showing up and there was some kind of tacked-on love story. I do remember letting one of my university friends borrow it, and I got it returned to me with the simple comment of 'that's dark and depressing', which I can't really disagree with.

'Age of Zeus' was, comparatively, a lot brighter and more lighthearted than 'Age of Ra'. When I opened it up, after having enjoyed the world of 'Age of Ra', I was  expecting the same kind of twist but just with the Greek pantheon instead of the Egyptian. That would have meant a lot of collumns and toga's, maybe some old school modern jousting, and a more totalitarian way of ruling the world.
If that had been the case, I don't think it would have been as enjoyable to read as it had been. It would've been pretty dry, to be fair, because the concept had been explored pretty thoroughly in 'Age of Ra'.
In 'Age of Zeus', though, there is a completely different story going around. The gods of the Greek pantheon, together with the monsters of their myths, showed up in the world about ten years before the events of the book. They, much like the Egyptians in 'Ra', were tired of humanity's shit and started to clean up the world, the Chicago way. Everyone that opposed them got killed and criminals were punished in the old Greek style. Rapists got their naughty bits cut off, thieves lost their hands, things like that.
A big point of the story is the fact that, to make an example, the gods destroyed a single town that was opposing them. After that they got pretty much free reign and could do what they wanted, when they wanted. The many monsters spread out over the world in order to enforce order while the gods got drunk and had fun. I recall an early passage about a drunken Hercules running around on a random destruction spree, because he's apparently a very angry drunk.
The protagonist is Samantha Akehurst, a policewoman who gets invited to join a crack commando squad of international badasses that train to run around and take names in powered armor while listening to the names of the Titans and start systematically taking out the Greek monsters and, after that, the gods themselves.
I remember that the story was a lot more character-driven than 'Age of Ra', which was a lot more focused on military combat and skirmishes. There were the twelve commando's and the man that organized them, which meant that there was a lot of character interaction that really helped you to get a feeling for the different characters. As opposed to Westwynter, I actually felt like Akehurst was an actual person that had plenty of faults and plenty of reasons for the things that she does. The other characters, which I don't really remember because it has been a while, all had personality and I remember actually feeling a little crestfallen with every casualty.
What I remember the most fondly was how the group, eventually, dealt with Hermes. The man, who had been fighting the group of power armored badasses with his speed and caduceus, actually grabs one of the group and starts teleporting her around the place. It's described that she basically gets hit in the head with a sledgehammer with every jump, but the 'eyes' of the reader are back at the home base, where the rest of the group can only really listen and view the camera feed, until there is an explosion and the feed turns into static.
You find out later on that the woman that was being teleported around by Hermes had taken a grenade - described to be more like a miniature nuke in power - and pulled the pin, exploding herself together with Hermes.
I had to put the book down after that.
There was a twist that I don't want to spoil, mostly because it puts the actions of some of the major characters in a completely different light, but I know that I thought it was a little weak, afterwards. That was a bit of a shame, though.

After reading through both 'Ra' and 'Zeus', you can probably imagine that I was quite stoked to finally get to read 'Age of Odin'. It had been the original book and, quite frankly, it had been staring at me for a while from my book shelf for a while by then. Quite literally, as you can probably imagine from the book cover up there. By then, I had realized that the books didn't have to be read in order, but I wasn't sorry for buying the other two books, because they had been pretty good reads.
This meant that the bar had been placed pretty high for 'Age of Odin', mostly because I was (and still am) a sucker for military fiction and both 'Age of Ra' and 'Age of Zeus' had provided me with that plentiful.
The book started off pretty roughly, because it was the first of three books to be written from the first person perspective. I know I write my own stories from a third person perspective that is pretty much fixed on the back of the protagonist, which means the reader still doesn't know more than the protagonist knows and is, quite frankly, basically the same, but for some reason the use of the word 'I' outside of the spoken text doesn't sit well with me.
It also introduced a pretty extensive back story, for as far as that's possible with a chapter's worth of dialogue, between the main character, Gideon Coxall, and the person that was sitting next to him in the car. After the first chapter, though, that character is nowhere to be seen for the rest of the book, until the very last chapter, and I won't spoil exactly under which circumstances the two characters split up.
What happens, though, is that Coxall stumbles across a man that claims to be Odin and, for some reason, manages to convince Coxall (try saying that quickly three times and not start hearing 'cocks all') to stay with him and help fight against the oncoming Ragnarok.
When I realized that Ragnarok was going to be a big part of the story, I wished that I had ever taken the time to research the actual Norse mythology besides the stories that I was shown during the 'Age of Mythology' games I had played. All I knew was that it was, basically, the end of times, which still didn't mean all that much to me, as there are a lot of ends of times and I didn't know the particulars of this one.
Anyway, there are a lot of characters from the Norse mythology introduced. The first Thor movie came out after this book, and I actually recognized a number of them from the book, which I count as a good thing. Some of the mythology was actually explained, like when there was a Chinook helicopter that everyone called 'Sleipnir', the eight-legged, flying horse that was gifted to Odin by Loki, which was explained in full after the name was dropped. It almost felt like a joke, as if the book was poking a little bit of fun on the original mythology.
Everything taken together, though, the book was a bit of a disappointment. Every time I got the feeling the book went to a major battle or skirmish, it burned out to a sizzle. There was a lot of tension building that eventually deflated with nothing, or something quite minor, happening, and I quite disliked it, to be honest.

After finishing off these three books, I did some additional research. I know that a writer never stops writing, unless they burn out or experience a writer's block, so I Googled James Lovegrove and immediately found his website. Back then, only the three books I had already read were up there, so I was satisfied with the fact that I had finished yet another series.
I kept frequenting the American Book Center, though. I had started reading the 'Horus Heresy' books, after playing 'Warhammer 40.000: Space Marine' and taking a liking to the lore of the '40K' series. I read all of the TVTropes page, of both '40K' and the 'Horus Heresy', and had decided that I was ready to start reading the series. As such, I was very happy to find out that my ABC actually stocked basically all of the 'Heresy' books and I returned regularly as I polished off book after book.
But, every time I walked by, I threw a loving look at the three 'Age of...' books as I walked by. It had grown to be a bit of a ritual, checking up on the books, until I suddenly saw that a fourth book had joined the three.

I was a little nervous about 'Age of Aztec', because I didn't have an idea of what the Aztec culture was all about. I had a basic knowledge of the Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythologies, but that was all because of 'Age of Mythology' and because those three had all been pretty big during my youth. I was aware of the Aztecian mythology like you are aware of a light pole in the streets. I was aware of the fact that it existed, but I didn't know all that much about it.
It didn't take me long to realize that, just like in 'Age of Odin' and the books before that, the book would probably teach me a thing or two about the Aztec culture and the mythology that belonged to it. It really didn't disappoint.
I have to say that this book was released before the big '21-12-2012', because it actually played a pretty big role in the story despite being a Mayan thing. The date is, basically, considered to be one month after the new year, and I won't say anything else about this because of spoilers.
For the first time in the series, the book follows two main characters, but neither of them are gods. One of them is Mal Vaughn, a police detective who is on the trail of 'The Conquistador', a masked vigilante that is systematically killing off the Aztecian religious leaders all over the world. The other one is Stuart Reston, said vigilante, and he actively opposes the oppressive, cruel Aztec culture that rules the world.
What became clear to me immediately, or, after the first couple of chapters, was that the Aztec culture was a harsh, cruel one. Human sacrifice wasn't only a regular event, being chosen to be a sacrifice was actually an honor that was supposed to be applauded instead of dreaded. The way it was treated didn't really matter, though, because someone was still dead by the end of the ritual.
What disturbed me the most about the book, though, was the fact that most of the barbaric rituals were actually treated as public events. At some point, Vaughn's boss is discredited and shamed and, apparently, the only reasonable way to deal with this is a public execution. Said execution isn't done quickly, though, as Vaughn is forced to fight her boss, where he is armed with a feather attached to a stick and she is given a stick with numberous nails and blades attached to it. The fight is made a big point in the story, where important information is given, but it still made me feel a little sick about the way someone was basically told 'you are going to die, but we are going to give you the illusion of a chance'.
The end of the book was also a surprise to me. By that time, it had turned out that the 'gods' everyone was worshipping were actually real, but they weren't actually gods. They turned out to be sufficiently advanced aliens that had visited the Aztecs first and had given them the chance to grow out to be the dominant religion on Earth to use them as guinea pigs. In 'Age of Zeus' the gods weren't actually gods, and in 'Age of Odin' their origin was kept quite ambiguous, but this time the gods were actually an outside force that was actively forcing itself on the world, which felt very scientology to me, but I decided to ignore it in favor of the ending. This book was actually the first one to feature an apocalyptic ending with the end of the world ensured before the last page. 'Age of Aztec' made it very clear that there was no way that there would be a sequel to this book, just like 'Age of Zeus' did. 'Age of Ra' and 'Age of Odin' could easily be followed by a sequel where things would be made clearer, but 'Age of Aztec' left absolutely no avenues open, which is something I can respect.

Finding out that 'Age of Aztec' had been released while I wasn't looking made me go back to the internet and research mister Lovegrove again to see if I had missed more books. As it turned out, I did, because a story called 'Age of Anansi' had been released simultaneously with 'Age of Aztec'. It took me a lot of research and fruitless searching before I realized that 'Age of Anansi' was actuall a novella that hadn't been released in print. It was only available as an e-book, and I didn't have an e-reader, nor a smartphone or other device that was able to read e-books, so I decided to drop it and accept that the 'Age of Anansi' story would never be available to me.

It took a couple of months, maybe a year, but I started to keep track of James Lovegrove. I didn't check his website daily like I do with certain webcomics, but I returned to it every now and then in order to get an update and see if anything had been released while the world kept turning. It usually didn't really give me any kind of news, but I eventually got the news that a new 'Age of...' book had been released. In this case, it had been 'Age of Voodoo', which had been far from what I had been speculating. I had hoped Lovegrove would go further east, taking Japanese or Chinese lore for his next book, but he had decided on a mythology that I had absolutely no knowledge of.
Which was both a surprise and a delight.
I like to be surprised like this, with both a book and a thing that I hadn't expected, so I once again got my hands on it as quickly as I could and started to dig in.
The book starts out with the main character, Lex Dove, diffusing a situation with a couple of rowdy characters in a bar, which sets the tone for the complete rest of the book. You see, Dove used to be a wetworker who retired some time ago, and he's not afraid to show off his skillset and, for some reason, he's still carrying a gun everywhere he goes. Take with that the fact that his old employers apparently still have his number, and you've got the reason for why the main character is throwing himself at danger while other people join him. It includes, once again, a love interest, but also a number of SEALs, which created an interesting dynamic. The SEALs openly distrust Dove, of whom they know just about next to nothing, while Dove does his best to hide his past from them and the love interest.
The twist is that the love interest is actually a voodoo lady, who has some toys that she uses with some success against people like rapists and the enemies they are trying to fight, which end up to be 'Zuvembies', or Voodoo Zombies.
That is the gripe I have with this book. It actually shows how the main antagonist talks with the people around him while he's obviously setting them up for a betrayal, and everything about him screams 'Hidden Agenda!', but the whole book appears to revolve around the fact that everyone around him is way too blind to actually see it.
The zuvembies themselves, though, are some of the best zombies I've seen portrayed in books up until now. Lovegrove actually took the time to try and come up with a scientific explanation for the zuvembies, besides 'voodoo happened', which means that I felt like it was a plausible danger while reading the book. The zuvembies also showed the immense stamina and difficulty to be killed, including headshots, which felt novel after reading books like World War Z. They also felt sufficiently savage, what with the descriptions of people getting ripped apart while screaming and such.

I later discovered that another novella had been released next to 'Age of Voodoo'. It was called 'Age of Satan' and was, just like 'Age of Anansi', an e-book only release. I had already decided that I would probably never get to read the e-books, something I had resigned myself to, but I have to admit that it felt a bit like a shame.
Keeping track of the website of Lovegrove, though, soon brought me an update that made my heart jump a bit. He was going to release both 'Age of Anansi' and 'Age of Satan' together with a new novella called 'Age of Gaia' in a compilation that would be titled 'Age of Godpunk'. I actually pre-ordered this book from my local online retailer and was a bit disappointed that I was smack-dab in the middle of a different series ('Innocent Mage' and 'Awakened Mage', by Karen Miller) that I first wanted to finish reading before I started that off.
Unfortunately once more, I finished my last class with some book to spare in 'Awakened Mage', which meant that I polished that one off at home and then decided to keep 'Age of Godpunk' waiting until my class started again, in February.

I finished it by now, though, and I have to say that the three novella's contained in 'Age of Godpunk' are three completely different beasts that are written in wildly different styles.
'Age of Anansi' was written, once again, in the dreaded first person, but I powered through it while I tried to ignore the fact that it wasn't exactly a military novel. 'Anansi' is the first story to deal with gods from different pantheons, as Anansi himself is the trickster spider god of Western Africa and wants to win an annual get-together of trickster gods playing tricks on each other. Dion Yeboah, a lawyer by trade, is recruited to function as Anansi's avatar for this, and it quickly becomes clear that the tricks go from playful ('I put pee in your drink' and 'I put rotten flesh in your AC unit') to dangerous (a razor embedded in a piece of soap, or lining someone's cigarettes with LSD), to downright deadly. The ending was a bit weak, though, as it relied on Yeboah acting completely out of character when compared to the rest of the story, which was a shame.
'Age of Satan' was, thankfully, back to the third person and was actually the first one to span the complete story of Guy Lucas, from his early years being bullied all the way up to his winter years. In order to stop the bullies, Lucas gets pulled into performing an amateurish black mass, selling his soul to Satan to reach his goal.
Cue the next half of the story telling about different encounters with the Devil, or, as is explained later on, what Lucas perceives are encounters with the devil. Especially near the end, the story gets a strongly atheistic and actually starts to actively glorify atheism and the 'do unto others as they do to you' creed as the answer to the world's problems. Though it was a delightfully optimistic end, after the end of 'Anansi', I had to feel a little sceptical as I polished the story off.
'Age of Gaia', as the last story and the most recent story, which had been written just for the compilation, had the tough job of making me feel good about this book. 'Age of Anansi' was funny, but didn't really endear me. 'Age of Satan' gave me a pretty epic story with twists and turns, but it left me sceptical. It was all up to Barnaby Pollard, which I still think is a strange name, and Lydia Laidlaw to make this book up for me.
It started out innocent enough, with the extremely rich Pollard, CEO of a company that actively exploits the Earth's natural resources, working on getting some environmentalists off his back by taking them on a tour across the world. After that, though, it quickly turned into a romance between Pollard and Laidlaw that was, to my surprise, very graphic an pornographically described. When Lovegrove actually started to describe the sex I started to feel a bit uncomfortable, considering the fact that I was reading in the train and didn't really want someone to read that kind of thing over my shoulder... The twist being, of course, that Laidlaw was the personification of Gaia, the world, and the way Pollard treats her immediately reflects on the way the world treats him and his company. It wasn't a pretty ending.
All in all, the compilation was a fun thing, but none of the stories really left a positive imprint on me. It felt a lot like the end of 'Age of Aztec', though we aren't talking about a scale like that ending. It just left me with a bit of disappointment in the back of my head.

Well, that was quite the story... Props if you read it all. My research has already shown me that there is going to be yet another 'Age of...' book, this one called 'Age of Shiva', which is yet another culture and pantheon that I know next to nothing about. Considering the fact that 'Shiva' is set to be released in april this year, I know that I have a bit of time to research it all...
I just hope to be able to get back to writing again!

Writing 5K

So, in the past, I mentioned the number of words I write daily when it is NaNoWriMo time. In case you missed all those times, it is 5.000 words, which is about three times the recommended daily amount for NaNoWriMo in order to finish the challenge on time.

I also said I was a bit of an overachiever, so don't look at me like that.

When I don't distract myself and find myself to be 'in the zone', as many would call it, I manage to type roughly 1.000 words per 30 minutes. That doesn't mean these 1.000 words are pure gold, free of typo's, or even coherent (okay, they are pretty much coherent), but these 1.000 words have appeared in my word .doc and are counting towards the wordcount.
The moment I start distracting myself, though, the speed plummets. If I have something running on the side, like a series, or a movie, I'm already happy if I reach a thousand words in an hour, which means that I'm doubling the time I'm spending on the writing process for the day.
The reason that I choose to have this blatant distraction running beside my word document, though, probably has to do with the fact that I'm feeling like I don't have the inspiration to write that day. I force myself to write, though, as I need those 5K to keep my story going and even when I feel like I'm not going to produce much, there is the chance that, whatever I'm writing, could actually be pure gold.
What I then find, is that five thousand words actually isn't that much, depending on what is happening at the moment. For example, and this is a spoiler for Hangman's Daughter, somewhere in the story is a fight that takes roughly 2.500 words to actually finish up a pretty important issue that ran through most of the story. There's barely any dialogue, but there's a lot of action that, in my mind's eye, lasted for roughly two or three minutes. The same goes up for dialogues or exposition, which can quickly get out of hand and actually start taking up more words than I had ever thought I would need for them. Suddenly, I have reached five thousand words and still haven't reached that point in the story that I had promised myself I would be at by then.

A result of this is that I start debating with myself whether I want to start writing more words per day, but then I find that there are some problems that are hard to overcome. The five thousand words are barely a problem on good days, but can take all day when I'm having a bad day. Writing more words per day, say, 7.500 instead of  5.000, would actually be a way to expand my stories and allow myself to really expand some things that I cut short this year, but it would also require me to spend another hour and a half to write on a good day. That would be two and a half hours of extra writing on a bad day, when I only type a thousand words per hour. That would mean that I'd actually be spending almost a full working day on simply writing, something I doubt I would be able to keep up next to a fulltime job.

So, there are a lot of pros to the five thousand words, but there is also the huge con that it usually doesn't bring me as much words as I could need on a day. It's a difficult thing to weigh, and I only cross over the 5.000 when I'm either in a hurry to finish the book on the last day, am incredibly inspired and actually want to keep writing despite the fact that I'm no longer forcing myself, or if I actually lose track of the amount of words I've written. That last one has become hard with me compulsively checking the word count of the novel every ten minutes or so, only broken when I've reached the before-mentioned 'zone' and forget all about it.
That doesn't happen all that much, though.

So, I think that, when the time comes around in a year and it is time to write again, I won't be writing more than five thousand words per day. It's a shame, but it keeps me sane...

November Madness

Every year in November, two events happen that are important to me and tend to control the better part of my life for the duration of the month. Everything I want to do has to be weighed and measured, and it has to be decided if the things that I want to do are worth the amount of time I will sacrifice for it.

One of the two things is Movember, an effort to increase cancer awareness and fight preventable cancer deaths. It requires that you don’t shave your moustache for a month, but many people (including me) actually use it as an excuse not to shave at all and include a beard, which is officially breaking the rules, but what the hey, right? It’s for a good cause.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort, though, so it isn’t the thing that causes me to think about each and every other pastime that came across me.

No, the reason that everything has to be weighed and every decision needs to be made with the utmost care is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, that challenges people from around the world to write a 50.000 word novel in November. It means that, every day, the people that decided to accept the challenge are working hard and throwing quality in the wind (or not) in order to write at least 1.666 words and make sure that they have a word document containing at least 50.000 words by midnight, November 30.

Now, it has to be stated that I am a bit of an overachiever when it comes to things like this.

Back in 2010, I first joined the challenge and wrote my first book, Bright Dawn, a piece of military fiction focusing on four fighter pilots, successfully finishing the novel and ending up with 63.584 words. I decided to send the book to a print-on-demand publisher, and it’s been standing in my bookcase ever since. I remember that I had only decided to join about ten days before the challenge started, because that was when I heard about it, so I had worked with minimal preparation and maximal time wasting plots, but it had worked out and I came out with a good feeling.

So good, in fact, that I didn’t waste time and used the whole of December (and a good part of my first Moleskine notebook) on planning out the book for the year after that.

It ended up to be Physokinetic, which was a fantasy adventure that ended up getting way out of hand as I started introducing subplots and characters that turned out to be way more important than I could ever have planned. I like it when that kind of things happen, because it usually turns out to be the best writing I do and gives me more material to close inconvenient plot holes with. Physokinetic ended up with 91.477 words, but was actually finished with it by day 18, because I decided that 1.666 words per day was actually a little light. I could write that amount of words in less than an hour, and I actually enjoyed the writing, so I decided to write at least 5.000 words per day and, like that, finish a chapter each day.

In 2012, the fateful year that would bring the end of the world (or, as it turned out, not), I decided to write an indirect sequel to Physokinetic. Tamer would be in the same world as Physokinetic, dealing with the problems that had been caused by the ending of Physokinetic, but it would feature a new main character and a whole slew of different sub-characters that all had their own agendas and reasons to be. It, too, quickly got out of hand as I realized about halfway through that I hadn’t even prepared an villain, let alone an ending, but thankfully, my writing got away from me again and allowed me to fix that problem in a sudden flash of inspiration. It even allowed me to get some characters from Physokinetic back for that nostalgic thrill.

In the end, Tamer was 149.261 words long. I had reached my goal of 5.000 words almost every day, which had been a huge achievement for me.

This year, with the world still intact and another NaNoWriMo coming around, I decided to do the same as I did in 2012 and wrote an indirect sequel to Tamer and, with that, Physokinetic. It would be titled Hangman’s Daughter, and I got the first inspiration somewhere around January, when it started to dawn on me that I actually needed to prepare again. So I started writing notes when the inspiration for the new story came to me, quickly filling page after page of the little A6-notebook that I was carrying around for exactly that purpose.

At some point, though, and I imagine this being somewhere halfway through April or May, the inspiration stopped when I realized that I had hit a wall that I didn’t know how to write myself out of. I decided to put it all down while I worked on the second sequel to Bright Dawn, titled Flying Light, but it ended up in a massive writer’s block that made me stop writing anything for the rest of the year.
This blog was a first move to actually get out of that block in a long time.
Skip to halfway through October, when the jitters about November coming up started to creep up in my mind and I started to look back to my notes. I started typing them out, carefully copying the many handwritten pages to my computer, all the time marvelling at the amount of writing I had done, and eventually hitting the point where I had stopped. I realized that I still didn’t know how to get out of that situation, but re-reading everything that I had prepared meant that I had an inkling of an idea of how I could solve it and work on after that point.
I never took the trouble of actually working it out.
It turned out that the point where I had broken down and stopped taking notes happened on day 28, which meant that I had notes to guide me for the better part of the challenge (of course I kept adding characters and plots as they came to me, often making for better plot than the things that I had prepared), but the last three days were filled with improvisation. Thankfully, I had managed to come up with a solution for my problem, but it was a close shave.

In the end, Hangman’s Daughter counted 158.366 words. It beat all other stories, and it was quite the ride. I only spent 1 day without writing, because I was playing an awesome game of D&D that day, and I spent the next two days repairing that oversight. Those two days were probably the most exhausting of the whole ordeal.

I got through it, though, so I got this neat little winner’s badge, which I will proudly display on the bottom of this page.

Now I need to start thinking about 2014, because I think I introduced enough chaos in this world, by now…

I win!

Miniature Business and Updates

By at the end of August, I decided to get back in the business of the hobby that had started all the way back in August 2012. Looking at Kickstarters and the way they could get me cool stuff was and, admittedly selfish, thing that I had really grown to love and enjoy, so every once in a while I threw a look around to see if there was anything interesting to see.
Being very much into the Dungeons and Dragons business, my eye found the Kickstarter for an interesting, lovecraftian model called the QU-SH-UG. Though the name didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it looked pretty awesome, which meant that I decided to keep my eye on it, think about it, and kept looking at the model and the updates for a while.

I never really decide to fund a Kickstarter immediately. There is, after all, always the chance that different things might come into play that will ruin the whole thing for me, like a loss of interest or the fact that I quite frankly, don’t have the money to pay for the thing when it finally ends and the credit card bill rolls in. It means that I’ll have to weigh a lot of pros and cons while deciding on whether or not I’m going to sink any kind of money into the thing at all.

In the end, though, I decided that, yes, it was quite worth the money. It was a high-quality model that would require quite a lot of experience before I would ever allow myself to touch it, but it looked pretty damn amazing, so I went for it.

Long story short, after quite a bit of waiting, as is part of the Kickstarter experience, this cute little box came in around the middle of October that held two Ziploc bags, each of them holding a part of what I had ordered as part of the Kickstarter: one of them held the actual QU-SH-UG and its awesome, amazing tentacles that belonged to it, and the other held six cultists that belonged right next to it and right with it.

To the left: the QU-SH-UG. To the right: the cultists.

 

Back when I saw the Kickstarter, I realized that this thing was an amazing monster. I had some amazing ideas considering the thing and the different parts of its body, and the cultists made an excellent addition to it for multiple ideas I had.
Now, my dungeon mastering days have ground to a halt for the moment, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get the miniatures and wait for the moment to actually start using them again. The ideas are there…

Now, about the other thing. I realize I haven’t written very regular in the past month. This was partly because of a lack of inspiration and a lack of will to write, which can hit everyone at some point, I guess.

On the other side of the coin, though, was the little event called NaNoWriMo that would start on the first of November and would consume my life for the month. I remember preparing for a good part of December 2012 and January 2013 for the story that I would write, but then it all ground to a halt as I met a roadblock that I couldn’t quite pass just yet.
In October, when the big moment was about to come, I returned to the preparations. I started typing out my notes, hoping to find a way to deal with the problem I had encountered, which took a lot longer than I had expected as I realized that I had made a lot more notes than I had remembered in my little book. Thinking, I eventually found a thing that could deal with my problem, so I progressed on after that…
And then it was November. I hadn’t taken a lot of my time out of my daily schedule to write anything other than my story, and as of today, I’ve crossed into the 100.000 words, doubling the word goal at day nineteen.
That means it’s going strong, the story is going on at a pace that makes it quite possible to beat the word count of last year (149.261). It also means that I won’t be able to write for this blog a little longer, though, as the two writing things really can’t compete when it comes down to the adventure that NaNoWriMo is…

Breaking things

When going to camp with your scouts, all kinds of things can happen to you. You can fall and break something, you can end up in a ditch, you can become the target of some vicious pranks, or you can drop your phone and crack the screen.

A lot of smartphones, lately, seem to have a very weak screen. I see a lot of people walking around with a huge crack in their iPhone, scratches all around, and all that kind of things. When I got my phone, together with a contract with my provider, I immediately said I wanted to insure the phone in case something bad happens to it that wouldn’t be covered by the store guarantee. It seemed like a legit thing to do at the time.

So, when I went to scouting camp, I dropped my phone on a concrete floor. The result was a huge crack in the screen, which was very much made of glass, and which made handling the phone more than a little uncomfortable. Besides the fact that my fingers kept getting stuck behind the little ridges that were created, I was also very much afraid of cutting myself on the undoubtedly sharp edges that could get uncovered at any unlucky moment. The screen definitely had to be fixed.
Now, I wasn’t quite capable of returning to the store with the broken phone during the camp. I had some responsibilities there while walking around that required me to be available to know what time it is, and people would also need to be able to communicate with me over distance. The phone was one of the things I absolutely couldn’t miss.

So, I immediately went to the store the Monday after camp and went to the repair desk. I showed the guy the phone, the crack, told him the make, and awaited the verdict. He basically told me that they would have to order a new screen and then affix it, which I was fine with. The phone still worked, I was just afraid of a few cuts, so I was willing to wait a few days.

Then he told me that he wasn’t able to order a new screen and that he’d have to send it out to their (external) fixing service. I agreed, a little reluctantly, because he told me it’d take them ten business days to fix the phone, but it was either that or not fixing the broken phone, so I chose the lesser of two evils.

 

I was insured, after all…

The next day, I received a pricing from the company that was going to fix my phone. Still, I wasn’t expecting anything to go wrong, because I hadn’t paid off the own risk part of my insurance. I knew there were going to be some costs.
I hadn’t expected them to send me the pricing for the full repair, so I sent an e-mail to the contact address that was provided with the pricing mail, asking them to explain why my insurance wasn’t calculated into the price. I received an automated ‘we’ve got your mail, and answer it when we feel like it’ message and started the waiting game.

After four days, I figured I had waited for about long enough. I returned to the store, where the same guy as the last time was dealing with the repair booth. I asked my question to him, and he told me that I should have collected a claim number from my insurance before I let him send out the phone. He let me call the insurance from the store phone and I had the insurance generate a claim number, but they told me that they would have to validate my claim by human hands before I could get the number, which would take about two business days.
I found it a little strange that I had to do that before handing out the phone, considering the fact that having to wait two days for the insurance slows the service down considerably. What I was also wondering was why this wasn’t added automatically, because I had purchased the insurance from the provider itself. It would’ve been a lot more convenient, at least.

I actually received the claim number from the insurance the next day, Saturday, and I finally got an answer to my first question from the repair company that evening telling me what I had already learned from the store. I immediately replied the claim number towards them and expected them to react with a little haste.

So, fast-forward to Thursday.

I had been without a phone for nearly two weeks. A lot of things happen through my phone for me. All my Google accounts required verification in two steps, which made it impossible for me to log in to anything that belonged to Google. My finances were stopped dead, because I couldn’t transfer money without the codes that were sent to my mobile phone by my bank. Communication with my fellow scouting leaders had ground to a halt, because they preferred WhatsApp over e-mail.
Thankfully, I was able to disable the verification in two steps after a lengthy process with Google that required me to wait four days, so I could continue my school work more or less unhindered, but the financial and communication things were still a bit of an issue. I realized that I could go back to the store again and see if I could get a replacement phone, which would at least get me back in the communication again.

Well, no such luck. At the store, they told me that I didn’t have a replacement option in my plan, which would cost me an additional €2,50 per month. Also, I couldn’t get a replacement at that time, because it was only possible to have a replacement phone delivered to them by the same courier that would pick up the phone. The best they could do was give me a new SIM card and I would buy a new, cheap phone that would help me along until my phone was repaired.

Now, I still had my old SIM card, I had taken it out of my phone before I handed it in, but it was one of the new, smaller SIM cards, so it didn’t fit in my old smartphone, which still uses the old, larger SIM cards. This new card I was handed, though, was a large one that could be punched out to become a smaller one. I immediately pushed it into my old phone, which I had been using as a glorified MP3-player up until then, and it worked, so now I have my previous phone back while waiting for the repairs to complete.

When I got back, I wrote a complaint about the lack of information I had been receiving during the process that made me run around and get frustrated on the company’s facebook page, which garnered me a reaction from someone who knew someone who used to work for the repair company that my provider had sent my phone to and which took more than its time to answer my questions. That person linked me a forum that had customer reviews from the repair company, and basically, it scared the living shit out of me. A lot of complaints about machines disappearing, claims made by the company that the owner had given them permission to recycle their phone, and a lot of unbased claims of water damage.

 

It kind of makes me afraid of how my phone will be returned to me…