Alasdair Watson

Well, I’m fifteen pages into Stormbreak, it’s going almost exactly to plan, and I’m taking a bit of a break. In celebration of the fact that my current rate of work, I’ll be be finished with a few days to spare, I have opened the Bushmills 12.

You have to understand – this is my favourite whiskey. It has the smoothness of the Bushmills 16, but balances the vanilla and citrus notes that mark Bushmills out a bit better than the 16, which sometimes looses them in it’s sweeter, port-influenced flavour. But with that, the 12 also has the sherry warmth and spice in the aftertaste that you find in one of my other favourites, the Glenfiddich 15.

For the last year and more, I have had an unopened bottle of the stuff. I have not opened it because whiskey doesn’t keep as well, once it’s been opened – it starts to oxidize a bit, and you loose some of the subtler notes. Not a problem for cheap, everyday stuff, but the really good stuff should be drunk in a few months.

And the reason I am more careful with my supplies of the 12 year old is that you can only buy it from the distillery shop. But I bought another bottle last time I was there, so that’s OK.

Like I said: Y’gotta treat yourself.

I’m insane. I have to be. It’s the only possible reason I could decide to do 26 Things while also doing NaNoWriMo, in a month where I have two weekends completely spoken for already.

Actually, I’m not. No, honestly. I just know how I work best at this time of year. My creative muscles wake up in the Autumn, after hibernating all summer, and they’re itching to be used properly. So I give them room to stretch.

So. Yeah. 26 Things. The gallery is here.

Halloween. I like Halloween, strange melange of religions that it is. It’s celtic, it’s voodoo, it’s christian, it’s a bit of everything. It’s a celebration of that little shiver of superstition that makes life much more interesting. I like it’s history (forexample, trick or treating’s origins in the medieval practice of going ‘Souling’ for ‘soul cakes’ given in exchange for prayers for the dead can be a marvellously macabre notion if you roll it around you head a bit) and I like it’s present, although I’m disappointed to discover that the horror stories of razorblades in apples and poisoned sweeties are just that – stories. Next year, I’ll have to lay in the ground glass and the strychnine.

Mostly, though I just like the ghoulies and the ghosties and the long-legged beasties. I like the idea of people hurring home after dark, afraid of the things like bump and slither in the shadows behind them. Because in this day and age, where everyone’s a pagan, or a thelemite, or knows some kind of ‘magician’, I like the idea that we should be frightened of these things, that they do have teeth, and that we should treat them with a bit of respect…

Andrew’s food quiz

I’m a bit lacking in ideas about what to do for this last piece of NaNoWriMo warm up. I’ve written a bit about Emma and Tim, and if I write about the opposition at this point I’ll spoil some of the surprises in the thing, ditto writing about their friends, and besides, it’s only Emma that has any, so I’m not entirely sure what to do. I did toy with the idea of putting the original first draft opening up here, but that’s not actually me writing anything, or warming up in any way. And besides, I just looked at it again, and it’s toss.

I can’t even share the idea I had on the bus this morning for a sequel to STORMBREAK called HARD RAIN that’s even more berserk and explody than the second half of this one, because the sequel has it’s genesis toward the latter half of the story.

But on the other hand, I can cheat a bit. Here, then, with the names removed, is a rough possible opening sequence to HARD RAIN. It probably won’t get used – my first ideas for opening sequences almost never do, because I tend to start writing them before I’ve got the thing fully plotted, but still…

MAN AT CONSOLE: HE’S INCOMING.

GENERAL: IS EVERYTHING READY?

ASSISTANT: YESSIR.

GENERAL: GOOD. REMEMBER, BOYS, NOTHING TO MAKE THE LITTLE BRITISH COCKSUCKER SUSPICIOUS. EVERYTHING NICE AND FRIENDLY.

MAN AT CONSOLE: SIR? I’VE GOT ANOTHER INCOMING. ON AN INTERCEPT COURSE.

GENERAL: WHAT-

The room shakes. Plaster dust falls. Console boy falls out of his seat.

GENERAL: THE FUCK WAS THAT?

MAN AT CONSOLE (pulling himself back to chair): IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, SIR. THERE’S *TWO* OF THEM.

The room shakes again. This time, a huge crack opens in the ceiling and down one of the walls. The lights flicker crazily. Sparks fly from some of the equipment.

MAN AT CONSOLE: THEY’RE FIGHTING. AT LEAST, I THINK THEY ARE.

GENERAL: SEND A LOG OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE ON THEM TO WASHINGTON, THEN SOUND THE EVAC.

I’M GOING TO WATCH.

More NaNoWriMo warm up

If you’re a designer, you’ll be familiar with the concept of a moodboard – a thing to which you stick elements that you’d like to see in the finished product, ideas and inspirations. A thing to refer to back to as the project continues, just to be sure that you’re moving on the right lines. I do much the same thing with music (as, I understand, do any number of other writers) I put together a soundtrack to listen to as I write, to keep them me playing the right emotional tune, make sure that I’m not diverting from the plan too badly. (Obviously, I have notes, and written plans, but I find the music helps just as much.)

So, here’s the soundtrack to Stormbreak.

NaNoWriMo Warm Up 2

I’m getting ready for NaNoWriMo. So, every day this week, a bit of short writing about Stormbreak, the graphic novel I’m going to be doing. I thought I’d start today with a bit of history of the beast, a little meta-text before the main event, as it were.

A couple of years back, I was working in Putney, and one afternoon in early summer, I was crossing the bridge over the Thames there in the electric closeness one finds just before one of those apocalyptic summer downpours when the sky cracks open and it rains fit to wash away the sins of man. I got indoors, sat down, and wrote a couple of short paragaphs about that feeling, for no particular reason other than to try and capture it in ink. I thought that’d be the end of it.

But something in it kicked and bounced about for a day or two, and I found myself with a few scrappy notes about a man called Tim Sussex, and images of Edinburgh’s Scott Monument shattering into chunks of lethal gothic masonry. But not a lot more. I knew I had a story I wanted to tell, but I just didn’t have all the bits. So I went scrabbling through the “ideas in development” folders I keep on my computer, and pulled bits together.

I grabbed Emma Chappell out of a file marked “Sideways Bar” my own warped take on the sort of concept Spider Robinson came up with in his ‘Callahan’s’ setting, a bar full of freaks and mutants with horrible stories and pasts thay couldn’t quite seem to escape, beneath the arches of a London railway bridge.

I found the power armour suits in a thing called “Phobos Station 13”, a sci-fi horror piece that they’d never really belonged in in the first place. For a while, I found a copper in “20 Scarlet Years” before deciding that no, he belonged in there, and cutting his part out of Stormbreak entirely, giving the story wholly to Tim and Emma.

The bad guy, like Tim, belongs in this story, and nowhere else, really, although if you squint, you can see traces of Matt from ‘Rust’ in Tim – they’re on a similar sort of journey, although Tim’s ends a lot more happily that Matt’s, which is not to say that Tim gets a happy ending…

Tomorrow: Meet Tim Sussex…

Blind Lawn Bowls. Made me think of my grandmother, former chairwoman of the Belfast Bowling Association, now forced to stop playing because of blindness, although not before noticing her game improving as her sight deteriorated. I fully intend to take up lawn bowls in my dotage, and hope to follow in her footsteps as a master the art of Zen Bowling, although I’d quite like to do it without going blind.