New Glasses for Painting

I have some new glasses for painting with.  Designed to give me ultra close-up vision, which work up to a point, but I'm getting old and it is still hard to see as well as I use to. At this rate I'll be up-scaling to 30mm, or whatever 25mm is called nowadays? 

As you can see above I've started works on some more Scope Dogs, and below some Diving Beetles from VOTOMS so that I have some figures to play Heavy Gear Blitz with.

I have played a couple of games of HGB with Roger and we are planning to meet up sometime to play a few more. I have mixed feelings about the rules.  

On one hand there is a great little game trying to break out of the book, on the other the layout of the rule book is less than optimal, which makes it hard to find the rules. On the rules side of thing, some of the writing is overly complex, or maybe I should say that the rules explain simple things in an overly complex way with too much jargon for my taste.  YMMV.

The great parts of  the game are the artwork, back story and general design of the Gears.  I am slowly getting my NuCoal Jerboa painted too, as can be seen below.

Battlegames

Battlegames comes to the end of its thirty–four issue journey as Henry receives the call to a new adventure that of editing Miniature Wargames.  Like all true stories, rather than fairy–tales, when one quest ends, another quest come along.  All stories evoke feelings in the readers, and the story of Battlegames is the story of Henry responding to the call to produce a wargame magazine that covers what wargamers actually do down the club, or at home, rather than what people think they do.

I am of course dead chuffed that my article on BattleTech will appear in the very last issue of Battlegames.  For those readers of Miniature Wargames that fear a return to the days when Miniature Wargames did not feature SF articles, I think you can rest assured that Henry will publish SF in his magazine.  I see no evidence to suggest anything to the contrary.

25 Years of BattleTech Woot FTW or what?! :-)
  

Announcement

 

 
I want to separate my writing blogs from my gaming blogs, as I don't imagine that many of my subscribers want to read about the trial and tribulations of writing a novel.  However, if you do want to read such things then if you subscribe to the new blog, imaginatively titled Ashley R Pollard you will get the updates as they come.

See you on the flip side.
  

Big Dog: Bad Dog

 
As I may have mentioned I'm trying to complete my first novel, called Bad Dog, which was inspired by a phrase that popped into my head that went something like this, "It was all Big Dogs fault that I'm sitting in my Dog in Afghanistan being shot at."  It came to me just like that and so I wrote it down and filed it away as an idea.  That was around the middle of last year, or so.  I can't remember exactly when as I over wrote the original note when I started the novel, which is a bit of a shame really.  However, they are just words and ideas and one can't get too precious about such things.

Anyway one line pitch for Bad Dog: Starship Troopers meets Ground Hog Day.   Synopsis: Life in the military means everyday feels like every other day, but for Gunnery Sergeant Tachikoma today is just like yesterday.

The running total for first four weeks of writing was 25,087 words.  I've just finished another 2000 words today, so that makes 10,195 words this week, and brings this monthly total up to 41,210 words in all, which is why I've been a bit remiss in posting stuff here.  The novel now stands at 64,616.  It's an interesting challenge to write a novel, and for the first time in a long time I'm actually immersed in something that I'm really enjoying, in spite of it being really hard to do.

On a related note the BBC just posted a story about Big Dog and DARPA are developing things that I very cleverly allude to in passing in my novel.  Life imitating art?  No not really, just obvious stuff that happens.

Other news is that I now have new glasses for painting and making models.  Special prescription after taking a couple of examples of what I do into show the optician.