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.
  

Scribing Away

If you watch the above there is a scene with some android girls typing.  That's me, or so my partner says.

This month I've been taking my writing seriously, for definitions of serious that means I write everyday and try and do a thousand words.  On the the advice from a friend who is a professional writer, big shout out to Alec, I downloaded a programme called Scrivener.  It rocks, because it makes keeping track of a story's structure a piece of cake, or a walk in the park, or just plain easy.  Well, for definitions of easy where one assumes that you are the kind of writer that likes to work from a structured outline.  Not all writers do, some prefer writing as guided discovery with the story flowing from the writing process.

Now if I could only write narrative as easily as I just wrote the above paragraph.

Seriously, I'm finding it quite difficult to get the tone and flow of the words down as I want the to be.  Instead it's all a bit rough around the edges and at times I think my eyes are going to bleed, or my brains start dribbling out of my ears.  Still it beats sitting around doing something one doesn't enjoy doing.

Anyway, enough of the bonhomie, this week I've managed 8563 words, and for the month 25,087 words in total.  Approximations as Scrivenor only claims to accurate give or take ten words, or so.  Go figure?

I was also reflecting on the amount of stuff I've written over the last twelve years for a game that I participate in called Contact!  I just totaled up my mission reports that I wrote after each game and that alone came to 26,568 words, which doesn't include all the annual Power Point Presentations I did for the game, other reports on what we found, or requests for information I made to the plot team.  I'm not going to go back and calculate all the words for the games that I wrote, but I'd guess that it doesn't fall far short of 70,000.

I don't regret any of it, but I do realize that all that time spent writing could have produced the best part of a novel, or an RPG scenario book, or even a dissertation for a degree in something.

So, as my friend Alec reminded me, blogging is writing, and I have been doing a lot of it.  So now I'm going to do some more.
  

About TIme

Super Dimensional Fortress Macross has moved one step closer to becoming a live-action movie.  I want to thank Robotech Battles blog for the heads up.  I've also added your blog to my front page blog list as a result.  Should have done that a while ago if truth be told, but them's just the way things happen at times.

Seeing Robotech for the first time was one of those big sense of wonder moments when I was over whelmed by the concepts of giant aliens from space having their asses handed to them by people flying transformable robots.  I guess you had to be there to appreciate what a big thing this was at the time?

I remember Helen McCarthy, who writes about Japanese culture and anime on her blog A Face Made for Radio running an anime fan run video stream at the 1987 Eastercon, where she pretty much kicked Japanese animation into the forefront of UK SF fandom scene by showing Urotsukidoji, otherwise known as The Legend of the Overfiend to an unsuspecting audience, which pretty much made everyone role for sanity loss.

So with Palladium moving towards a Robotech wargame and the now this movie, I see much happy giant stompy robot wargame goodness in the future.  It's heartening for an old time fan like me to see a new generation being exposed to something I love.
  

Sounds of Cylons

Anyway, a friend of mine, Kari posted this YouTube video on her Live Journal blog, which I thought was worth stealing.  This of course being the highest form of flattery possible.  Anyway, Kari is an interesting writer who is well worth reading if you are into fantasy novels inspired by Dumas, who is one of her passions.

I've been too busy writing other stuff to really post anything on the blog this last week or so.  It's not like I don't have a lot of stuff in first draft form waiting in the queue to be finished and posted even.  At last count I have sixteen articles waiting for me to edit, or take pictures for, or whatever?  Of course that begs the question of whether or not articles can be said to be waiting to be finished?  However, this is going off on a philosophical tangent that is best left unexplored here.

Last year, not so long ago, another friend of mine, Ferret quilter par extraordinaire, posted the following on her FaceBook page, which I stole for my FB page, and will post again here for reference.

I found Alan Watts discourse quite moving and it certainly hit home with me.  It made me ask the question of myself, and what I decided was that I want to write stuff that I own the IP of.  So I've made the decision to take my writing more seriously.  This doesn't mean I will stop writing reviews for magazines, even though they don't pay, as I quite like doing them.  Or for that matter writing where I get paid to write, but what it does mean is that I will be focusing on projects that are mine.

The downside is that I'm less likely to be doing as much blogging.  Not stopping, just my own writing has to come first.

VOTOMS Conversions

 

To round out my Heavy Gear army, I'm converting some of models to make variants that I think look good. First off is a straightforward conversion to the Turbo custom variant that comes in the Takara set to make it a Barcoff's variant from the Pailsen Files. 

Still need to finish off the rocket launcher and adding the grapple launcher to the backpack.

Next up are these two WIP shots of a conversion to represent the Burglary Dog variant from the Shining Heresy five episode OVA.

 

And here are a couple of more Strike/Rabidly Dogs and my second Blood Sucker, which is going to be my other army command mech for my Heavy Gear army. I'm planning on changing the Strike/Rabidly Dogs guns using parts from the Dream Pod 9 Heavy Gear Blitz range, before I go any further with painting them.

All I need to do now is print out some stat sheets for a game of Heavy Gear, and use these models as proxies of Dream Pod 9 designs.