Moving

I hate moving house. No, to be accurate, I hate buying and selling houses that you intend to live in. Conveyancing, it’s such an innocent sounding word.

My family and I have been in our new house for nearly a month now, and the horror is just beginning to fade. It’s like waking up from a nightmare. You know it’s over, the terror is fading, but you’re damned if you’re going back to sleep just yet. 

The actual move itself isn’t so bad, just work and expense. Putting your place up for sale is expensive but reasonably simple. Finding a place to buy is exciting, almost enjoyable with its initial hope and optimism. The pain begins just after the joy of finding your buyer or seller, when the lawyers get involved. From there it’s a rapid descent into hell, and you soon realise that this rollercoaster is just a bit too scary for you.

I work in process improvement, and if there’s ever a process that needs improving, conveyancing is it. The whole thing seems to be a cobbled together gentleman’s agreement, where each buyer has their vendor’s testicles in an inescapable grip. If everyone is nice and calm then we can all pretend to be friends, but as soon as one person squeezes, the pain chain begins. Meanwhile the solicitors and estate agents sing softly to each other, telling you not to worry as your sanity unravels. 

If a political party pledged to throw the whole system up in the air and start again, they’d get my vote. Unless they were Conservatives, UKIP or racists of course. 

Still it’s done now, and we’re in. I now have a front room to sit in and write, or listen to the radio, or hide when it took me an hour to notice a new hair cut. It almost seems worth it. One woman told me moving house was like child birth. You swear never again, but soon forget how horrible it was. Before you know it you’re planning your next one. 

I’m surprised there aren’t more books about moving house, or stories with a move as a backdrop. There’s drama, intrigue, uncertainty, stress, arguments, hope and despair. If anything would push someone to the brink of murder, this is it. 

I don’t think I’ll write it now though. I’m still too traumatised. I should fill a notebook with everything that happened and how I felt about it. That way I’d have something meaty to work from, or should the urge to move ever return, I can use it to cure myself of the notion.

Tsuro Of The Seas

Things are just getting started

A few months back I was persuaded to have a clear out of some of my old gaming material in preparation for moving house. With a heavy heart I handed some old 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons references books and adventures to my mate Malcolm, who worked in a local independent game store. These items went into the second hand boxes for people to browse through. They proved more desirable than anticipated, and a few weeks back I found that I had some in-store credit to spend.

I was keen to find a game that I, my wife and 10-year-old daughter could play together. I am hoping that in a few years, daughter will be up for trying a Role Playing Game, but for now a good board game was the target. I interrogated Malcolm, and with his help we selected ‘Tsuro of the Seas’ (TotS) from the shop’s wares. This is apparently a sequel to ‘Tsuro’, and I found out later that TotS was funded through Kickstarter.

Malcolm’s recommendation was spot on. The Allsop game night is a regular occurrence again, mostly driven by TotS.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa - Hokusai

For me, opening a new game is one of life’s pleasures, and TotS is absolutely lovely. The art is inspired by ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Hokusai and the whole game has a Japanese theme. The ships are junks and you have to avoid monsters called DaiKaiJu. The box alone looks good on the shelf. The DaiKaiJu themselves would make respectable tattoos, and there’s even a lovely cover sheet designed to look as if it’s printed on rice paper. All this magnificence comes at a cost of course, and it isn’t a cheap game. You wouldn’t let your kids play it with jam covered fingers. Having said that the board and counters are of a good thick quality, so I think it will prove durable.

Hard a port! No PORT!

So it looks good, but how does it play. Well the first word that comes to mind is ‘quickly’.  All of our games have been finished in less than 20 minutes, usually with another round immediately following. The rules are nice and clear, and I had it ready to go in no time. I refuse to allow anyone else first go at the rule book, so it’s always me teaching a new game to everybody else. Everyone picked it up quickly. The aim of TotS is to be the last one left alive. You start at the edge of the board with three square wake tiles in your hand. You choose and place one, each of which has two entry and exit points on each side joined by wakes. All tiles are different, so depending on the tiles in your hand you could go straight ahead, left, right or even double back on yourself.

At the start of the game you can go pretty much anywhere you want and staying alive isn’t a problem. However you very soon have to start avoiding the DaiKaiJu, which are randomly placed on the board and wander slowly about. Once you’ve placed a wake tile it can only be removed by a DaiKaiJu, so the board soon fills up. If you get cornered and are forced to enter an existing wake, then you have to follow it wherever it leads. This could be off the edge of the board or straight into a monster. It’s a simple game but everyone soon ends up staring at their tiles, trying to figure out how to stave off death for one more round. If you can manoeuvre the loved one besides you into sealing their doom at the same time, then so much the better.

Tsuro of the Seas is a game that looks great, plays well and will not be left to gather dust. Not cheap, but worth the price. Go and buy it.

Doctor Who Legacy

Like most people with any interest in casual games, I have dabbled in Candy Crush (CC). My wife is so ensnared in its sugar-spun web, that she has decided that she needs to give it up for lent this year. I like the game, though the cutesy graphics annoy me. When playing CC I keep going until I fail a level, then I usually log off and find something else to do. The map showing your progress along the path to social isolation is cunning, but the game still doesn't keep me wanting one more go. I haven't downloaded it to my tablet, and if I get a decent slot of time on the family PC then I use it for other games or projects.

A few years ago I did develop a significant Chuzzle habit. I liked the graphics and loved the sound. The trophy room kept me coming back, and I won every single trophy apart from the 'pop a million Chuzzles' one. I learned how to hack into the files to see how far away I was, and I still had another 450,000 or so to go. That would have taken far too many hours so I retired.

Since then no casual game has sunk its hooks into me. If there was a good looking, funky sounding puzzle game that provided challenge and progression, then I'd probably take it on. If it was also based on one of my favourite shows then I'd be in real trouble.

Well somebody help me, because I've discovered Doctor Who Legacy (DWL). This has been out for a while, but I resisted investigating until a week or two back. Now there's no going back.

Ha! Gotcha! Pity I won't remember it

Like Candy Crush (CC) and Chuzzle, DWL is a 'match 3' game, meaning that you must arrange objects around a grid to get 3 or more in a row. However this isn't just a case of dressing up CC in a Whovian skin.

In DWL you play on the side of the good Doctor himself, with a team of companions taken straight from the show. You battle against Daleks, Cybermen, The Silence, and other less well known villains. If you match the gems in the grid then your foes take damage. For every round they survive, they blast your team, reducing their total Hit Points (HP). So far, so so so. However, each companion has a special power. For example Rory can heal your team, regaining lost HP. Madame Vastra delivers a riposte, effectively free damage to your opponents. Even better, as you progress through the game the companions gain experience, getting tougher and increasing their powers.

Time fragments are dropped, which unlock higher levels for your team. These are regular and predictable, but there are also rare drops of new companions, different incarnations of the Doctor, and different outfits for them all to wear. There's even a storyline to work through, though so far I don't think Neil Gaiman will be looking over his shoulder. Still, it isn't a role playing game so that's a little unfair.

Porridge gets an upgrade

The artwork has a very nice comic strip style, and the Doctor Who theme playing away in the background means that I actually plug in the headphones rather than just turn the sound down. I found a good article on the development of the game on www.computerandvideogames.com which explains that it is partially inspired by 'Puzzle & Dragons' which I've never come across, though I can see it after watching the trailer. 

The game has a good web site and fan community, that has some excellent tutorial videos here by The Adipose TV. Adipose makes my Pirate Galaxy blog look very amateur. His YouTube channel looks like a key resource for gamers and I'll be checking it out. So far the game is also free from heavy handed monetisation, so if you don't want to pay then you can enjoy it still and progress at a pleasing rate. 

At first DWL is easy enough, but soon gets tough enough to make you work. Spotting the best combinations and working out how to thread them together is harder than I thought. Good brain exercise.

DWL obviously works for me, but what if you're not a Doctor Who fan? Well you don't need any knowledge of the show so that's not a problem. However if you have a pathological hatred of all things Whovian then I doubt if you'll have read very far into this post. 

Doctor Who Legacy is a great game and well worth a try. Just be prepared to sacrifice a few hours to it.

Getting Your Book Online

If you have any interest in publishing your own ebook, then may I direct you to ‘how to publish an ebook’ on C|Net. Not an imaginative name but an accurate one. It is largely thanks to this article that I managed to get Hiding out there. It is a great ‘how to’ and ‘who with’ article, and the author David Carnoy has updated it a few times, most recently in June 2012.

The article gives an overview of the various options you have, covering Amazon Kindle, Scribd, Lulu and several others. It gives hints and tips, contrasts and compares, and from what I can see is even handed. I have this permanently bookmarked and it is a constant reference.

With my book I chose to start off with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and I have to say it turned out to be easier than I thought. I downloaded a free ebook ‘Building Your Book for Kindle’ which was a big help. If you know how to format a Word document then you’ve nothing to fear. I enrolled in KDP Select for the first three months of publication as this provides significant perks. Once that period expired I decided to come out of it, so that I could then go with Smashwords. KDP Select has an exclusivity clause.

The benefit of Smashwords is that once you publish on their site, you can then have them distribute your masterpiece to most of the major ebook sellers, including Apple’s iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s etc. When I first published Hiding and spread the word amongst my friends and family, there were a significant number of people who were asking if they could get it on their Nook or whatever. I decided to make my book as widely available as I could.

Smashwords has its own free guide to turning your manuscript into an ebook, called the Smashwords Style Guide. This is a bit more comprehensive than the Kindle equivalent, and at first looks a bit more intimidating. However I read through it once, and then used it to get my Word file into their required format and uploaded in less than two hours. You can now buy Hiding direct from Smashwords here.

The book passed review for their Premium Status, and so has been distributed to the other ebook sellers. Smashwords themselves have made it available in all the formats that I’m aware of, so it is possible for people to buy books for almost any device direct from them.

I am computer literate, and comfortable with word processing programmes, the internet etc. so will have found the process with KDP and Smashwords easier than some. However I am not an IT consultant or publishing magnate. If you’ve managed to write a book, and have mustered the required faith in it, then you’ve done the hard part. Getting the little blighter on line is easy.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on. Good luck. 

Pressing the 'Publish' button

The biggest achievement of my writing career so far is my book Hiding. Back when I first decided to take writing seriously, I thought that if I ever got a book published I would have 'made it'. However I soon realised that it would instead be an important milestone, rather than the ultimate goal.

Despite this realism, once Hiding hit the virtual shelves (and I hesitate to say this) it was a bit of an anticlimax. I didn't feel a sudden surge of confidence, a spontaneous burst of writing super powers, or a big wedge of cash materialise in my back pocket. I didn't even get a certificate to stick on the wall.

What I did get, and continue to feel, was a sense of accomplishment. I thought of an idea, wrote the story, crafted it into a book, learnt self publishing, and finally pressed the 'Publish' button. I'd been thinking about it, talking about it and working towards it for years. Now I'd done it. I'd written a book.

Strangely enough that last step, to press 'Publish', was perhaps the hardest of all. Once released into the wild it would be properly finished. Available for all to see and as good as it was ever going to get. I was asking people to spend time on money on it, and that made it fair game to be ignored if I was lucky, or be criticised and ridiculed if I wasn't.

I now wonder if that's why it took me so long to take the final step of self-publishing. Up until then I was a keen amateur and hadn't dared to stick my head above the parapet. Once that button was pressed there was no hiding place.

Well like I said, anticlimax. No one has pointed and laughed at me yet (well not for Hiding anyway), and I haven't been sued for taking up valuable web space. Of course you've got to be noticed first. Critics wouldn't take a pop at Dan Brown if he didn't sell books by the lorry load.

I don't mind the anticlimax now, because the rewards of publishing your own book are durable, not a fleeting glory. I love it when I see that one more person has downloaded my book, that they were in Germany or Japan. I still grin like a loon when someone says, "Stephen wrote a book you know," and people look at me in surprise. Of course I've always got my tablet with me to show them the cover, modestly of course.

The Musketeers

"Athos, Porthos, Aramis & D'Artagnan"
Image by Maurice Leloir, 1894

I love the 1973 film ‘The Three Musketeers’, and its sequel ‘The Four Musketeers’. It’s got sword fights, makes me laugh and has a cast list many films would kill for. Charlton Heston, Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlin, Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway, Michael York, Frank Finlay and not forgetting the marvellous Roy Kinnear. Even Spike Milligan appears, improvising with his long johns.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw this on telly, but the scene inside the sedan chair when ravishing Raquel is hanging from its roof on the outside, stirred strange and interesting feelings in my young self. As well as being a little saucy, it also has some very dark scenes which can catch you off guard, but fit perfectly within the whole.

So when the BBC started trailing their new drama series ‘The Musketeers’, I booked the telly for 9pm on Sunday. Sunday night is turning into the #1 slot for quality drama. It replaced ‘Sherlock’ on BBC1, and ‘Homeland’ only recently finished its run on Channel 4.

I enjoyed the opening episode a lot, and I’ll be surprised if I don’t follow the whole series through. I haven't read the original Dumas book so I've no idea how this series relates to it, but I'm not greatly fussed. There were a few characters to introduce in the first episode but I think they managed it well enough, still fitting in enough murder and mayhem to keep things ticking along.

The Musketeers themselves are all likeable and distinct from each other so there’s no confusion. I must say they have extremely cool outfits. I did find myself startled by Porthos’s (Howard Charles) teeth every time he grinned, but it does probably distract opponents in a fight. Santiago Cabrera plays Aramis well, and he’s got the looks. He was also good in his roles as Lancelot in ‘Merlin’, and that painter chap in series 1 of ‘Heroes’ (it got rubbish soon after his brains were scooped out).

Of course we have the interesting situation where the current Doctor is playing the chief villain, with Peter Capaldi playing Cardinal Richelieu. He’s great in this, and now I’m looking forward to the next series of ‘Doctor Who’ even more. Apparently he’s going to have to leave ‘The Musketeers’ after this series as he can’t do both. Writing him out won’t be difficult, a well place blade or musket ball will take care of that. It will be interesting to see how they go about replacing him though.

Maybe they should get Christopher Lee back in, complete with his old eye patch.

Apologies for that short interruption

So anything happen while I was away? No? Great, let's pretend I was here all the time then shall we?

Okay, a quick explanation/excuse.

I threw myself into Cryonite Cove and absolutely loved it. Lots of fun writing it, causing controversy, getting barred, being let back into the fold, and of course playing Pirate Galaxy. I had so much fun that this blog dried up and blew away effectively. Once Cryonite Cove (CC) came to a stop I should have come back, but I was probably too embarrassed to show my face again.

Anyway I've bared my soul already on CC and it's not that interesting so enough said I think.

Life is back on an even keel, and my writing career is back up and chugging along. Lots to talk about, most of which deserve a post of their own. Suffice to say my book Hiding is now published and available on Amazon.

Exciting isn't it? Time to start this blog up again, and it's very much in need of an overhaul. Consider my sleeves rolled up.