John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids"

"It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent & comforting hallucinations to trust that 'it can't happen here' - that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm." John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

Published in 1951 the datedness of this story is not a detraction from the narrative at all. In fact, apart from being a very disturbing read that leaves you looking askance at strange weeds in the garden, it is very timely. As a result of humanity's pollution, tampering with genes, and quest for power and money, the species practically made itself extinct. As such I have never come across a better exploration of "what do you do when your civilisation is collapsing around you?" Do you fight the collapse, trying to save everyone and everything you can, or do you just move on and build something new?

Roger the Wyrd

Roger the Wyrd is a work-in-progress that I started in April 2020. It involves the eponymous hero, Roger, who must go to a new Secondary School, it being September 1969 and him being now 11 years old. He lives in a town in Southern England, and at first assumed the school would be the same one that his friends from Primary School would be going to. Instead he goes to Norham Priory school, which turns out to be a very different kind of school indeed. As a result, Roger finds out that he is a Wyrding, one of a group of people with magical abilities.

So there is some self-insertion here, which happens a lot in my stories, but this one is worse than usual. This photo is actually of me, in my new school uniform for my Secondary School in 1969, which unfortunately was not Norham Priory! Writing the story is a lot of fun as I try to immerse the reader in the period as much as possible. Thankfully online resources are such now that I can actually work out what would be on the television on a given night, including who was playing on Top of the Pops, from online resources, plus information like which were the popular songs of the day, the weather, and contemporary events which impact Roger's world.

The story is presently at over 47,000 words and got bogged down because I knew exactly where the rest of the story was going. This has happened to me twice now, as I tend to write for fun, allowing the characters and plot to largely develop as it wills. Once I know what happens, I stop writing.

I do still think of Roger and his world, and think of changes, so once I have the time I will finish the story and be able to share it more widely.

Hero Forge

You may have eventually realised for yourself that I have discovered Hero Forge. The point of the company is actually to make mini figures for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Every figure you design can be created by a 3d-printer in various materials, and can even be provided coloured! 

I have not actually ordered any of the figures, but I have found the application very useful in creating images of the characters in my stories. Here is a Hobbity Halfling called Toby who actually isn't in any of my stories, but maybe he should be as he seems very nice (much nicer than the Everquest II Halfling). 

Sometimes I even just play around with the attributes in the character creation software in order to develop the character for the story. It really is tremendous fun.

I have found it so useful I took out a subscription, which enables me to download a higher-resoultion image with no background (a PNG file). 

This enables me to plonk the character onto backgrounds in a graphics programme. Here's Toby again with no background, ready to be plonked into an adventure!

You will find Hero Forge renditions throughout this blog!

Asimov's Foundation

I bought this book over 40 years ago, and it stayed with me through numerous cleansing moves. Recently I decided to read it again and found that a good narrative never ages!

The basic concept of a mathematician plotting out the probabilities of the future is still an awesome idea, and the unveiling of that history, with the unforeseen twist, is a great yarn. It was first published in 1942 and is also a historical study if you are aware of that, with space battles rather reminiscent of WW2 sea battles, and cigar-chomping heroes leading the narrative.

However, I use the term "hero" advisedly, for there are not a lot of female characters! This aspect of a book written in a 1940's milieu might be irksome to some people, but it is a reminder of how far we have come (which is not to say we do not still have far to go!).

A Squire for Wolf's Keep

A Squire for Wolf's Keep is a novel-length work-in-progress that had its beginnings in about 2006 when I was playing with my daughter, who would have been 11. We were playing with her Playmobil, of which she had an extensive collection of mediaeval figures and a castle which I had built for her out of cardboard tubes. While we were playing, I surreptitiously modified the figure of a squire, to give 'him' the hair of a girl. It was red hair. "This is Jane," I said. "She is coming to be a squire at the castle." My daughter, the princess of the castle, was initially hostile, but I won her over by writing an entire novel about Jane, the princess, and the residents of the castle.

The universe that A Squire for Wolf's Keep is set in is a beautiful otherworld, a place for the magical creatures of the Earth to escape the increasingly human-dominated original Earth. It is called the All-Realm, the land for all creatures, including all the magical creatures and the First Ones, that humans once called gods. Collectively humans call these the Fay, for they are magical and dangerous. Some say it is part way between Earth and Paradise, but others say that are they all the same place, but are just a blink and a turn away. It is the same universe as my published story The Dæmon. 

The main character is Jane Linden, the squire of the title. In this world it is not unheard-of for girls to become squires, but it was unusual for the King of Duveda, the principal resident of Wolf's Keep, to have more children than it already had. But apart from Jane, he soon had a further two squires, and eventually four. The four have many adventures as they train to become knights, generally being a headache for the King, and eventually solve the mystery of the King's locked chamber. 

A Squire for Wolf's Keep is essentially complete, and stands at about 66,000 words. This story would be my priority, but I need to complete a comprehensive edit, make changes suggested by readers, and incorporate more of the mythos of this world that I had worked on after the initial version. All of this needs a block of dedicated time which is difficult for me at the moment. But it will happen...

Summer of 1981

I had always wanted to be an archaeologist for as long as I can remember. I went on my first dig when I was 16, but later a careers adviser told me that there were "no jobs in archaeology". So I went to Art College, hated it, and eventually ran away to become a field archaeologist. I was actually very good at it, with a natural understanding of stratigraphy and dirt, and an inclination to the sometimes hard physical labour. I got a job with the Southampton archaeological unit, and lived a happy albeit underpaid life.

This photograph was captured by a photographer working for the Southern Evening Echo, and was taken at an open-house the unit was holding on the Six-Dials site. By this time, the Summer of 1981, I had been working in field archaeology in England for over three years, all year long. This was actually a lot of experience compared to archaeologists I later worked with in the Middle East who only worked in the field two months in the year. 

Unfortunately for my career in archaeology in the UK, March that year I had married a Canadian. In September I emigrated to Canada because I thought it was what she wanted.