Tavern of the Storyteller

September writings

2010-09-21T03:29:00.000+02:00

School has started up again!
This unfortunately means that there is a lot less time for writing other stuff at the moment, or at least the creative part of my brain has taken a short holiday... But it'll be back in time for teatime, don't you worry!

I've started up a new blog, over at Tumblr.com, which is updated daily. The content ranges from images and quotes to journal-entries and poems, so it might be worth checking out. I spill some of my creativity there now, whilst on my unintended hiatus from Storywrite. Head on over to http://dracudian.tumblr.com/ to see it! (Hopefully it'll get a proper domain soon, but that's the link for now)

In writing news, a free online magazine has shown interest in my story Cassandra (the revised version), which is awesome! I'm currently writing a bio and stuff like that, and hopefully the story will feature in their October edition (I think). A link to the website will come shortly, in a post of its own! They aim to share art and creativity, so their goals are admirable, and their magazine looks great.

Since May

2010-07-18T03:21:00.000+02:00

So, this is my first post since May! Why? Well, as usual when I take a hiatus from writing at this site, it's because I'm actually getting some writing done, and posting it on Storywrite, and that is exactly what's happened!

My last post was about part one of Legendary being posted and finialized. I wrote back then that I had about four more chapters written, and that I'd try to release shortly. Well, now I have, and at the time of writing this, there are seven parts of Legendary up at Storywrite, and I'm working on chapter eight. You can find the entire Legendary series HERE.

Now, this progess in itself is kind of amazing. Seeing as Legendary chapter one was the first brand new thing I'd written this year, and the third thing overall this year, posting another 6 chapters was a big deal for me. But no, it doesn't end there, I've been able to write even more! Yay!

So I've written a few pieces that stand on their own. None are too good, but they're okay exercises.
Those Dreadful Hours - This is a short piece written as an Email. Prolly my favorite of these short writes.
Monsters - The shortest thing ever, just a commentary really, written and posted on my Ipod Touch.
Just Demise - Sort of a spiritual successor to Infernus, as this is also a gory piece with little else offered.
Weakling - My second most favorite of these, a story I earlier referred to as Whiskey on this blog.

And I also wrote a four-part story that I'm actually really pleased with (like Legendary), called Loving Violet. It's a story about two girls who fall in love, and it opens with one of the main characters, Scarlet, looking back at her time with Violet (who is revealed, from the start, to be dead at the time of writing). Then the story tells of how they met, bonded and eventually and tragically parted. The entire thing is found HERE.

So, really, I hope this trend can continue, and that I can keep writing stuff that I'm pleased with and that I can post onto SW. It doesn't have to mean that I can't keep posting here too, as I'm writing and discarding a lot too these days. Either I'll be making a few posts here soon about "The Ziz" and "Lucifer", or you'll be seeing some new stories over at SW. Look out for it. Alright, enough crappy teasers! Thanks for reading =)

(The picture at the top is explained at the Loving Violet list over at Storywrite, linked above and here)

Progress - At last!

2010-05-19T01:11:00.002+02:00

Now I've posted the first part of Legendary over at Storywrite!

Can be found here

I ended up with the title of

Reviews - Infernus

2010-05-11T23:22:00.000+02:00

These are some tidbits taken from reviews of my story Infernus. Not all of these are positive reviews, but I love these little bits, so thanks guys and gals of Storywrite XDD

(The ones that are not separated by a blank line belong in the same review)

"Very disturbing, but amazing as well."

"Gruesome details. A truly horrifying tale."
"Overall, a good, if disturbing, tale. "

"I loved this story a lot. The gruesome details and the twist in the ending."

"This is really quite gross. Sickening really, but I can't but help to like the end. Well done."

"This should be age-restricted."
"The content is sickening, frankly speaking. But you have imagination, I'll give u that. "

"Well written, you style is good, but I'm a little disturbed at the content in this story."

"Why is this even posted?"

"urhhh! my gosh1 you make my body trembling!! i don't know why!!!! but i am scare!!!"

"Oh wow. That was a really good story. I actually covered my eyes a few times to try to make myself stop reading."
"It was extremely grusome, and yes, afterwards, I did feel about ready to throw up. The horror factor was good. *shiver*"

"Beautiful and detailed descriptions."

"...I dont even know what to say here, very grusome."

"I could have lived without some of the graphics but thats what makes it your story!"

This is my favorite:
"urhhh! my gosh1 you make my body trembling!! i don't know why!!!! but i am scare!!!"

I AM SCARE!!!

Thanks all, you make it even funnier to write XD

Writing again!

2010-04-22T17:08:00.000+02:00

So, I haven't written much on this site for quite some time... Because I've started writing something again! It's about 3000 words now, but I have more planned, and I love that my muse is back in place =)

It's not any of the ongoing projects I wrote about last time, it's a brand new thing with the working title of "Legendary". It's supposed to be a mix of romance and fantasy, though it's stuck at the romance stage right now.

Two taglines have emerged from the project so far, and might indicate where it's going:

"We’ll meet again in the Summerland."

"I’d go through hell to find you, and if I couldn’t get you back, I’d stay there with you."

So, hopefully the project will bear fruit, and maybe something will pop up on storywrite.com soon :)

Ongoing Projects - March 2010

2010-03-12T02:04:00.006+01:00

University still holds me in a firm writers block, and even though I start new stories all the time, I'm never able to finish any these days...

So, to get my crative juices flowing... or, perhaps just for the sake of actually writing something, here's a list of the short-stories I've started writing recently.

Working titles:

Nightmare:
Inspired by a contest over at storywrite (about writing your nightmares), this story follows Dr.Dracudian and two trainees at an asylum for the criminally insane. The asylum turns out to have a supernatural edge, as well as beeing filled to the brink with murderers and other violet lunatics. Three old sisters (two inmates and the warden?) are to be important to the story, having something to do with the supernatural events that occur (a part that was present in my dream).

Sword and Sorcery:
Another story based on a SW-contest, this one is just a description of a fight so far. A man in a shiny armor kills his brother in a ghastly way, and is joined by a wizard before they dissappear to go for their next kill... In other words, no story present yet ;p

Villain:
The story opens with a man running through the rain in intense pain. He seeks shelter, and seems to be disoriented. When he breaks glass and cuts himself accidentally, he finds that his wounds regenerate, and that time slows down as they heal. In finding another person around, he discovers that he has acid touch, and he accidentally kills the other person. He's then shot, but as everything turns dark, he's rescued. When he comes to again, he's in a room with three others, who seem to know more about him than he does himself. They talk to him about an infection, resulting powers, and... it ends there, not sure where to take it :p

The Beauty:
Boy falls in love with girl, girl already has boyfriend. Boy must come to accept that it's more important for him to see the girl happy, than it is for him to be happy himself. The outline is there, it just needs to be heavily fleshed out ;) Also, my first romantic story in quite some while, even though this one has a distinct tragic outlook (like all my stories involving romance really :p)

Running:
The working title here comes from the fact that the story is just a description of someone running this far ;p It was supposed to be a slightly erotic, very gory werewolf story... But it's hard to write classic-monster stories without ending up cliche and downright bad, so I never really put much work into this one, although it would certainly be fun to expand upon it.

WoW love:
A poem about love, written in world of warcraft related metaphors... And yes, it's a comedy piece... (inspired by the popular songs rewritten as wow-songs done by Turpster and others, though this one isn't based on an already existing tune)

"IT" or "Dragons Child":
A story about a lonely creature who has roamed the earth for years. The creature tells his story, including how he met his only friend, a blind girl. The girl called him Dragons Child, because she found him to feel like the closest thing she could imagine to a Human-Dragon hybrid. The story leads up to Halloween, the only time the creature can walk among men. Where I'm currently in the writing process, the creature is picking up its costume, helped by the girl. The story was at first intended to show how the creature takes revenge upon a hateful human race, and goes on a rampage on halloween, but as the story came to be more and more about the girl and the relationship between the girl and the creature, I'm starting to lean towards a tragic end instead of a gorefest end.

Dead like us:
The story is told from the perspective of a ghost who lives in an old mansion. As I haven't written much, there is still two ways I'm considering to take this story:
1. The ghostly inhabitants of the place have to convince a newcomer that she's really dead, and show her how the afterlife really is
2. The ghost thinks the newcomer in the mansion is a ghost aswell, and tries to communicate, but doesn't realize that she's still alive - However, what happens when he manages to break through?

House on Mars:
A man who has lived the past thirty years on Mars as part of a small crew in an experiment returns to Earth after some sort of accident or event has destroyed civilization and radiated the entire planet. He walks through a cemetary, finding his eartly friends and loved ones, and waits for the radiation to kill him. Meanwhile, he thinks about his time on Earth, his time on Mars and all his regrets.

Whiskey:
A man sits in a bar, drinking whiskey (hence the title... duh ;p), in walks an underage prostitute. He goes outside with the girl, preventing anyone else from taking advantage of her. The two talk, and as the reach the other end of town, the girl confides in the man, who seems to be a good man. When they reach the docks, snow falling, no one around, the man kills the girl. He doesn't want her to go on living a miserable life, and so he leaves her with a smile on her face, and returns to the bar and his whiskey. I have the key components to the story, but again I just need to flesh it out.

So, that's it for this time... Hopefully I'll be able to finish one or more of these stories soon =)

2009 - A Summary

2010-01-16T04:06:00.004+01:00

So, a short summary of the year 2009

- I moved and started university after the summer, the first step on my journey towards becoming a teacher in history. I've made a lot of new friends, but also had a lot of school-work to do. A lot of reading!

- I've posted a record low 13 items on storywrite during 2009

- One of those stories is a rewrite of an old story

- Five of the stories are parts of series (3 different series), and do not have proper endings

- According to the SW word-counter, my 2009 items makes up about 21 500 words

- My stories of 2009 have had 157 comments, though my own replies are counted

- Cassandra (revised) has had 76 comments, Kain, Hunted, the second in the series of Kain, has had no comments at all

- 5 of my 2009 items were tagged 'Adventure', 3 tagged 'Dark', 5 were tagged 'Fantasy' and two 'Semifantasy', 3 were tagged with variations of 'Gore', 5 are tagged 'Horror'... No stories are tagged 'Curious Orange'. One was tagged 'Love' and 'Tragedy'.

- To compare a bit, I posted 14 proper items during 2008 (+ 2 non-proper contest entries)
- In 2007 I posted 84 more or less proper items.

Here's all the things I posted in 2009, and a short description of what they are:

Lucy and the Rainbow (posted January 1.)
A short story about a girl who loses her virginity. Told mostly through metaphor/her drunken dream about the event.

One Man's Meat Is Another Man's... Treat (posted February 6.)
A story about a homeless man caught in the middle of a zombie-apocalypse, and how he comes to adapt to the situation in a bit of a strange way. Warning, contains attempts at humour.

The Featureless Face (posted March 7.)
A horror story with grisly murders, gory descriptions and a properly weird end.

Buccaneer Sky - Part 1: The Cage (posted March 11.)
The start of a planned adventure-series. Set in a steam-punk universe with both hack-and-slash and zeppelins!

Buccaneer Sky - Part 2: We sail The Jolly Roger (posted March 11.)
The (much worse) follow-up to the previous story. The adventure continues with hastily written characters and a poor gunfight. This part put me off writing more in the series, though I wish to come back to it in time.

Fall of Paradise (posted March 13.)
A gory horror-fantasy piece about the murder and rape of angelic beings, and the invasion of paradise by those unfortunate enough to have been shut out.

Fear Of Death In A Vision Of The Future (posted June 6.)
A spiritual follow-up of sorts to Retrospectives In A Vision Of The Future from 2007. It's set in a sci-fi universe, and follows a woman heading home from a friend in the evening.

The Doll (posted June 18.)
A girl is shown an old dancing doll by her grandmother. That night, the girl and the grandmother is visited by the man who once gave the grandmother the doll. He calls himself Lightbringer.

Kain, Nighthunter (posted July 14.)
The longest story of the year with it's 4811 words. It's another adventure story intended to become a series (though this one has potential, and will hopefully and probably be continued). It's about Kain, a 'nighthunter' who hunts rogue monsters while taking work from more 'friendly' monsters.

Kain, Hunted (posted August 3.)
The follow-up to the previous story, this one is more based around combat while taking away a lot of the descriptions and dialogue that sort of made the first part. A few new characters are introduced, most importantly Kains wife. The third part is supposed to follow this one directly, but hasn't yet been finished.

Three Sisters and The Sea (posted October 18.)
Featuring some characters from Kain, this is supposed to go into the Kain story, but also stands on its own. It's written as a myth, inspired by greek mythology. Inspired by an Inkubus-Sukkubus song.

Cassandra (revised) (posted October 24.)
It's one of my own favorite stories, revised more than two years after the original was written. I think it's a lot better, without really changing anything. The story is about an author who writes about a shipwreaked girl, who then comes alive.

Garden of Time - Chapter One - "The Marble Hall" (posted December 29.)
My most recent story at the time of writing, it's another adventure-type story that's supposed to become a series. It's about five people from different timeperiods being summoned by a mysterious stranger who sends them on a journey to find the Garden of Time, giving very little explaination of his motives and what they are really embarking upon.

So, that was 2009. Very few stories, only 3 written after I started university. Hopefully, I'll manage to write more during this year... Even the Charlotte (dreams of) project that I wrote about in my last post here.

So, cheers for 2009, now let's welcome 2010 with open arms.
- Drac

(Why the picture at the top? Well, I spendt the entire writing of this entry listening to the song Kurious Oranj by The Fall, and I just watched some Curious Orange clips on youtube. Then I spendt half an hour looking for a good 2010 or 2009 picture online... When I came across this one, combining the Curious Orange and 2010, I had to go for it ;D There you go)

Charlotte (Dreams of)

2010-01-15T02:57:00.003+01:00

So, I haven't written anything new in a while (no shocker there), and the total number of my posted stuff from the whole of last year turned out rather dissappointing (I'll probably post about this soon). So, taking a short break from my last project Garden of Time, I decided to attempt one of the many projects I've been thinking about for ages, yet done nothing about... It's not rewriting the 2 year old story Dreams of Charlotte, but it's all about taking that concept and that story to the next level. Let me explain.

So, Dreams of Charlotte is a story about a girl who has visions/dreams all the time, and she believes every one of them to be real. I won't spoil it if you haven't read it, but her constant dreaming and claiming of it to be real soon gets her in trouble with her parents and her concerned friends.

So my new idea is to use this story (an expanded version though), to wrap-around other short stories. It's gonna tell about Charlotte and her everyday life, and how the dreams influence it. In between, the dreams will be presented either in Charlottes notebook or in her retelling of them. The dreams are supposed to be old stories of mine, rewritten if they have to be (so that they suit the story). This way, I get a somewhat more interesting way of presenting a short-story collection, and I get to expand and improve a story that I believe has potential to become a lot better than it is. My goal (or, perhaps rather, dream) is to self-publish this as a book in the end... Either the kind that is made as it's sold, so that I can try selling to my SW-friends, or merely as a craft I can finally own that I can call my own, perhaps with copies to give to friends and family... A fun and cheap project in other words ;)

So, happy new year, and sweet dreams everyone!
Tis the year for dreams to come true!

Peter, Peter, Homicidal Cannibal

2009-12-02T03:22:00.003+01:00

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn't keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And then he ate her, just as well.

A slight remix of a popular nursery rhyme, and you've got the entry-point for a story about a man who kills his wife, stuffs her into a pumpkin, then eats it (maybe as a pie?). The modification of the original was just to make it all more blatantly obvious, as the original would probably have worked just as well. This idea didn't go anywhere though, but thought I might as well share the idea, as was the original plan for this blog ;)

Cassandra - The Second Coming

2009-12-02T02:34:00.005+01:00

my rose has withered
it will never bloom again
the soil is dry
time has come to die

Trying hard to write something these days, as usual, but it's still hard. Hoping that christmas will abolish this block, and make me write something new and good again.

Lately, I've been trying to cook up a sequel of sorts to Cassandra, while still thinking about how to actually expand on the original story itself.

I have a few ideas about how a sequel might happen, and I've even started writing some early drafts, yet I'm not completely feeling it yet. Hopefully, it'll come in time. Here are some of my ideas, for now:

- The sequel takes place in an entirely different era than Cassandra (envisioned somewhere between 1400's-1700's), such as medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, 40's Germany, present modern city or somewhere sometime in the future.
It's about a similar deal, where someone has a limited amount of space to write upon, but what he/she writes comes alive and provides a life-companion.
This sort of sequel could take on an entirely different feel than the original, and maybe even evolve in omnious ways. However, it'll most likely follow the tragic path trodden by its predecessor, let's be honest.
This kind of sequel could lead to another sequel (if successful, mind you, unlike the sequels I mention in my Sequel Post), all taking place in different times, having different twists to them.

- A story like the one above, but that connects the events of Cassandra to the new age in some way or other. This I've written part of, but it didn't turn out real well (I'll post it at the bottom here, for all to see)

- A direct Sequel or Prequel to Cassandra, that reveals something previously unknown about the original story, distorting the original view of the story (however, seeing how much I love the original, I doubt this'll happen ;p But it'd be a fun experiment).

my journey's over
I'm standing on the edge
and close my eyes
to this world of lies

my will is broken
it's the end of all my dreams
my soul yearns
for the valley of the queens

The song that the above lines are take from is called 'Valley Of The Queens', by the amazing 'Ayreon'. I highly recommend that everyone listen to Ayreon, you won't regret it for a second. And 'Valley Of The Queens' is a really beautiful song that I just can't stop listening too, so check it out! I'm sure I'll get much of my inspiration from Ayreon in the future (the only problem being that I can't afford to be that ambitious in my projects ;p).

Oh well, for those waiting for it, here's the hastily scribbled thing that might evolve into a story interlacing with Cassandra. I guess it could have the working-title "Catherine".

From the top of the cliff, the view of the world changes. All you see is the violent ocean, the beautiful colors and its beconing sound. For a second, I thought I saw a red dress floating in the water, but in an instant it was swallowed by the sea again. I hear the whisper of a familiar name, spoken by a familiar voice. A tear traces the outline of my face, dripping from my chin, at once stolen by the wind and brought down to the sea.

In my hand, I was holding a book bound in red leather. An old book, it had been one of my only companions for years, as I had searched for the cliff. The cliff was different from what I had imagined, the author of the book had never really described it fully. The house on the edge however, was exactly how I imagined it to be. It was the only house I'd seen for miles, and it was clearly abandoned. The town mention in the book, Mirror Breeze, was long gone. When I passed the former town, only ruins still stood, and even though I searched for days, I couldn't identify the hovel that had once belonged to the old lady in the book. Perhaps it had been for the best.

Searching in records for a ship called Ophelia, gone missing, yielded no results. But I had found the house now, and the cliff.

This is where he jumped, this is where she dissappeared. Maybe then, this is where my Catherine dissappeared too. I threw the leather-bound book off the edge.
"Cassandra" a voice shouted from the sea, as the book was grabbed by the waves.

From my inner jacket, I pulled a machine-written manuscript. It was two hundred and fifty pages long, four years worth of fond memories. The title was Catherine, and the end was yet to be written. I smiled, as I stepped off the cliff. The pages of the manuscript flew around me, filling me with a peace I thought I'd never again feel.
"Catherine" I whispered, as I could swear I saw her waving to me from the top of the cliff. Next to her, a girl in a red dress stood, waving to me as well. Then I hit the water.

Cassandra - revised

2009-10-27T23:42:00.003+01:00

I wrote some time ago about editing my story Cassandra from early 2007, and I was actually in the process of doing so when I moved, forgetting all about it until I bought a new computer. Here on my new computer, I obviously didn't have the 'editing-cassandra' file, so I started over. With the strange process of re-writing the story paragraph for paragraph, I wrote my new version and posted it on SW as Cassandra (revised).

The first version of Cassandra features one of my own favorite plots, and I've always liked the story. It has also always been my most read and commented story, and it has for a long time been somewhere on the first few pages of top-all time SW popular stories. However, as many commentors said, the story was flawed, the layout was strangely messed up, and some parts of it didn't make sense. Even though I'm not entirely pleased with the new version either, I think it's a definate upgrade, and I hope people will read it, even though they read the first one. In time, I hope to be able to re-write it again, perhaps even in the way I've always wanted, making it a much longer story.

The first Cassandra was the 67 463'th story posted on SW, and Cassandra (revised) is number 348 700! I've posted about 86 stories in between the two versions, and more than two and a half years have passed! In the meantime, the story also grew more than 300 words. Hopefully, the added experience has made the story better, and will make it even better in the future. I still think the story holds up, and is still somewhat original, and I hope it'll stay that way.

Thanks for reading =)

(My next project? Maybe I'll try to revisit some other old stories, perhaps 'The beauty of a witch' or 'Purgatorial Pain')

Trying (hard) to write... as usual

2009-09-16T00:36:00.002+02:00

Okey, so the pictures might get more and more irrelevant to the post, but at least this one is funny :p

So yeah, I recently started university... It's fun and all, getting to know a lot of nice new people, learning new stuff... But whoa, it's a dry season for my writing :s

So far I've only been writing academic texts, and even though I've tried several times, I just can't get a real story started. I've got ideas, they come all the time, and sometimes I manage to write down a few lines... Then it goes blank, and I just can't finish... Damnit!

Over at storywrite, I've got a contest going, and I'm gonna have to judge that soon. Hopefully, all the great entries there will help me pick up some inspiration and get my creative juices flowing. I haven't really had the time to read much outside of the curriculum, which is a bummer, seeing as I just bough First Blood, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories and have already got a number of other books lined up to read. Hopefully though, I'll catch up to the schoolwork, maybe even get ahead, and then get to read something. And after reading, maybe I can get to writing ;)

Anyway, I keep checking out the contests over at storywrite, hopefully something will come up one day that really inspires me and makes me want to enter... It can be easier writing then :) I'm confident that when I get to write something, a full story, it'll be easier to keep on writing :)

Until then, I'll see you around ;)

I await my glorious return!

2009-09-02T00:55:00.002+02:00

As some of you may have noticed (or perhaps none, as I believe that's the number of people reading this blog... yes, this is an outlet for me, as is every blog ever written by anyone) I've been away from writing both stories for SW and posts for this blog lately.

My excuses are:
Family holiday
Started university
Moved to another city
Lacked internet until this weekend

But now I'm running out of excuses (fortunately), and I can get back to writing! yey!
So, this post is really just to say: I'll be back, soon!
C ya then ;D

The Poor Sequel

2009-08-04T02:19:00.003+02:00

A lot of my stories get a sequel, and a lot of those turn into a trilogy, or are supposed to do so. Those who still have a story to tell after three entries, can become larger pieces of work, though this seldom happens in my world of writing. One thing I find, is that the bloody second part, the first sequel, is often the place where everything goes wrong. Let me tell you about some of my sequels, and intended sequels, and how they turned out compared to the first (and perhaps third) entry.

Sanguine 2:
Back in 2007 I wrote a story called Sanguine. It's about how the wife of the devil and a friend of the devil goes to earth to wreak havoc in order to have a good time. I felt that the story is alright, presenting several interesting gore-scenes, and an all-over okey idea for a action/horror story. The ending basically said that the devil himself would like to come with the two others the next time they were going to earth. This is where the idea of a sequel enters. I started writing this sequel, trying to come up with more gore-filled scenarios where the devil would mess around with humans. However, the devil turned out to be to powerful a being for me to really write about in this way, as the story just turned into a series of scenes where the devil brutally murdered people in less and less inventive ways. Of course, the sequal was scrapped, and is still hidden away somewhere.

Chemical Wedding, Part 2:
This is the second part of a finished trilogy. However, the second part is really just leading to the third, and little actually happens to further the plot, which is the greatest problem of nr.2's in a trilogy. This isn't as good or as well written as part 1 and 3, and it doesn't make as much sense.

The Unholy Trinity, Part 2: The Antichrist:
This is also the second part of a finished trilogy, but is also mostly a filler. And besides, the ending is awful, really =p

The New Mask 2:
I once wrote a horror/slasher/comedy/spoof thing that I called The New Mask. It wasn't very good, and so when I started writing a second part, it was (of course) really awful, and I didn't have to write more than a couple hundred words to realize that I would never finish or post a second part to the story.

Departed - Part Two:
This is the second part of an unfinished series. The third part hasn't been finished, and I don't know if it will be. Really, the first part of this gave closure, and I think people would like the story better if they only read the first part. This second part isn't crappy though, just confusing I think, and it sets the scene for a larger story that might never get written. This one luckily has an ending that can sort of give closure to the whole thing, and therefor doesn't seem like another filler to a third part, and I'm glad.

Buccaneer Sky - Part 2: We Sail The Jolly Roger:
This second part in another unfinished series really didn't feel the same way as the first part, and is definately filler, without really leading to something serious, or anything at all that the reader can expect from the third part. A third part was started, but hasn't been finished yet. I really liked this series, and enjoyed writing it, and I still like the first part a lot, but this second part hasn't got anything to bring to the table, and isn't particularly good. It's a shame, cause I think the series could have turned out alright... Oh well.

Kain, Hunted:
This is the follow up to Kain, Nightunter. It has a few ideas incorporated that I've been working on, and that I wrote about earlier. However, this one also feels incredibly like a filler, as it definately serves the purpose of leading up to the third part. In the third part, I plan to try introducing an overarching villain, as I wrote about in an earlier post here. I don't think this story is bad, but it certainly left out some of what I think made the first part good. Focusing more on action, this part has neglected a lot of detail, like the description of characters that destinguished the first part. This one has a lot of gore, but little of it is fleshed out, and this one also lacks the sexual content and foul language of the first one, resebling some of my early work more than the first part of the series. With the third part, I want to get back to the feel of the first one, and make a good sequel, trying to ignore the crude style of the poor first sequel.

(I'm not the only one doing this. Dracula 2: Ascension. Pirates of the Caribbean 2. The Matrix 2 and 3. AVP2. The new Indiana Jones movie. Ghost Busters 2. Saw 2. Movies are a great example of poor sequels, and I guess the same often rings true for written works)

The Names Are In The Music

2009-08-03T17:26:00.006+02:00

A lot of my inspiration come from music, as I am always listening to music when I write. Sometimes I listen to heavy metal, sometimes it's 80's pop, and sometimes it's irish and celtic music. I listen to a lot of different music, and I'm usually able to draw some sort of inspiration from most of it. However, I do find that I also like to draw character names from songs that I like. If I find a characters name in a song, I can often get other inspiration for that character from the same song or the same band. Here's an example of characters I've named after songs, or fund inspiration for in songs:

Mephisto - The main character of my unfinished novel was not named after a song, but after hearing the song 'Mephisto' by Moonspell, I incorporated parts of the song in the character, such as the line 'I am an angel who dresses in red', leading to the idea of him wearing mostly red and black clothes. (The fact that he was a fallen angel however, I established earlier).

Cassandra - The titular character of my short story 'Cassandra' is named after the song by the same name by Theatre of Tragedy. In the song they sing 'She hath no life but the one he for her wrought', which led to the idea that the character had no life, but the one 'he' for her wrote, the whole basis of the story.

Messalina and Nightwing - These two characters from Kain, Nighthunter are both the titles of songs by Inkubus Sukkubus, and alongside the song 'Sanctuary' by the same band, they helped establish several ideas I incorporated into the story.

Characters from Mephisto - In mephisto I had a character named Cassandra, named after the same song that named the short story. I also had a character named Lillith, partially inspired by the song 'heart of lillith' by Inkubus Sukkubus. Another of their songs inspired the character Atrocity from Mephisto, and made me create a backstory based on the song. The character Beltaine was also inspired by one of their songs. A character called Luna/Lisa was named after the song 'Luna' by Moonspell and 'Lisa' by Lita Ford... And yes, in the story it makes sense that she has two names. The idea for this novel was that I'd pay homage to some of my favorite bands and authors by naming characters, locations and such after them or their work, without copying of course, so I mainly stuck to first names. Some characters however, like Azrael, Lucifer and Lucifierra were harder to link to any particular piece of work, but all of them were in turn inspired by pieces of music I was listening to while writing. I could probably make a soundtrack for each character and chapter at the time of writing =)

So yeah, to sum up, I use a lot of music to inspire my writing, and in particular my characters. I've found that Inkubus Sukkubus is a great band to look at when I want a character-name that suits the sort of mythology I'm going for in works like Mephisto and Kain, Nighthunter. And yes, the picture on top is of Inkubus Sukkubus. I thank them for all the inspiration they have given me so far when listening to their albums, and all the inspiration they will continue to give me in the future =D

Kain, Nighthunter

2009-08-02T19:57:00.003+02:00

As I was away in holiday this last week, I didn't get any writing done... However, a lot of ideas popped into my head. A surprisingly large amount of these ideas featured or somehow had something to do with the character Kain and the other characters I made for my last story Kain, Nighthunter.

I've walked around with an idea of how to start a new chapter in the story of Kain since I posted the last part. Kain is to have a wife, a fairy, who is tiny (like most faeries) at day, but grows to the size of a human at night. Their house is to be attacked by evil creatures at the start of the next chapter, and Kain then goes to see Messalina and Nightwing in order to find out who sendt the creatures, what they want, and where to find them.

After a long time of thinking about this new chapter, I found myself coming up with backstories for both Kain, Messalina and Nightwing, and I made up a story that I somehow want to feature in the Kain-universe, even hough I'm unsure how. I also made a backstory for some of the creature-types featured in the last and the upcoming part.

The hardest thing to make up, is the main villain. In the last part Cathola was the main bad-guy(/girl), but I wanted her to be stopped fairly easy (as Messalina did, at the end of the story), so that she wouldn't feel too powerful. I have plans to set her actions in a broader perspective though, and I want her to be associated with a bigger bad-guy, that I want to introduce in this part.

I don't know why, but I've always had a problem writing about bad-guys that are persistant in my works. In my longest piece of work to date, my unfinished novel Mephisto, there was never a clear villain. In the start, Mephisto was introduced as the villain, but turned out to be one of the prominent good-guys. Then I introduced a long time foe of Mephisto called Atrocity, but I made Mephisto kill him early on. Then I introduced Beltaine, who kidnapped both Mephisto and other friends of the main-character. Later on, Beltaine converted to the side of the protagonist, and I still lacked an antagonist. I guess the closest I came was the archangel Peter, who tried to set up a war between heaven and hell. This character was never met by the main character however, and only mentioned several times, making a very uninvolved antagonist. In the stories about Kain, I want a more involved antagonist, and I want to make it a good one. Good luck to me =p

Any tips or hints about how to do this? Please leave a comment ;)

Inventing Mirror Breeze

2009-07-25T18:04:00.003+02:00

Welcome to Mirror Breeze, a fictional city that's a mix of my hometown and my imagination. It's a name I try to give the central places of all my stories where I actually name the place (which, I admit, has been very few stories so far...). In the end, I want it to become a place my readers can recognize, and maybe even characters can appear in several stories. So far, I've had the town be the central place of both stories with a very 'realistic' plot (Angels in a Small Town) and a supernatural plot that takes place in the past (Kain, Nighthunter). However, I doubt that anyone has noticed this name as a reccuring theme, as most of the stories about/featuring the town are half-done, long since scrapped, or merely ideas. I've got one story where the town is a major player coming up, it's about half-way written, and I've got the town as a main feature in two upcoming stories that are both just ideas (I've had them for a while, but they are hard to write :p)

So, hopefully I'll see you all down the line, in a place I hope you'll all come to like, Mirror Breeze =)

Captain Morgan Stone

2009-07-23T20:06:00.004+02:00

If someone was to search all my stories posted at storywrite, I think they'd find no stories about pirates. If someone was to search all my saved .txt files however, I know they'd find plenty. See, I've tried over and over again to write a story about pirates, a subject I always think is fun and challenging. However, the challenge always proves to be a notch above my level, as I have never finished a pirate-story that I really liked in the end. I once posted one at storywrite, about three pirates who served at a ship, but in the end discovered that they were in fact ghosts. Upon rereading this story I found that it wasn't really very good, and the end was far too unclear to make sense for anyone but me. The next day after posting it, I deleted it again.

Then enter captain Morgan Stone. The story about captain Morgan Stone is (similar to the story about the astronaut watching the world end) a story that I've been trying to write for a long time, and one I have started writing several times, all with different approaches. The one I think is my first try at the story, is a tale about a man who used to be part of captain Morgan Stone's crew, who many years later decides to set out after the treasure he was once part of hiding. The story didn't get very far until I scrapped the idea for a total lack of originality and likable characters. Cue attempt number two.

The second try became the story of a sailor who turns himself in for piracy. The pirate then tells the story of how the famous captain Morgan Stone disappeared, and what really happened. But of course, the narrator isn't extremely reliable, and in the end there are supposed to be several twists and turns. Unfortunately, I'm not extremely good at long pieces of dialogue, and even when trying to break up dialoge with retrospectives, it didn't quite work, and so the story never got very far. This is a story I'll try to finish sometime though, so bear with me here ;)

Anyway, here is a preview of the last version of the story, the introduction:

1663:
Captain Morgan Stone attacks a Portugese sloop, the Dragonfly, and kills the crew. Unsatisfied with what little silver and food he finds abord, he is about to set the ship on fire when a crewmember opens a barrel in which he hopes to find fruit, but finds something far greater. The Dragonfly turnes out to have been a gold transporter, headed for Portugal to deliver the foundation for a new currency. The barrels with gold are plentiful, but heavy. Being the largest treasure any single pirate had ever looted from only one ship, it is far too large and heavy to take with them. Their ship would sail slowly, as the Dragonfly did, and they'd be in grave danger of being attacked by anyone with a mind like their own. Captain stone and two of his most trusted men takes part of the treasure in each their rowing boat, going to hide it in a cave on an abandoned island. As the three of them return to their boats, they find that their ship, the Dark Princess, has sailed without them. The Dragonfly, probably still with a large portion of the treasure abord, has been sent to the bottom of the sea. With six barrels of pure gold hidden inside the cave, captain Stone and his two trusted friends makes a map in three parts and takes one part each, swearing to one day take revenge upon the treacherous crew before returning to the island and retrieving the treasure.

So yeah, that's the start of it, I hope to get it finished one day ;)
Thanks for reading =D

Editing Cassandra

2009-07-23T17:01:00.002+02:00

Sometimes, I like to go back to my old stories and read them through, either to find out if I'm making progress as a storyteller, or to find inspiration for new stories. One thing I've often thought about is to go back and edit older works, especially one I like very much myself, called Cassandra.

I wrote the story back in February 2007, just a few weeks after joining storywrite. The story is about an author who writes about a young girl, and as he writes about her, his story comes alive (because of some sort of enchanted book). He comes to love the girl like a daughter, but has to write small texts about her in order for her to stay alive. However, what will he do when the pages of his 'magic' book runs out?

So yeah, I decided to read this story again about a month or so ago, and to my horror I found a lot of flaws =P Firstly, the structuring of the story is awful, and could easily be made better. Secondly, there are a lot of minor flaws and errors, grammatically and otherwise. And thirdly, it's just not really as good as I used to think it was =p

I'm not really blowing my own story down here, I still think the story itself and the premise is good, but I would like to edit this into something better. The lack of detail shines through the story, and it almost reads like a summary or a synopsis rather than a complete story.

So, what I did was to sit down and start editing Cassandra. At first it was easy, correcting the flawed structure and the grammatical shortcomings, followed by taking use of several tips and corrections that readers had left in the comments of the story. Suddenly, it didn't only look better, but it read easier as well. Then came the hard part...

When it was time to add things or take things away, I found that it was hard for me to do so. It's a story I've always loved myself, and one of my most read stories posted at storywrite. It's quite high in the most popular stories list at SW, coming in at nr.112 out of a whopping 141,583 stories. People have always liked the premise of the story, though I think many agrees that it could have been done better with more detail and some extra things added or taken away from it. In the end, I just couldn't really do much about it... At least not for the time being...

So, I'll probably get around to replacing the existing version with the slightly edited one soon, and I hope that one time I'll manage to further expand upon the story, and write it the way it deserves to be written =)

Thanks for reading ;D

Venus is Lovely This Time of Year

2009-07-23T12:15:00.002+02:00

For ages now I've been trying to write a story about an astronaut in space that witnesses the end of the world by nuculear war. It's supposed to be a story that shows just how hopeless it is to see everything you've ever loved be destroyed, and be able to do nothing about it, not even be there. It's supposed to be a story about loneliness and despair, but I'm having a hard time writing it...

I've actually started to write the story several times, each time with a different approach. One of the versions is written as if it is the last journal-entry made by the astronaut, written some time after the destruction of earth, just as his shuttle is about to land back at the barren wasteland that is the new earth. This version however contained very little emotion, and ended up as a plain description of what happened, with cheap references to a lost family as the only way of provoking any sort of feeling from the reader. All in all, it was just another failed project.

If anyone has any tips or suggestions about how to get this story written, or how to go about it, please do tell me =)

Maybe, sometime in the future, I'll be able to write my space-story, with the right amount of emotion and a feeling of great loss provoked in the reader... Or maybe not, we'll see ;)

Journey to the Darkside

2009-07-23T11:46:00.003+02:00

Alrighty, so here I'll introduce to you some of the sources of inspiration that make me able to sit down and write my stories... Welcome to the darkside ;)

In this post, I'd really just like to introduce you to two great artists who've both been of great inspiration to me when writing stories.

I wrote a two-part story once (where a third part was started, but never finished) called Departed and Departed - part two. Now, Victoria Frances is the name of the excellent artist that inspired both characters and locations for this story, but even beyond just looking at her pictures, I'd reccomend everyone to go to her website and let the music there play for a while while you're browsing pictures. I'm telling you, that atmosphere was what prompted me to write Departed, and has helped inspire me through several other pieces of work. So, Victoria Frances, thanks a lot for being such an awesome artist (and yes, I do have a poster of one of her paintings at my room).

Another artist that has been giving me inspiration lately is Henning Ludvigsen, a digital artist that is awesome at what he does. Browsing his artwork at his website inspired me a great deal when writing Kain, Nighthunter. I even recognized some of the pictures from google-searches, and have no doubt that this brilliant artist has inspired me at other times aswell.

So, I would recommend everyone to take a look at the websites of both these artists (just click their names to go there), and yeah, this has been a peek into the sources of my inspiration, I hope you can find inspiration there as well =)

Most Recently Failed Project: Spurt

2009-07-23T02:43:00.003+02:00

For two days now I've been trying to finish a project I called Spurt.

The whole idea behind the project was to make a very gory comedy-horror story, somewhat like I once did with Red Red and Red all over. The idea was to start the story with a definition of the word Spurt, like this:

Spurt

A sudden forcible gush or jet.
A sudden short burst

Which would tell readers that this is a story with lots of blood in it, but also give the impression of comedic value. So I sat down and started to think how I could start the story. In 'Red Red and Red all over' I started straight into the action and explained things as they progressed. With this one I felt like making a proper introduction of things, introducing a few characters that I could then kill off.

My ideas of how to get characters into trouble were numerous, but I ended up with a few that I liked more than others. One of the ideas was to write about someone escaping prison, only to take refuge in an abandoned house, that also turned out to be (obviously) the refuge of a serial-killer. However, after thinking about it for a while, I decided that it would be too long of an introduction, writing about a prison-break and such, and so I instead decided to speed things up a bit.

So, in my new introduction I went straight into a teachers speech of death, dying and life after death. We're quickly introduced to two of his students who are fascinated by finding out what happens when someone dies, in their dying moments. Then we cut quickly to a scene where these two have tied up ten people on hospital-like beds located in a sterile room, where there are lots of different tools lying on a table in the middle of the room. To make an already long retelling shorter, they try to slowly kill the ten people one by one, filming every kill, to see if anything particular happens when someone dies. One of them suddenly finds himself wondering if he is doing the right thing, and starts to let some of the people out of their restraints. The other one then must try to kill the remainder of the people, but it rapidly gets harder when they acquire tools.

So, where did this all go wrong?
Well, actually I thought the beginning was well written, and the first few murders were okey described with the right (excessive) amounts of gore. But when I came to the part where one of the students started to let people go, I realized that not only was the story lacking horror and comedy, it wasn't actually making any sense at all. All it was at that point was terrible descriptions of gore. That is terrible as in badly written, and not as in horrific gore. I suppose where I went wrong with my inspiration was that before writing I read an article about medieval torture devices, and I had sort of forgot the entire comedy part of it :p

So, I shall try my luck again at another horror-comedy soon, hopefully with the title Gush ;)

If anyone has a suggestion of how to make the plot of Spurt any better, or how to make it funny or scary, all suggestions are warmly welcome =D

Tavern of the Storyteller - Trying to write

2009-07-23T02:28:00.003+02:00

I would guess that everyone that comes to this blog will know me from storywrite, where I go by the name Drac. If you're not from storywrite however, here is a link.

So, let me try to explain this blog to you, I bet you're confused ;D

Often (read: all the time) I sit around and try to write something. Sometimes I sit for hours browsing pictures, songs and writing-contests trying to find some inspiration that suddenly prompts me to write, and sometimes I just sit down and try to write regardless of inspiration. Many of those times (read: most), I end up writing nothing at all, or merely a paragraph or two that are eventually discarded. Sometimes I end up with an idea or the outline of a story, without having any idea how to finish it.

So, this blog is really just here to let me share some of my ideas and tell everyone about my works in progress. I just need something to do with all that material that never goes anywhere. Maybe someone will read about my unfinished ideas and comment on them, giving me tips and suggestions as to how I should continue. Maybe just having written down that I'm working on something makes me try extra hard to finish it. Maybe I can post my sources of inspiration, and share them with the anyone that wants to see.

All in all, this is just a blog where I'm going to whine about not getting anything written, and so it is a great way for me to actually get to write something, even though it's all just for the heck of it :p

Anyway, let me rather show you what this is by posting something else, and let me welcome you to my tavern ;)