2009 - A Summary

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)

The Names Are In The Music

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