I always make new year resolutions. I think it gives me focus, a target to work towards. I know I am not an individual possessed of huge amounts of willpower, and thus I try and set myself these targets to guide me.

Unfortunately, it is now June and I have broken one of my two big resolutions — and am likely to have broken the second by the end of July.

1) Complete a piece of artwork every month.

I did so well with this last year, I assumed I could keep it up. Sadly April was an icky month. I got a lot of teaching work, and I got a fair chunk of writing done, but I just couldn’t get inspired to paint.

I think I went through 3 actual paintings, none of which I finished, none of which I even really liked. I hope to get back into it with June’s painting, but I’ve left it a bit late and I’ve only just started.

2) Complete draft 1 of Chains of Time by the end of July

This is a self-imposed deadline, but its a deadline none the less. 150,000 words, roughly, in seven months shouldn’t have been that hard, but again I’ve got a lot of teaching days under my belt this year so I’m only really 55,000 words into this.

90,000 words in 5 weeks seems…unlikely…especially as the teaching will continue.

Summer holiday is coming up, but who knows how well I’ll be able to concentrate in the heat. Its already playing havoc with me.

When it boils down to it, I have no real excuse for breaking these two resolutions. I know work — actual paying work — has kept me busy, but I know authors and painters who manage to juggle both. I guess I blame my weakness for computer games. Again.

Anyway, I am aware of my faults in this, as in many other aspects of my life, so i will perservere in getting both of these back up to speed over the coming months. Hopefully I’ll have at least 12 paintings and a completed first draft by the end of the year…

*crosses fingers*

The Black and Whites

Here we have the B&W artworks from April, May and June. Colour version for June is in progress. April and May were started but abandoned. Will get back to them. Hopefully.

April – Demajen : Final Fantasy XIV version of my FFXI character, Demajen.

May – Rowan : Actually drawn in January, this is a style reference/concept for Rowan in Chains of Time

June – Lovers : two efreeti from Chains of War

It bothers me when people post about how they are “bored” on Facebook. It really narks me that these people have time to be bored. Even during half term or school holidays, I am never bored. Frustrated, yeah, quite often. Pissed off, even more so. But I never want for things to do.

When people ask me what I do and I reply with “I’m a writer!” there are invariably two responses:-

The first is the nonchalant “Oh, that’s cool! What’s your book called/about?”

The second is the “Writing’s a hobby, not a real job. Why don’t you get a real job?”

Now here’s the thing. I have a real job. Hell, I had a full-time real job at one point and it was so utterly stupid that it sent me spiralling into stress-related breakdowns that have left my long-term memory shattered. But I don’t want this to turn into a negative rant. In fact, I want to draw comparisons between my previous “real” job, and my current “not real” one.

People have preconceptions about just about every profession on the planet. This is natural; this is human. Preconceptions are off course built on stereotypes, especially those found in the media, and it is here that my ‘troubles’ start.

You see, as both a writer and teacher, I double dip the classic stereotypes with precocious ease. Writers, with their cigarettes and smoking jackets, who sit in cafés all day and drink coffee while typing on their run-down laptops; and teachers, who get more days off than they get hot dinners, who go on holiday half the year, and who are never doing a good enough job. I find that, in actual fact, people do not understand either profession.

At the core of both professions, I believe, is a deep desire to connect to human beings on many fundamental levels. Teachers do this by means of education. Writers do this by means of creativity.  What I don’t think Joe Public realises is that it is very difficult for — and actually, I should stop generalising here… let’s go first person — me to turn off. I posted a Facebook status yesterday that I had been writing all morning and my brother, bless his heart, commented that what I’d meant to post was that I’d been playing World of Warcraft all morning.

Y’see, what I find is that nobody considers the work that comes around what they see. Students, for example, only see the lessons you teach them, not the gazillion hours you put into marking their books, planning their lessons, getting the facts straight in your head on your evenings or weekends off. Likewise, my family rarely sees me actually writing. When they do they usually put on their best mocking expressions and tell me, shocked, that I’m “actually working”. They don’t, of course, see my piles of notes, the concept sketches that I draw, the restless nights I have when I keep waking up and writing down details on the Notes app on my iPhone. They don’t see the twenty or so files on my PC with ideas in them, or the half dozen maps of London I’ve got subtly altered, or the deckplans for the Valhalla, or whatever…

And I take their mockery with a pinch of salt, because I know that they too have hard jobs. They spend most of their time working, and because my work is — I suppose — less ‘obvious’, it is difficult for them to relate their experience of what work is with my own. Some days I think they understand. Other days, somebody comments that I should maybe try teaching full time again. It is about that time that I cackle madly and walk away from the conversation.

So it is confession time. I am finding writing very hard work at the moment. I’m dispirited about the whole thing. I know I want to get this book published, but I don’t believe it is good enough. Nor, probably, will I ever. The trouble is, I’m having a hard time getting past that psychological hurdle. I know I should print the damned manuscript out and send it to an agent/agency or three. But then I read all these advice columns where they say “Make your book as good as you think it can be before you send it to anyone.” And I’m not good at that.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working on scenes from novels 2 and 3 and avoiding novel 1. I just can’t get inspired to look at it again. I am, I think, bored of it. And my stupid brain translates this to “Well, your book must be boring then!” which naturally puts me back at psychological square one.

Anyway, moping aside, I am actually really psyched for people to read my books. I honestly think people who are fans of the fantasy genre will get a kick out of them. I’ve looked at a lot of really cool artwork this week and said to myself, “Yeah, I’ll probably never be able to paint like that… But I can write, and I bloody well will write!”

Last Sunday (the 7th Feb), on a whim (and, admittedly, high on Mass Effect 2 fever) I ordered some books from good old Amazon.co.uk: namely, the first of the two available ME novels, plus the concept art book from the first game, as I’m quite the fan of concept art. As a member of Amazon Prime, I expected to get the novel on the Tuesday, and the art book when it becomes available. No problem.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing a blog about this if it was all plain sailing! By the Thursday of last week, the book still had not arrived, so I emailed amazon customer support about the delayed delivery. They asked if I could wait till close of business on Friday, just to make doubly sure, as that is the longest any package from them should take.

I did so. No delivery.

Sent them an email about it again over the weekend. Received a very apologetic reply from them yesterday morning, telling me they’d stuck a new copy of the novel in the post for me straight away, and that it should be here today.

Text message from mother this morning tells me three packages have been delivered. Now I know one of them should be the book. A second should be a REAL TREAT about which I will write at a later date. (Spot the sarcasm.) But the third…?

Well, intuition tells me that there will be two copies of the book, instead of one. So I trundle up the road, open some parcels, and prove myself right.

Typical. So now I have two copies of the same book, and have to go figure out amazon’s return process now. /sigh

At least they only charged me once. =D

If there’s one thing that television, movies and computer games have taught me it is that in the future, everything is neon, every light has a huge corona of lens flare, and all clothing and body armour absolutely has to have hexagonal panels on it for maximum protection and fashion aesthetic.

These, then, were my guidelines when creating February’s piece of art. Now, it should come as no surprise to anybody who has checked out the gallery (which reminds me, need to update that page with 2003-2009′s paintings), that February’s piece features a hot babe. BUT this month’s hot babe is wielding a gun, because its the future. Y’know.

Now since I only really started the painting proper yesterday, it isn’t anywhere near finished, and there are some glaring errors in places, but I’d just — for the record — like to make the following statement: PAINTING GUNS IS HARD.

This is almost certainly due to lack of experience doing so. I mean, looking back through my gallery, how many of my paintings have guns in them? I think there are like 4, and most of them are from the early days of my painting progression.

So why are guns difficult? Well, for a start they have lots of different planes: sharp edges or curves, different materials and textures, and they’re almost invariably made of metal (which I’m not great at painting) or maybe some high-tech plastic (which I have no experience painting whatsoever). ADD to this the fact that if I’m gonna have somebody holding a gun, I need to paint the hand too — and we’ve all seen how bad I can be at painting hands — then it is maybe unsurprising that this painting has been a nightmare.

But then, if it wasn’t hard, there’d be no challenge to overcome. If there was no challenge, there’d be no progression. So once again, I’m daring myself to do better.

So that’s the work in progress…

Play spot the futuristic bits

And as a footnote, if the hand holding the gun looks too photo-esque, its because currently, it is. I’ll be painting it up properly in a bit! Reference, y’know!

Back when I was at university doing my degree in English Literature (with a heavy emphasis on medieval literature) I stumbled upon a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Comedy, known today as the Divine Comedy, an epic poem divided into three parts. Inferno, the first of the three, is the basis for Visceral Game’s Dante’s Inferno, an incredibly loose adaption of the poet’s descent into the nine circles of Hell. A lot of creative license is taken in the motivations of the main character, and he is fleshed out into a scythe-wielding badass for the game with no real apologies on the game designers’ parts. Nor should there be. This is not supposed to be taken as a direct adaption of one of the finest pieces of classical poetry, but rather an homage to it.

Now, I don’t actually wish to talk about the game itself in this post. I will offer some form of review or critique of it at a later date, but I haven’t actually finished the game yet. No, what I want to write about today is the Death Edition of the game, for which I paid an extra £15. Why the extra cost? Well, it is because of these special features listed:

• Making of the Game documentary (I always like to watch these and learn more about the design processes)
• Dante in History documentary (To see just how well the designers researched the source material)
• Full Game Soundtrack (You know me well enough by now… Though more on this in a moment)
• Scoring the Inferno documentary (Not only the music, but finding out how it was composed. Excellent!)
• Wayne Barlow Digital Artbook (Concept art is always something I like to look at and draw inspiration from)
• Scene from the animated Dante’s Inferno (Had no idea what this was about, but hey, I like animated stuff)
• Digital Reprint of the Full Poem (I don’t actually own a translation, so why the hell not!)

Quite a few special features. Easily persuasive enough to get me to put out a few extra English Pounds to own. Of course, this is the part where everything goes horribly wrong.

You see, as I’m in the car on the way home, I’m reading the small print on the back of the box. The first thing I notice is that for the Soundtrack there’s a little, obscure asterisk that states “Soundtrack can only be accessed through software included on the enclosed Bonus DVD and is not able to be transferred to any other media.” Hrmmm, I think. That sounds a bit dodgy. But it was in fact even worse than I expected.

You see, all of the above special features save for the digital poem reprint are on the DVD. And I can’t for the life of me get it to work in my DVD drive. Joy. So I fish out my old laptop just to see if it is a problem with my drive and yeah, it is. I should really replace the old thing at some point, but I don’t normally have much in the way of use for it anyways since I tend to buy games digitally these days, and most other DVDs work on it fine anyways.

But I digress, my issue here lies within the “enclosed software”. Because there isn’t any. This isn’t an “Install the Soundtrack on Your PC” type of operation. This is an “everything runs through your normal dvd-playing software” option. That is, quite frankly, abyssmal design. Especially as you have to click on every pair of songs to play them, rather than it running through the list. Sure, the sound quality is lovely, but that’s way too fiddly to be worth its while.

So I load up the “Wayne Barlow digital artbook” only to find that it, too, uses the same basic dvd-player software. No independent browser or anything. Every single thing on this DVD is designed to work in a DVD player. I mean sure, that’s great for people who are going to use their PS3 to experience the footage, but seriously, you advertise “digital artbook” and “soundtrack” and people are not going to think about playing it on their PS3 straight away.

Oh, and about 90 seconds into the digital artbook — which is actually a documentary, by the way — the whole thing crashes and locks up my laptop. I hard close my DVD software and sigh “One more try!” and load up the Digital Reprint of the Full Poem.

Which takes me to a static page with a web address and a password that I’m sure 99% of the people who bought this game will share online…

So let’s recap my disappointments.

1. Documentaries that crash a couple of minutes in both times I’ve tried them.
2. A soundtrack that I can only play using DVD/Media Playing software
3. A digital reprint of the poem that anyone can access on the web for free.

I haven’t tried accessing the other features yet. Still hoping to get my PC’s DVD drive to recognise the disc so i can at least watch the documentaries on a proper screen, but so far I am hugely disappointed.

As for the game itself, it’s okay. There are some irritating quick time events (QTEs) in places where you thought you were watching a cutscene, some instant death situations that are incredibly unfair, some jumping/swinging bits that I’ve had to replay several times because it isn’t always clear if you’re going to make the jump right or not and, most gravely, some little minigames which are fun in and of themselves, but don’t count as checkpoints so if you die straight after, you have to do them all over again.

BUT there are several positives too: the sound is great, the cinematics are very pretty, the monster and character designs have a lot of weight, and considering how it is adapted from the poem, it does a surprisingly good job. I think that, if I hadn’t just played Darksiders, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, I’d have much more praise for the game, but it does seem to fall a little flat after those.

Anyways, I still have three circles of Hell left to fight my way through and, if nothing else, there are some nice PS3 trophies to unlock on my way, so it is by no means a wasted purchase but, considering my issues with the bonus content above, I’m not currently feeling it was worth the asking price.

See, I got through my whole article without saying “God of War” onc—-aah crap!

As many of you are aware, as a writer and artist I feel it is my duty – expanding my creative reference base – to watch human beings and to see how they do things; how they behave.

As a supply teacher I often see children at their best and worst, lighting up a room with sharp insight or witty repartee; or lighting up a cigarette in the room and then trying to weasle out of it by telling me they can’t smell smoke when their hand is on fire. (True story. Had it happen. Wish I’d got pictures.)

I can understand people fighting over many many things: religion, race, territory, the hot redhead at the bar, etc etc. These are all pretty primal, human urges.

I’m not much into violence, though as several of the LARPers noted during my experimental stint in LURPS at uni, I swing a pretty mean latex-and-foam-rubber-coated blade. I’m a thinker, a talker. I’m sure I’m supposed to add “a lover” to that, but I can’t think where that reference has popped into my head from. Of course, even I have been prone to such primal savagery: after my breakdown I was very much into smacking inanimate objects with my fists in order to make myself feel better.

In Chicago’s this evening there was a fight. It was quite a big one actually. I missed what started it, but it was the kind of fight where two people argue, one pushes the other, the other stumbles into someone who turns round and joins in, pushing back, and it just escalates from there.

I didn’t get involved, but sadly I was stood very close. Close enough, in fact, to get an elbow in the small of my back as somebody flew my way. Unsurprisingly this hurt like hell. Not just because I’d been elbowed, hard, but of course as Sod’s Law would have it, they managed to catch me right at the place where my back is screwed up.

I spent the rest of the evening probably looking very sullen and angry and irritated, which is how I always look when I’m trying to disguise the fact my back hurts like hell. Even now, sitting down 3 hours or so later, its still twinging away and it pisses me off.

What the hell was so important that two people felt the need to fight over in a bar on a saturday night out? A spilt drink? Accidentally treading on someone’s foot? What ludicrously petty thing could possibly have sparked such a fracas? Whatever happened to just going out and relaxing and unwinding, listening to some music, having a dance?

I mean sure, I can sit on my high horse and tell people that they should probably drink less and have more fun, especially in light of seeing how drink can be pretty destructive to people you care about, but I need to drink less myself so I’m probably a big hypocrit either way.

Tangental blog much?!

So yes, fighting. I don’t like it. I’ve had a year 7 kid try and beat me up – did I write a blog about that one a while back? Might have done! – and that was laughable. I’ve seen kids of all ages try and beat each other up for fun! And I’ve seen grown men of thirty or so hitting each other in the face in a bar for something like knocking someone’s drink over.

I mean yeah, having someone spill Stella down your shirt is annoying as hell – especially if, like me, the smell of the stuff makes you wanna stick lit matches up your nostrils – but is that really any reason to give someone a black eye?! Whatever happened to a gentlemanly “Sorry mate, lemme buy you a drink to make up for it?”

Or am I just living in my own little fantasy world?

Errr…. ignore the part of me that’s, y’know, a fantasy writer, when thinking about answering that question…

I had this blog all planned. It was going to be a happy, shining blog, reminiscing about the evolution of television from the mid-90s. This would have perhaps shown my age, and how I’ve dated as badly as a mobile phone in a music video, but I wouldn’t have cared. Mid-90s TV formed the foundation of who I am today!

But alas this is not to be, as other stuff happened before I got to write it. Let me explain.

I’m sure any of you that use computers as much as I do run out of space eventually. Hard disks can only store so much data, and they start to slow down — or “chug” — the closer to capacity they come. Now while TV show release dates ARE changing so that the UK is getting new series closer to their US releases, I still prefer to watch the shows I like straight away. So I download them. I also tend to watch them when they finally do air on British TV. I also tend to buy the box sets (the collector’s 5-series DVD set of Andromeda is sat right behind me, for example. Yes, I plan on watching it in a marathon of poor special FX and Kevin Sorbo-ness.) This is my thinly veiled defence against “zomg he is pirate! Yarrr!” or something.

Some of these TV shows I like to store to watch again and again until the DVDs are released. Things like the Dresden Files pilot episode, which — at approx 2 hours long — was very cool, but not out on DVD and only available in the US on Sci-Fi. I watch it now and again to remind myself what it is about the series (and the books) that I love so much. But it’s over 1gig worth of file. These all add up. So I store all this kind of stuff on an external HD to save myself from a chugging computer fate.

All was going fine with this plan, but now DISASTER has struck.

I have a very simple, 250gig external HD, which I’ve used to back up pretty much everything from the last 7 years or so. In fact, when my sister was moving out, and I was having the big overhaul/tidyup, I actually went through many of my old backup CDs and tried to consolidate the data I have onto the external HD. And now, via an application of Sod’s Law, the external HD has decided to screw up. Connecting it in Windows makes explorer hang. Trying to access anything on it makes explorer hang. Interacting with it in any way (except one, more on this in a moment)…you guessed it… makes explorer hang.

There is 232 gig worth of data on this drive. Granted more than a bit of it is TV programmes that I haven’t deleted yet (I’ve got the DVDs now). Some of it is Anime. Some of it is Doctor Who. I think some of it may have been the Sarah Connor Chronicles actually. Either way, a huge chunk of it is TV and I would in no way miss any of this stuff – well, apart from House S4, but that’s out on DVD this month so that’s fine.

What I will miss, if I can’t retrieve it, is photos, work, silly things that — retrospectively — I should have backed up elsewhere instead. I never even thought about it. That annoying “What if the external HD fucks up?” question. I certainly didn’t expect to have any problems with it only 6 months after I bought it, but considering my run of luck with external storage devices, I should have known better. The sad fact is that, while I have plenty of copies of a lot of the older stuff knocking around on CD — I didn’t throw ALL of them away in the clear out — there’s a lot of stuff that I simply don’t have backed up elsewhere. This IS my backup device, after all. It was a purchase designed to ensure I didn’t have to spend hours backing stuff up onto DVD.

But now it seems I may pay for that error of judgement with the loss of a considerable number of irreplaceable items. This makes me a very sad panda.

This is not to say all hope is lost, however. I currently have a programme scanning every single sector of the drive in the hopes of retrieving as much of my data as possible. I started this scan at 6:05am on 9th August 2008, and at 2:22pm on the 10th August 2008 as I write this very sentence, the scan is 39% done. It’s a slow one, and I live in fear of a powercut, or the cable to fall out, or something that will cause me to have to start the whole process all over again.

I’ve pondered if it’s worth it. How much of the crap on that drive do I ever actually look at?! But that isn’t the point, really, is it. Because I know that as soon as I give up on attempting to retrieve this data, then I’ll need some of it. This, really, is the problem with the digital era. Nothing exists “for real” until you make it real. Photos are a collection of pixels until you print them out.

A big chunk of the backed up stuff — probably 5% or so — is PSD files. My artwork, in the many stages of work-in-progress. I save all of those just in case I want to go back and change things, or steal elements for another painting, or use portions of them for something in web design. There’s several gigs worth of these, as PSD files are pretty damned hefty, that I don’t have backed up elsewhere. I COULD have burned them to DVD, but I didn’t. I relied on one device.

Never again! It seems I will have to add even further to the clutter that is my workspace by adding a second external backup drive to the mix. A smaller, more robust one, for critical backups of stuff. I may also need to add a third HD into my PC itself. All to ensure that, if I have critical data, if I do manage to recover the stuff that is important to me from this buggered HD, then I’ll have multiple copies of it just in case another Data Disaster happens again.

Let this be a lesson to me, and to you too!