A choice of sticky endings

If you’ve followed the life of this blog (and also my book, which is a bit of a giveaway!) you'll know by now that my imagination is firmly entrenched in the world of the fantastique.
After a chat with a mate not so long ago, it was suggested that one of the best exercises a writer of fantastical literature can perform to strengthen his or her imagination and writing abilities, is to run role-playing games. We’re not talking the sort you perform at business events on how to deal with tricky customers or what to do in an emergency, but the kind where you adopt a completely different personality and go on various weird and wonderful adventures armed with a pencil, some paper and several dice (and of course your imagination) to battle ghouls, solve mysteries and embark on colourful quests.

So I thought about this for a while, and having had some experience of role-playing games in my formative years, I thought “why not?”…

…(We now interrupt this blog for a brief flashback…)

When I was a teenager I used to be an avid gamer, playing all manner of fantasy board games, but gave that up once I discovered girls. I guess it’s that age-old story of trying to impress someone of the opposite-sex in your teenage years and willing to give up something others see as a little “uncool”. Which is perhaps why when I was 17 years old my obsession with the fantastique found itself a new direction in writing books rather than gaming. It was way “cooler” to write horror stories to terrorise your friends and girlfriend, than it was to mess about with little lead figures and many-sided dice.

Not that I’m complaining – the redirecting of my imaginative energies nearly paid off when my first book, The Forever Chain almost found a publisher with HarperCollins when I was 18, but just stumbled at the final hurdle :-(.

I always considered The Forever Chain to be the first book I ever wrote, but I recently "re"discovered this isn’t so. Along with all the board-games I played as a kid, I also had a very healthy stack of “Fighting Fantasy” and “Choose Your Own Adventure books” (anyone remember these?). During a recent “excavation” in my mum’s attic I discovered a box of these very worn and age-stained books, and it sparked a fair few memories of when I used to rampage zealously through each book, choosing my own path, fighting untold bizarre creatures and often coming to an extremely sticky end (for the life of me, I only remember completing a few of these books – most of the time I would just die!). But that didn’t stop me from buying dozens of gaming books, and when I ran out of those, I then wrote some of my own.

So I must have been about ten years old when I wrote my first book – a fifty page opus about a “Golden Idol” as I recall. It followed a quest (as most of these books did) to find a rare and expensive idol (that looked like a deformed monkey with diamonds for eyes – yes, it looked weird), and you had to fight past zombies, serpents, goblins, a witch with fire for hair and some odd creatures with random names. The book was vividly illustrated and coloured (by me), and the monsters and traps were all lovingly created; a homage to the Fighting Fantasy books I enjoyed so much.

And yes, there were many, many sticky endings..!

(transmission resumes…)


Ah, such innocent days. But I’m becoming side-tracked (as memories often do), so let’s get back to the rationale of playing games again, shall we?

I’ve just tracked down a copy of an RPG called “Call of Cthulhu” based on the stories by HP Lovecraft. I’ve never played this before, but being a 19th century horror fantasy game it should be right up my street. It should give my imagination a thorough workout and make me think on my feet, i.e. describing a scene immediately and effectively without having the luxury of drafting or re-writing, to an audience who will give me instantaneous feedback and be critical if I’m not telling them everything they want to know in the atmospheric detail they expect.

Whether or not I’ll get a chance to play it is all down to having enough time to learn the basic rules and gather a group of people together, who are either drunk enough, or have that same weird imagination as I have. But we’ll see.

Afterall, I’ve always loved telling horror stories around the campfire, but wouldn’t it be great if my audience could choose what happens next?

Even it means choosing their own extremely sticky end?!!!!



PS: This will be the last blog entry for a week or so (due to work and family related things) – so please forgive my absence, and just talk amongst yourselves for a while, and I’ll drop in when I can.

Take care

x