Celtic Bard: Blog

I have just submitted the first story in a new series called Rage. Part I should be up by tomorrow and I will work on getting Part II edited and posted ASAP. It is about a bouncer who has a medical condition that causes him to produce the same chemicals that get released during sex whenever his body triggers an adrenaline rush when the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. It first manifests when he saves his older brother from school bullies and makes him high as a kite afterward. Since modern man frowns upon berserker warrior types, he channels his rage into more acceptable avenues which allow him to feed his rage addiction. Unfortunately for him, his life is so much more complicated than he knew and a bad night at work shows him just how not simple his world was about to become.

I came up with this one while driving to my sister's house and listening to the radio. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the song (something metal, I think) but I know "rage" was in there somewhere and it was something about someone sending the singer into a rage. I have been working on this for a while now, taking me away from other things I would rather be working on, but the size of the anvil of inspiration my muse hit me with when sending this story to me was big enough to have crushed the car I was driving at the time. In other words, this one would not let me be. I have finished the first two stories in the new series and hopefully that means I will be able to work on other stuff now that they are out of my system.

I was hoping to have the next chapters of Future Distorted and Anomaly of the Fates out by now as well as more work done on In the Darkness Falling (the sequel to Enter the Darkness), but I have had no urge to pick those up because of my concentration on Rage. And, unfortunately, I am about to get really busy at work between the end of March and the end of May-beginning of June. I will endeavor to get one of the unfinished stories' new chapters out before then, but my muse has been a bit on the bitchy and uncooperative side lately. For some reason she seems to have a wicked mad on and Rage is the result.

That is all for now. Enjoy Rage and hopefully your favorite unfinished project will be out soon.

I know it has been a few weeks since I last posted something, but I have been a bit busy of late and Mother Nature has been a bit bitchy, causing the loss of ability to use the computer or even have lights by which to read and write. I am working on stuff, but none of it is in imminent readiness for submission. I do have something new that has been getting the most attention from my muse lately that I may begin posting perhaps as early as this week. I am also working on some of the stuff In Progress as well as projects that I have written about here previously, but none of that is ready either. So, as the title asks, abide in patience and you will be rewarded. That is all for now.

I have finally finished and submitted The Death of Love in Morristown! For those of you who have been waiting and e-mailing me and praying to my muse that I would eventually finish it, I apologize. My muse is a rather capricious and sadistic bitch who decided to whack me upside the head with ideas for many, many other things over the last two years. As I wrote when I first posted it, Death and Love in Marjah came to me as the first sentence of the story and it was almost a rush to fill it in from there. The Death of Love in Morristown was prompted by some of you readers who read the first story and wanted loose ends tied up. That is not how I write, generally, and so the inspiration was lacking. Or maybe my muse was just sulking at having her job usurped. Whatever the case, I got to the first two paragraphs of Part III of TDoLiM and then the ideas dried up. Last week I decided to grind it out and finish it, if only to make that yellow line in my story list go away. The end result is something more along the lines of a trip down a painful memory lane for Maeve and some insight into Con for Shameera. Either way, I hope those of you who have been longing for the completed story are happy with the end result. Please, please, PLEASE don't ask for another one. This one was almost painful to write and I don't like writing when stories get like that.

As for the other two new stories, I want to thank those of you who have responded to them; it has been overwhelmingly positive. Aside from one person who decided to use the story as an opportunity to blame the Fall of Man and everything that preceded it on George W. Bush, the e-mails have been supportive, even from those who felt I went a little heavy on the political tones of it. I usually try my hardest to keep the overt politics out of stories, if only so I don't get mail like that, but A Match Made in the Hindu Kush was about a soldier in Afghanistan and nobody who talks to guys serving in that mess can be 100% neutral. I have too many people in my life who are associated with the military to keep that from coloring my thoughts on that subject. And anyone who spends any amount of time with military personnel and their families would have trouble, too.

On The Arrogance of Empire, I have gotten positive responses as well but one reader sent me an e-mail that made me think about what I was thinking on that story when I wrote it. He seemed to want to know why Kallath did what he did and how Sieti-Kha went so bad so fast as an Empire. Suffice it to say the e-mail and my response were much longer than that but that will do for a summary. For those of you with similar questions I will repost the e-mail and my response to it on my external blog at http://jmfhildebrandt.livejournal.com/ so I don't have to retype it all from memory (the name withheld, of course). It was an interesting and thought provoking e-mail and I tried to make my response worthy of the effort he put into it.

That is all for now. I will hopefully get back to work on your favorite unfinished story soon and my muse will no doubt hit me with new stuff (the sadist). Until then, enjoy the new postings and revisiting the older stuff.

As promised, ladies and gents, new stories have been submitted. The first, A Match Made in the Hindu Kush, was already posted as of this blog entry. The Webmaster is smoking today. It is about a U. S. Army sniper on a mission near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Something goes awry on his exfiltration and he winds up in a cellar, bleeding and having no memory as to how he got there. That is about all I will say about the plot. It is part of the Magic at War Universe, though none of the characters from the Con/Shameera stories are involved.

The second story, The Arrogance of Empire, is going to be the first in a new high fantasy Universe called Pan-Deia. Pan-Deia is a world that probably has waaay more gods than it needs and their fingers are always getting tangled in the threads of mortal's lives. No gods in the first story about a general sent on a doomed invasion mission but the first novel-length story in this Universe is all about what happens when gods are convinced to put all of their attention on something that has mortals in a dither. That story is called The Shattering of Faith and I will start posting that one when I have more than the chapter or two that I have now. I have been working too hard on other stuff to have done much on it lately, so it might be a while in coming.

As for The Death of Love in Morristown, I finished it as promised this week but it needs to be transcribed from chicken scratch to English onto the computer, edited, and re-edited before I can post it. There will be two more parts to it and they focus mainly on Maeve and Shameera. Hopefully they will be submitted before the end of the weekend.

That is all for now, enjoy the new stories and check back here for news on TDoLiM.

All right folks, there should be two new short stories coming your way this week, possibly into this weekend, depending on how work goes this week. The first is the introduction of a new Universe called Pan-Deia in the story The Arrogance of Empire. This is not going to be a happy story. There is no trick happy ending. What you see in the first quarter of the story is what you get throughout the entirety. This is a tragedy from beginning to end so try not to get too upset, since I have warned you. It is also written in an unconventional style as more a jog through one character's (for the most part) memories as he heads towards the end.

The second story is one many of you have e-mailed me about over the last two years and change that it has languished Incomplete and Inactive. I will, by the weekend at least, have finished The Death of Love in Morristown. This one is a story that takes place between the third and fourth to last paragraphs of Death and Love in Marjah. It was meant to wrap up a loose end or two, nothing more. So please, please don't ask for another one! This one was agony to write (thus the long lag time between Parts I & II and the final parts) and DaLiM was meant to be a stand alone story, complete in itself. After that I will get back to work on the next chapters of Future Distorted and Anomaly of the Fates and maybe even a few short stories that have languished with TDoLiM on the incomplete shelf.

There is a third story I have titled A Match Made in the Hindu Kush that I am in the middle of transcribing from chicken scratch to English. It is fairly long (though still a short story) so the conversion process may take a while. It will go in the Magic at War Universe and is about a sniper on a mission in Afghanistan. That is all I will say about that but I hope to have that one up soon, too.

That is all for now. Check back in a couple days for news on those postings.