Dawn and Dusk Investigations

In the world of Dawn and Dusk Investigations, London seems to be under the constant threat of increasingly devious and creative serial killers. What most of the public don’t realise, however, is that these killers, who often seem to have something of an odd streak, are actually some of history’s most notorious criminals, turned immortal long ago, and assaulting the world one at a time.

Enter Kalander Incorporated, a mysterious company who employ Detectives Dawn and Dusk. With enough money and political ties, the company has full control of all the cases involving the immortal criminals.

Lives always hang in the balance as the likes of Jack the Ripper and Elizabeth Bathory have had centuries to plan their murders. Only Desmond, the newly appointed Dawn and his partner, the enigmatic Dusk, whom Kalander has decided are the best of the best, have any hope of riddling out the immortals’ crimes.

Though things may seem singular at first, a grander plot is in motion. The mysterious Enigma Killer performs a final murder whenever one of the killers is caught. A final “take that” to Inspector Dusk, who has never managed to catch him. He is in contact with all the killers, and the one to thank for their immortality.

This was the third series I came up with, first becoming truly inspired after watching the anime Death Note. I was intensely captivated by the cleverness of the series and loved the cat and mouse element. This was further enhanced when I started to gain an interest in Sherlock Holmes, greatly helped by the adaptations by Guy Riche and the BBC respectively.

The three rules I knew I must follow when I started Dawn and Dusk were:

1) Make it clever.

2) Make it logical.

3) Make it interesting.

The last one was of most importance. It’s one thing to look over an investigation and say “oh now that’s a clever conclusion”, but it’s another to find something interesting. Of utmost importance, is remembering that it’s a book.

In one early incarnation, the whole series was based around one criminal – Jack the Ripper. It would have been a series of books about how Dawn and Dusk eventually catch him, getting closer and closer or getting a new clue each time. This would have worked entirely based on the cat and mouse principle. But I found it was too much and couldn’t sustain a whole series.

Seeing as the series is based around London, and I don’t actually live anywhere there the place, I decided to employ Google Street-Viewer. I’d fly around London looking for interesting exteriors. Of course I’ve had to invent the insides.

I’m thinking of possibly having a few more than these, but at present, the books are as follows (with working titles that will very well change):

- Dawn & Dusk Investigations – Jack the Ripper
- Dawn & Dusk Investigations – Guy Fawkes
- Dawn & Dusk Investigations – Elizabeth Bathory
- Dawn & Dusk Investigations – Josef Mengele
- Dawn & Dusk Investigations – Caligula
- Dawn & Dusk Investigations – Enigma Killer                  

Underside - Lady Anita

Truly a force to be reckoned with, Lady Anita is the seven-year-old girl who rules Underside with an iron fist, and acts as the primary villain of the series.  She was chosen, seemingly at random, to gain unimaginable powers, several thousand years ago. So fearsome were her abilities, that she was able to fight the Creators and force them to flee and create Paralex.

From that moment she turned Underside into a military state, with most of the country focussed on destroying Paralex. The methods she uses with her people are often harsh, with minor punishments being doled out by the Hallows, who acts as her personal police force.

Fear is the main method Anita uses to rule Underside. If the memory of her banishing the Creators isn’t enough of a reminder, then Anita’s rare public appearances often do the job. She only appears to people when things are dire. When she appears in a bustling street of people, every single individual stops and averts their gaze.

But despite her terrible powers, Anita is not indestructible and her powers do have a limit. All of her abilities appear to originate from something very mysterious, lying at the very top of her tower-the Adonium.

Personally, Anita may look like a child, but the unimaginable powers within her have made the little girl into something dark and cold. She’s quick to anger and unleashes her powers with little warning. She seems to take some cruel pleasure in causing suffering to her subjects. Though also an expert strategist, she prefers to act with violence, meeting force with force.

Like with most of my series, the villain is one of the oldest and changed parts of Underside, seeing as, like Acheron, Anita’s plans are what drive the entire plot. Originally, she was the unwitting pawn in a dark version of the Little Red Riding-Hood story, having lost her grandmother to a God-like wolf, and unknowingly asking that same powerful entity for the ability to kill it. She was granted four canine spirits, parodying the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who gave her, her powers. Her plan from there was to kill the wolf, who represented death itself, thus unbalancing nature. The unbalance would be so powerful that it would quite literally turn the world upside down, putting Underside where Paralex is now.

It would have also been ended with Anita’s Grandmother, who survived, carrying Anita’s innocence within her, returning that innocence to the girl’s soul and undoing all of her evil.

But now I’ve got something far, far better. It all centres around the source of Anita’s power. Let’s put it this way, the first Underside book ends at the top of the Adonium…         

Underside - Xavier

An ex-English teacher, Xavier is more commonly recognised as the man who went insane and murdered a classroom full of students. He’s an outlaw in possession of the Weapon, an ancient device made up of a gun which never misses and a bullet that always kills. The Weapon has an inexorable control over the person who holds it, giving them a manic sense of glee and urges to kill random people. As such, Xavier and the Weapon are hard to differentiate, making it hard to tell who is speaking at any one time.

The Weapon’s twitchy mania often makes Xavier believe he’s the star of the show, the one person Underside can rely on. In a way he’s right, with both Professor Canis and Beatrice agreeing that Xavier is an invaluable, if highly dangerous, resource.

Though the Weapon has a lot of control, shadows of Xavier’s former self still shine through, like his status as a former English teacher, for instance. As a sort of verbal tic, he always corrects the last thing he said, offering a more impressive word or phrase.

“We need to leave - now! Or better yet: at this present moment, departing this location with extreme haste is in our best interests!”

When I was still working on character, he actually came with a companion. A very tall, grey-skinned man named the Guardian. He was the one who carried the Weapon when Xavier wasn’t using it, also acting as Xavier’s personal butler. Also of note, the Weapon was originally a sword and Xavier’s mania was natural, as opposed to being part of the Weapon.

Xavier’s name was originally Tamlin Jones, being named after an English teacher I had once had myself. They shared nothing in terms of personality, I just liked the name. But in the end, I thought Xavier sounded better.

Underside - Beatrice Ledouf

Beatrice Ledouf is a high-ranking veteran of the Underside / Paralex war. She has medals for her bravery and abilities, being a fantastic strategist and an expert marksman, never going anywhere without a gun. Something of a larger woman, Beatrice hails from the north of Underside, and her voice carries a faint accent. She’s not so much ugly as she is… off-pretty.

She is often aloof and unapproachable, with an air of culture in both her tastes and mannerisms. She enjoys insulting Professor Canis and refuses to work with him.

As I said in an earlier post, when I was creating the characters of Underside, I was eager to make them as different from those of Spirit Rider as possible. This relates back to Beatrice, who at one time, was a far more attractive, thin woman with dark hair. I soon realised I’d recreated Grim, and had given her a gun. In order to combat this I went entirely in the other direction, in regards to appearances.

Once more, Beatrice is another character at least partially imported from one of the games I planned to make when I was younger. However in that iteration she was the thin woman described above, and came from a cowboy-styled dimension.

I got her name from the same place as I did Professor Benedick Canis’ – Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I was fascinated by the relationship between Benedick and Beatrice in the play and wanted to parody them to at least some extent in my own work.

At one point I had intended to give her an estranged boyfriend and then kill him off, off-screen, thus throwing her into a harrowing depression. But it felt like it was there for the sake of drama and so I binned off the notion.       

Underside - Professor Benedick Canis

Undoubtedly the smartest member of the group planning to depose Lady Anita, Professor Canis is a prolific inventor and C.E.O of Canis Industries. An attempted genetic experiment some years ago went awry, turning the good professor into a shaggy, black dog. He still wears spectacles and has a specially adapted laptop strapped to his stomach.


Though he's mostly pleasant to everyone else, he never passes up a chance to trade insults with his ex-lover Beatrice Ledouf. At the same time as this, he's also very worrisome and pedantic, being the first one to panic in a dire situation. But at the same time, this is usually when his encyclopaedic knowledge of Underside is most useful.


His family has been providing the war with death-machines, weapons, and Hallows for thousands of years, with Canis Industries being the most renowned, all purpose company in Underside. It was only when the company passed to Benedick, that he took a stand.


Professor Canis is to Underside, as Grim is to Spirit Rider. He acts as Mr. Exposition, able to explain anything overly complicated to the audience. I do feel such characters tend to be necessary in stories with so many vast and ranging concepts. At the same time, I had to distance him from Grim, so immediately toned down the sarcasm and replaced it with other traits. It could be argued that Grim's necessary attributes are divided between Professor Canis and Beatrice Ledouf, with him getting her brains and Beatrice getting her fighting prowess, though it could be argued that Tamlin Jones serves that role as well. But of course, more on them later. 


Professor Canis is another of my older characters, pre-dating my desire to be a writer. Professor Canis came from a game I wanted to design called 'Zyden', about a boy gaining the powers of the zodiac, but (all together now!) more on that later.       

Underside - Alex and Adam

Alex and Adam have been bonded, ever since childhood – whether they like it or not. Alex is a fairly typical, athletic young man. Though his only failing is that he tends to avoid confrontation and is somewhat lazy. As a child he was bullied for several years and had no friends. To remedy this, he invented Adam, a confident, catty boy, who could be his friend. Understandably, they were both surprised that Adam stuck around after childhood.

Now a seventeen-year-old, Alex is resigned to the fact that he must be clinically insane. Adam tends to agree, always taking some pleasure in being a bother. He gets in Alex’s way, mutters rude things about the people around them, and always tries to cause trouble.

When making a protagonist for Underside I knew I had to be weary not to copy and paste Sam’s character. To avoid this I tried to make Alex as different as I could. I automatically made him older, closer to an adult than a child. At one point, Alex was also more integral to the plot. That is to say, he had some secret piece of knowledge trapped in his head. But then I began to realise – I’d made him Underside’s Spirit Rider. So I changed that, pulled it all back and made Alex absolutely normal. No magic, no abilities. Nothing.

Meanwhile, Adam is very important as well. Within the first book of the series, we get hints that there’s something more to him. He mainly acts as an acidic comic-relief, but there’s still something more – even if he doesn’t know it himself.      

Underside

Underside is a continent on the same world as Paralex, though located on the opposite side of the planet, with Paralex at one pole and Underside at the other, hence its name. It was around roughly a thousand years before Paralex was even imagined, originally being where Paralex is now. But when one little girl, Lady Anita, gained the powers of a God, she led a revolt against their Creators. Dismayed that their creations had turned out so rotten, the Creators literally turned the world upside down, and made Paralex in its place. In a world without the sun, a world of perpetual night, Lady Anita rose to power, building a vast tower that stretched into the sky and creating a cluster of artificial moons to shed light on her people. And so Underside advanced, quickly gaining control of powerful and advanced technology. Enough to rival Paralex’s grasp of magic, which Underside lacked. Jealous of the Creators’ new project, Lady Anita waged war on Paralex. They’ve never managed to gain a foothold in Paralex, with most of the fighting taking place on Underside’s beaches and coasts.

That’s where our story comes in. Set about twenty or so years after Spirit Rider, we meet Alex, a seventeen year old, unemployed boy, living in Underside’s capital. He’s something of an oddball, having an imaginary friend named Adam. Certainly not by choice of course. Adam simply refused to leave after childhood.

Alex’s unemployment is soon discovered and rather than being conscripted into the army, he opts to work in the Adonium, Lady Anita’s tower. Once there he uncovers and becomes embroiled in a plot to destroy whatever lies at the top of the Adonium, the mysterious force which gives Anita her powers. Because without her, there’d be no cause for war. And the people of Underside are REALLY sick of the war.

I created Underside when Spirit Rider was ‘fully formed’ in my head. Realised that I loved my fantasy world so much – I never wanted to leave it! So what better way, than to extend the world!

The plot of Underside also went through a few different forms, at one point having the cast travel around in a big, red spaceship. I decided against the ‘crew-like’ formation because it clashed with Tall Tales (more on that series later), which was more deserving of a crew.

I made Underside out as a mysterious threat, only mentioned sparingly in Spirit Rider. I also gave Underside advanced, futuristic technology to differentiate it from the magical, medieval world of Paralex. Also I fancied writing a sci-fi story at some point.

The books planned for this series are currently as follows:

- Underside: The Gunpowder Plot

- Underside: The Infernal Prison

- Underside: The First Sun

         

Spirit Rider - Acheron Dae-Cache Beachis

With me, as with most people, a series can live or die, based on its villain. Whenever gearing myself up and deciding if I wanted to read something or watch a film, I hope to see some glimpse of the villain in the blurb or the trailer. Even since I was a little boy, I’ve always liked the villains best. After watching Power Rangers each and every morning, I would run up to my bedroom and sketch out the monster from that episode.

And so we turn to Acheron Dae-Cache Beachis. Our leading Luceurge is everything I look for in a villain. He’s powerful, intelligent, cool, and suave. Always casual, he’ll more often than not engage Sam and Grim in some verbal sparring before the spells start to fly. Undoubtedly, were Sam not the luckiest boy on the planet, Acheron would have killed him a long time ago. So more often than not, it’s Grim who he faces off against. In many ways they are two sides of the same coin, both vastly intelligent and alarmingly powerful. Though if pressed, I might suggest that Acheron has a slight edge on her, when it comes to intelligence and planning.

Every time I write a scene with Acheron in it, my first thought is ‘make him cool’. He’s rarely flustered and often two steps ahead of everyone else, even if it seems he isn’t. Naturally, being the villain, he gets all the best lines.

He’s also one of my oldest characters, predating Spirit Rider as a series; he’s also gone through the most changes. Originally he was the villain of one of my aborted series about a futuristic wizard who cast spells with jewels and gloves. In his first incarnation, Acheron was more of a Lich, a zombie wizard. He had mottled skin and exposed bones in places. Most of his hair was missing and he generally looked like a mess.

But that series died before it was ever written, though I still liked Acheron’s character and moved him onto my ‘new’ series Spirit Rider. Back then his grand, master plan, the thing upon which the series turns, was pretty simple. He wanted to entirely corrupt his own soul, which was already mostly done, accounting for his zombie-like appearance. Only with an entirely dark soul could he kill pure and innocent creatures. Then I ditched that, made him normal and had him trying to resurrect his dead girlfriend. Again, not too original and it lowers his villain score significantly. Finally I settled on his current plan, which will remain a secret for quite some time. For a short while I fancied having him wear glasses and a leather trench-coat.  On a related note I suppose I should mention that Luceurgy, the brand of magic Acheron uses, was once Lucemancy, until I found out ‘-mancy’ was a common mistake and ‘-urgy’ is more appropriate.

I gave him a pet robin because it seems so innocent and innocuous. Having an adorable, fluttering robin really offsets his murderous personality. And of course Turdus isn’t there just as a pet, he holds more significance than anyone could ever imagine.

     

Spirit Rider - The Queen, Mr. Cinnamon, and Lady Rosemary

For today only, ladies and gentlemen, I give you three character profiles for the price of one!

Let’s start with The Queen – ruler of Paralex! She’s a bit of a stuffy, though kind sort of person. She’s got the stiff snobbery of the upper classes, but still tries to treat her subjects as equals. Somewhat easily annoyed, she can sometimes be an obstacle for Sam and Grim, but she genuinely means well.

To be honest, across the whole of my writing journey, she’s stayed very much the same, never really altering at all. I’ll admit, every now and then her dialogue can be a touch tricky to write. She’s so royal; she’s above using apostrophised words. It can sometimes make her speech kind of clunky, but I usually catch it.

Now where The Queen can cause difficulties, but means well, Mr. Cinnamon just wants to be a nuisance. He hates Sam and Grim from the onset and makes it his personal business to blame them for everything that’s wrong with the world. He’s snooty, arrogant, and condescending. He’s The Queen’s right hand man, and he’s going to make sure no one forgets it.

Definitely one of my favourite characters to write, Mr. Cinnamon’s lines are always ready and waiting. It’s always fun to try and push the boundaries of how insulting he can be before someone hits him. He’s only ever changed in one regard, his name. He began life with the name Skaro, but I soon realised I’d stolen that from Doctor Who (home-world of the Daleks). Then I still liked how the name sounded so I adapted it to Skartre, which made it into the same written draft as ‘Kyle’. But I still thought that Skartre was a poor excuse for a name, so I threw it out altogether. Instead I decided to try something new altogether. Give him a silly-sounding name to go at odds with his acidic and polished personality. And thus, Mr. Cinnamon was born.

Finally we came to The Queen’s mother-in-law, Lady Rosemary. An old woman by the time of ‘The Royal Problem’, she married into royalty, and thus, managed to avoid most all of the poshness. She’s usually very short and to the point, not believing in tip-toeing around sensitive issues. She was previously head of the Palace Guards, and so is always ready, possibly even raring for a fight.

Again, she’s a character who changed very little over the course of writing. At one point I had her secretly standing guard of a now deleted Artefact. A pair of gauntlets that granted Sam super strength. He was going to get them toward the end of the chapter ‘Royal Trinity’, but I decided to cut them because I didn’t fancy having Sam get two Artefacts in one book.           

Spirit Rider - The Grim Reaper

WARNING! SPOILERS AHOY! READ CHAPTER 5 OF ‘THE ROYAL PROBLEM’ BEFORE YOU PROCEED!

The. Grim. Reaper. It doesn’t get much better than that.  From the off, she’s introduced as charismatic, sharp-witted, and sarcastic. She’s most definitely not the dark, fearful being that Paralex’s legends paint her as. In all situations she will try words before force, often using people’s fear or unease to her advantage. She’s over a hundred years old, with four thousand plus years’ worth of memories from previous Reapers. She’s too old to be concerned with people. It’s all she’s ever known. She’s entirely care-free, doing what she wants, when she wants. Not even The Queen can give her an order most of the time.

But when the situation calls for it, she can change in an instant, calling on eons of experience as a fighter and magic-user. Her brain is endlessly brilliant, a master of many things from advanced mathematics to a working knowledge of almost every creature on the planet.

From a young age, I was fascinated by the concept of a Grim Reaper, helped greatly of course, by the Discworld series. Long before Spirit Rider, when I wanted to be a Game Designer, one of the first games I devised was one where a man became a universal Grim Reaper and went from dimension to dimension reaping the souls of demons.

As far as Spirit Rider is concerned, never, at any point was Grim anything but female. It was one of the earliest parts of Spirit Rider that I was sure of. Before I started writing it, I had been reading a book with a powerful, commanding female character, which offered quite some inspiration. I read it and thought ‘ooh that’s pretty cool, I might do something a bit like that’.

Of course having her as an ‘it’ for the first few chapters is very deliberate. Naturally you assume that if anything, she’s male. But whilst in the ‘expected’ persona, I show her as a likeable and intelligent character interacting with Sam and a powerful fighter facing off against Acheron. Then the gender reveal.

I call it the ‘L Principal’. Just like in Death Note they showed L to be a brilliant detective, before we see he’s a weedy, weird little man who loves sweets, so I showed Grim as brilliant before the gender reveal. Now don’t get me wrong, I'm no misogynist! But I think I know if I were reading the book for the first time and was immediately confronted with a female Grim Reaper, I would question it. Some part of me just wouldn’t be sure. So I show the before, just to be sure.

With the amount of interaction between her and Acheron, it could easily be argued that she sometimes edges in on Sam’s territory as the main character. There was a very brief time when I considered dropping Sam altogether and just having the adventures of Grim! But this was very brief indeed. Sam is a very necessary character.      

Spirit Rider - Sam

We meet our simplistic, teenaged protagonist in the village of Besfen, a place which literally ignores the rest of the world. Plot device used so that the reader is in the same position and needs Paralex explained to them? You betcha! But beyond that, Sam’s well natured, though useless. He’s the last person you’d want saving the world, mostly due to the fact that he can barely handle a sword and any magic he can manage is minor at best.

He isn’t the pure and perfect hero with the heart of gold either. He certainly knows right from wrong and would never ‘join the dark side’; however we can’t forget that he’s a hormonal teenager. He makes bad decisions in the fit of teenage emotions, sometimes with far-reaching consequences.

I’ll admit, as I said earlier, Sam started out as something that allowed me to believably explain the rules and beings of my world. For a long while I kind of disliked Sam, and disliked myself for so shamelessly using him. He never had a personality and his face was always blurry in my mind. But over time, the more I wrote him, the more I was able to sense a personality. He’s self-conscious. He’s often quick to anger. He criticises himself. He likes toast. It’s the little things that make all the difference.

In the early stages Sam actually had someone else from Besfen who tagged along with him and Grim. It was originally a one armed boy named Kyle… and his pet chicken. Yeah, believe it or not he actually made it into a written draft! From there the ‘other Besfen person’ became Sam’s younger brother, who had a passion for plants and from there to a girl, who served no other purpose than to be a love interest. Then again I did briefly entertain the idea that in a twist, it might turn out she was the Spirit Rider, not Sam.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHOY! READ CHAPTER 8 OF ‘THE ARMY OF BONES’ BEFORE YOU PROCEED!

Of similar note, Evan started life a white, flying horse named Archie. It sounded like a good idea for transport, though I quickly scrapped the idea because it left Grim with nothing! It sounded too weird just having her sit on the back.     

Spirit Rider

This is my oldest series, the first real set of books I came up with. The idea first formed in the approach to Christmas 2007. Ideas and the barest strings of a plot had begun to form a little while beforehand, but I held off writing anything until Christmas, when I was due to get my first laptop. Christmas came and went, Spirit Rider: The Royal Problem had begun.

And then, over a year later, on the Friday 13^th of February 2009… it happened. I suffered some severe computer trouble and had to “wipe” my laptop. In the commotion Spirit Rider was lost. All that work, the book nearly half completed, was now gone. From that day forth it became known as The Great Loss.

But I prevailed! I started over, rewrote everything even better than before! Trust me, looking back, I’m glad of The Great Loss. When I remember the first draft, I remember Sam in a leather jacket and a whole chapter spent clothes shopping. Seriously.

March 2010 marked the end of the journey. Sure I’ve added minor revisions since then, but the mass of the story was done and written.

Upon first glance, you’d be forgiven for calling Spirit Rider ‘typical’. It’s the story a boy who has to go a quest, in order to beat an evil Magician and save the world. Sure, you’ve probably heard it a thousand times before, but why do you keep hearing it? Because people are always reinventing the idea – and Spirit Rider is no exception.

Though it’s undeniably fantasy, the whole thing has an entirely… casual feel to it. Never lazy, but certainly casual. There’s no complicated magic system and the politics are simple at best. Paralex is a world of creative convenience, not accuracy. The setting is overtly medieval, but they still have modern kitchens, bathrooms, and fashion. Not to mention our main character is a pretty simple guy, hardly the dashing puritan hero you’d imagine. But more on him later.

But enough with behind the scenes nonsense, you’re here for plot.

Acheron Dae-Cache Beachis, a powerful Luceurge, a Magician who specialises in death and torture, has been causing trouble for some time. Rather out of the blue, the Grim Reaper comes to Sam Martyr, announcing he’s due to become the world’s latest Spirit Rider, the person destined to best Acheron. The only catch is, he needs to collect six legendary Artefacts required to make him fully become the Spirit Rider. From there he and the Grim Reaper set out on the journey of a lifetime, questing for the Artefacts and making their main base of operations in the Palace of Paralex, with The Queen becoming a fast ally. But Acheron waits around every corner, always ready with a new way to kill Sam and new plot that threatens the world. From trying to assassinate The Queen to working with an ancient family of Demons, there’s little Acheron won’t try.

There are currently four books planned, with the first two already written: 

- Spirit Rider: The Royal Problem
- Spirit Rider: The Army of Bones
- Spirit Rider: The Demon Invasion
- Spirit Rider: The Tenth Plague

Did you enjoy that? I did. Now… onto the characters….            

A Proposal Of Sorts...

So hello there! Of recent, I've been having a teensy bit of trouble deciding what topics (if any at all) to write about here. And then the solution came to me: people make blogs about their work and / or themselves. 


Well I'm an author aren't I? Why don't I write about that!


Yep, I've got plans for six series of books. Now if I do a blog post about each book series, along with a post about the books I may one day do, and a post about the books I gave up on THEN several posts focussing on the main characters and villains of my series - then we're good for the next 47 days or so (my maths is appalling)!

So If Time-Travelling Space Lizards Invaded In The Time Of Guy Fawkes And Dimensionally Displaced Humanity And Claimed The Earth As Their Own...

No, seriously this is the kind of thing I spend my days thinking about.


So give us another thousand years or so to get some decent laser guns and semi-working spaceships. We can flounce around our own solar system like it's anyone's business, but we're still not up for interstellar travel.


But the Ankiolum are. They're this race of green, lizard men, who have a bit of a handle on time-travel and time-related technology. They send satellites across the galaxy looking for planets with a 'temporal weak point' literally a place in the universe where time is a little looser and more malleable. 


Turns out there's a temporal weak point on Earth. So the Ankiolum launch a full-scale invasion. We try to be diplomatic and eventually put up a fight, but are vastly outmatched in terms of technology.


The temporal weak point is tiny, so the Ankiolum can only send one person at it. Said person winds up in 1605. From there he has to set up camp beneath the Houses of Parliament and use some kit to widen the temporal weak point and allow through the invasion force.


Guy Fawkes sniffs him out and so decides to blow up Parliament and do away with the nasty invader. Well instead, history plays out as we know and Mr. Fawkes is arrested before he can light the fuse of all his lovely gunpowder. 


A few years later, the temporal weak point is wide enough and the rest of the Ankiolum come on through. They're not entirely monstrous so as opposed to wiping out Humanity, they set up some space-colonies and displace us to there using some clever, planet-wide dimensional technology.


Now as a side effect of the dimensional displacement, all of Humanity gets a little scrambled. As far as we're aware, we've always lived in space. We evolved in space.


From there, the Ankiolum have got a nice habitable and more importantly empty planet to colonise.


That's not to say that all hope is lost. You don't just have the course of history altered with zero side-effects. There are some people who know that something just isn't right with the universe and some who are intuitive enough to know to Earth was once ours... somehow.


And then there are those people, maybe only one or two in the whole Human race, who know EXACTLY how things are meant to be. They remember both time-lines.


But really, it's just our word against theirs. Who's ever going to believe us...?

Eighteen Year Old Books

So I'm tunnelling my way through the BIG ARSE THEMATIC ESSAY and I'm about a little over half-way. In order to complete it, I had to take a book out of the University library. 


Now for some reason or another, I love old books. There's just something kind of special about holding something that dozens or even hundreds of people have held before you. 


The book I'm using was printed roughly eighteen years ago. That's nearly as old as me! It's not quite the same with REALLY ancient books in museums, because they've sort of lost their magic. You know that they've been in a glass box for fifty years and people only touch it them with latex gloves and tongs. 


But do you know what the best part is? A legacy.


The book I'm using is full of old notes in the margin, Half-Blood Prince style. It's really fascinating to imagine who left those notes, where they were, where they are now. 


Now some of them were a little wrong ('A burning forehead, and a parching tongue' is NOT "sad after sex so it's gd". Personally I took it to mean that the figures upon the vase existed in a perfect, timeless world where their love would never fade, as opposed to love in a transient timeline, which Keats believes will eventually go sour. But I digress) but that doesn't detract from the brilliance of it one bit.


Part of me is tempted to leave something completely nonsensical in there, just so I can imagine someone else taking the book out in another twenty years, and having a little chuckle.  

The Worst Reason To Blog

Now let's be honest with one another, we both know why I'm here.


I made one single blog post over a year ago, then dumped this mess and left it rot amongst all the other abandoned pages on the internet. But now I'm back - and isn't that the important thing?  


All together now - 
P - R - O - C - R - A - S - T - I - N - A - T - I - O - N!


Yeah, I've got three essays that need to be done by Wednesday, or at least one NEEDS to be done for Wednesday, the other two need to be done by Friday, but that's inconvenient to travel to, so they need to be finished by Wednesday instead.


Creative Writing - Reading As A Writer: 'Widows'
English Language - Analysis of the Linguistic Conventions of 'Richard III'
English Literature - BIG ARSE 'THEMATIC' ESSAY ABOUT SOME ROMANTICIST POEMS


That last one needs to be at least 1800 words long, which is always daunting. The other two aren't too much of a difficulty, but all together they look like Hell.


I should REALLY get started...