When Evil Wins...

In my view, there are not enough stories that end with evil triumphing over good.

There is something annoyingly perfect about the bad guy winning. It leaves a taste in the mouth. Whenever you're aware that the story in front of you is one of good v evil (which arguably all stories are at their core), you instinctively wonder: 'how are they going to stop the bad guy / save the world.' When that doesn't happen, well it leaves us feeling cheated and teased, but also a bit excited.

What if Harry Potter had died when he met Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, and the world was dominated by Dark Witches and Wizards.

What if Gollum had escaped with the ring while tousling with Frodo inside Mount Doom. Middle Earth would be plunged back into a savage war.

Imagine CLU taking over the Mainframe; Agent Smith taking over the Matrix; Loki taking over Asgard. The list goes on.

When evil wins we want a rematch. We want someone else to come along and make it better. The story is not over until there is a happily ever after. Its this sensation that makes the story all the more exciting when we see the bad guys win. Its a storyline without real closure, even if we have reached the last page, completed the game or are watching the credits roll.

Here are a few of my favourite narratives in which the bad guy comes out on top, and why I think its better than the benevolent alternative.

Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne

This PC Game by Blizzard Entertainment was the expansion released for Warcraft 3, and it still serves as the final RTS instalment of the Warcraft franchise.

If there's one thing Blizzard seems to love in all of its work, its a good villain who certainly does not go down without a long, long, long, long fight. And even when he does eventually go down there is no guarantee that he will stay down.

The Warcraft 3 games have you following a number of plot lines, one of which has you playing as a light-wielding hero, Prince Arthas.

The brilliance of Arthas, as a character, is that he represents all that the archetype good guy should be. He is the prince of a bountiful and prosperous civilisation, he worships the light and all things holy, and he dedicates his life to defending his lands through justice and righteousness.  So far so good.

After fighting many battles and saving many lives, Arthas begins to make rash decisions. Situations get so bad that he becomes monomaniacally fixated on stopping evil at all costs. People die in his attempts to stop the villains of the story. Eventually he betrays his friends, his king and his faith in order to find new power that will aid him. When he finally finds that great new power, it becomes his worst enemy. The power, in the form of a sword 'Frostmourne', whispers to him and manipulates him into doing its will. Soon enough Arthas becomes the very thing that he once tried to destroy. He becomes a tyrannical sovereign of the damned and undead, The Lich King. (pictured).

In the game's expansion many heroes are trying to prevent Arthas becoming The Lich King and there is a great battle. The characters spend the duration of the game forging new alliances and doing everything they can to slow Arthas down. But in the end, Arthas gets the upper hand and reaches the Frozen Throne where he then sits as the King of the undead. That is where the game ends, showing the player the immediate effects of those events, where undead armies are charging out to destroy all that lives and all that serves the light.

The Lich King won this match. In my view, it worked brilliantly this way. If the Lich King had not won then we would never have met the character pictured above. His terrifying powers would never have been seen. The story ended in the way it did and left the world in danger and left the player wondering how this would be fixed. That made the story frustrating, but it made me certain that if anything ever came out in future that even hinted at the story's resolution then there would be no doubt that I would be getting to the end of it. Its a brilliant mechanism for keeping a franchise story alive. In some respects its like a cliffhanger, except the doors are left more open as to where the story will go next, but there is no guarantee it will go anywhere at all (the most frustrating outcome).

(Fortunately the fall of the Lich King is portrayed in World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King, but as with all things in an MMO, it only lasts a short while and you can go back and he see him sat upon his throne again.

Sherlock Holmes (Classic/Modern): The Final Problem / The Reichenbach Fall

Source BBC

 Sherlock Holmes, the genius consulting detective, is one of the great iconic urban heroes who went out on a low point.

This fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle persists as one of the greatest crime solving characters ever created in western literature. Holmes may have been quirky, dismissive and cold at times, but he had a hand in solving many, many crimes. He may not have been a magic-wielding hero of the light, but Holmes was able to bring about justice in his own way using nothing other than his sharp intellect.

Source BBC

The character of Sherlock Holmes was part of a massive controversy at the end of the 19th Century when his character was killed off while tackling what was effectively his evil duplicate, Professor Moriarty.

Although Moriarty also died, and his gang of criminals were subsequently deposed, this was still a win for the bad guys, being the criminal networks of London in general.  Justice was struck a crippling blow by the death of Holmes.

This was definitely a case of 'frustrating bad guy wins' syndrome. The world was not, and still is not, ready for Sherlock to die. But when it actually happened, well s*** went down. (not so much the case for the modern revival).

The readers and viewers did not want to believe that Sherlock had died. He was too important and his stories were too loved. This was an ending that nobody wanted. Doyle had, in his mind, put Holmes's universe to bed for good. The fans, however, refused to accept it. A world in which criminal masterminds had taken down the one man capable of unravelling all of their plots was just too grim. That's why it couldn't last.

Just like the Warcraft example, this dark ending did the best service to the franchise. Even though the stories of Sherlock Holmes had been ended, the book series was revived by Doyle, under the pressure of the fanatics. The death of Sherlock Holmes brought the franchise its second wave of popularity, which has allowed the stories to continue to be popular to this day.

So, in this case, allowing the bad guy to win in the end created a strong negative reaction. There was no fan-satisfaction in the ending of Sherlock Holmes. But despite this, the 'evil wins' ending in both examples have had the same effect of inspiring the audience to demand more.


Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Source LucasFilm

Episode V of the Star Wars film series was filled with a lot of negativity. The team of heroes were betrayed, Han Solo was frozen in carbonite, C-3PO was blown into pieces and Luke Skywalker lost his hand.

On all accounts, it was certainly a bad day at the office.

The Empire trounced the forces of good in this film, leaving the galaxy in terrible danger. Although evil had not won in quite the ways it had in the previous examples, (there was still hope) this film still had the impact of leaving people with a sour taste in the mouth. The oppressive and destructive force of The Empire had won this battle far too easily, but they had not won the war just yet.

Despite the outcome of the following film being much more akin to our normal 'happily ever after' endings, in reality the forces of evil were still on the winning side. The leaders of the Dark Side may have been defeated along with their greatest weapon, but that did nothing to defeat the fact that the Jedi forces had already been decimated long before. It seems to me like the good guys won the battle, but evil wins the war.


So why doesn't evil win?

I think most people would consider themselves to be on the good side. This is not to say that we are all perfect, certainly not. As Benedict Cumberbatch's modern day Sherlock once said - "I may be on the side of the angels, but don't think for one second that I am one of them."

It's natural for us to want to see the most relatable characters succeed in their quests. We can usually relate to the hero because they represent some form of moral stance or societal norm personified. The villain, on the other hand, represents all the kinds of chaos, anarchy or discord that we hope to avoid in our lives.

Perhaps our joy at seeing the good guy win is an instinctive behaviour that we have developed as a result of our civilised environments. Perhaps our occasional itch for seeing evil rule the day is just simply that, an itch that we need to fix quickly before we can carry on business-as-usual.

On that basis, evil cannot win indefinitely simply because it does not reflect our natural lives and behaviours. It's like a 'Big Red Button' scenario. You want to push it, just to see what happens, but once you've done it it's out of your system. On the flip side, we may not always want to see the forces of good win every struggle, but we are instinctively programmed to be satisfied with it. We are much more likely to question a bad guy's victory than a good guy's.

Writing flow

Back when the first book was being written I looked up tips and advice for how to write effectively and avoid classic pitfalls of fiction writing.

In these online adventures I stumbled upon Vonda Mcintyre's little tips which I found to be really helpful. I really recommend that any prospective writers take a lookie look at this. Good ol Vonda.

I now follow, and am followed on twitter by a fair few authors who all participate in the PubWrite group, so theres plenty of good banter and advice floating between their chit-chat.

There was a nice rule that I read about writing flow, it may be in Vonda's list, to be honest I cannay remember. The little rule was this, start writing then after 20 minutes you will be into the story again and what you are writing will actually be good. So then you keep going and going untill you faint or your brain melts into a raisin. Final step, delete the first 20 minutes work and rewrite it to round off the writing session.

This is basically forming the assumption that everything you wrote for the first 20 minutes is just wrong. Or it's right but just written badly.

Often you can really tell where the first 20 minutes stops and the good writing begins. After practicing this routine a few times you can displace the 20 minutes of writing with either imagining or general thinking about what to write.
It helps, I think :)

Finishing the sequel

2013 has been an arduous year in my life. It has brought challenges and difficult times that have truly tested the limits of my perseverance and endurance. I won't detail the exact events that I am referring to, as that is far removed from the purpose of this post.

Despite the difficulties of this year so far, I have finally finished the first draft of my UNISON sequel, titled UNISON:ARC. The story is over 130k words long - just over 2x the length of the original. 

I have mixed emotions about this achievement. I love knowing that the story is substantially complete. Just being able to see it completed is the greatest reward for the hard work and time I invested into writing it. However, at the same time, I am disappointed that the substantive writing process is over, as writing this story has been a brilliantly enjoyable experience. Obviously I still have to spend a lot of time editing and rewriting this story to make sure that it's sufficiently vetted for submissions, but that experience is not the same as watching the story write itself and grow from plan to manuscript.

I'm not complaining about editing, by the way, even if I do have an aversion to the 'red pen' - I use green to avoid this, its much less aggressive.

I hope that the sequel will follow in the footsteps of the original and make it into print, but I am very aware of the print industry's difficulties and the immense hardship of getting that covering letter, synopsis and sample three chapters noticed. Fortunately I already have a foothold as a published author, so hopefully some more doors may open for me and my sequel. Though, even if my current publisher rejects the sequel, and other publishers reject it also, I will always have the option to self-publish. Isn't technology brilliant? I think so.

So, although my blog updates have been sparse, I have returned to blogging for this exciting announcement. I thank everyone for their support and feedback on the first book and I look forward to making the second available for reading in the near future. I will make sure that I post my sample chapters on here as soon as I am happy with the edits.

Thanks!

L.H

Zen

The Last of the Magi:

In the old times, when the ancient magical bloodlines were starting to grow and expand, few would have described magic as an instrument of tyranny and oppression. Ask the people today and they would describe it as exactly that. How did the ancient gifts of nature become so tarnished in reputation?

The Sorcern are the cause.

In the early days of magic, only the fortunate bloodlines could channel the powers of nature. It was seen as a gift, believed to be bestowed only to those families who had lived in perfect harmony with nature in a mutual relationship of respect. It was the greatest blessing any could receive.

In time, the bloodlines grew and intertwined with the non-magical bloodlines to the point that the every family, every town, every city had at least one Magi amongst them. They only ever used their powers to help cultivate farmlands, summon well-needed rainfall and protect those around them. The Magi were said to be compelled by the will of the earth itself. The old Magi diaries all recorded similar beliefs, they believed that their powers gave to them an affinity to the needs of nature, and they believed that the misuse of their magic would result in their magic being taken from them. So the Magi served nature from birth until death. No Magi ever committed a crime, or misused his magic for selfish or evil purposes. Nature had a way of making even the most unpleasant of characters act selflessly when it came to the use of magic, it was a bizarre fact of magic. So, over time, the Magi helped the weak become strong and helped the vulnerable find shelter in the comforts of nature. Despite all they did for the people, the Magi never accepted praise or joined in the celebrations in their honour. They preferred to do their deeds and then return to the forests, rivers, mountains and deserts of the world and attune themselves with nature.

I wish I could have seen those days. When people and nature were completely in synch, thanks to the Magi. But those days are gone. Taken away by the Sorcern.

There were many who grew jealous of the Magi and their gifts. They tried desperately to find a way to steal their magic for themselves. Some Magi were killed, some made prisoner. Some tried drinking the blood of a Magi, or torturing them, or even eating their flesh. But such crimes against nature only drew them further from achieving their goals.

Some of the wealthy lords of the land rallied together and founded an organisation that studied nature and the Magi in order to find the secret behind their connection. They created great furnaces, wind tunnels and water jets to study the forces of nature in its most intense conditions. Its not certain exactly how it was done, but the organisation discovered a new form of power in their great nature factories. It was said that they bathed people in the gasses and vapours that came from their experiments. No-one knows for sure because the Magi burnt the factories to the ground, along with those inside. The experiments make the Magi fill sick, as they felt nature being abused for its power.

Although they managed to protect the balance of nature that day, the damage in the long term had already been done. In secret, the surviving scholars and researchers had escaped with the product of their studies. The wealthy lords were able to quickly refine the process and imbue their bodies with the violent forces of nature. They had just created sorcery.

If magic was the ability to commune with nature and share its gifts, then sorcery was equivalent to stealing the powers of nature and manipulating it with force. The difference was plain to see in its execution. The Magi had the ability to raise the hopes of all who witnessed their magic, the sun seemed brighter, the birds sounded happier and even the grass and trees seemed to become healthier. The Sorcern could invoke great feats of power with their sorcery, but at a cost. Sorcery ripped the life out of the nature that it manipulated. It killed trees, crippled animals and caused storms and droughts when used in great intensity.

Now, many years after the first Sorcern walked the land, I have seen the friction between the Magi and Sorcern reach its resolution. The history books and diaries may be fact, or they may be fiction, but I know this much to be true, the Magi failed to undo the damage to nature caused by the Sorcern. When I was just a child I witnessed the Emperor of the great Sorcern city lead a war against the Magi, in a battle that is now called the Great Purge. The Magi were powerful, but their benevolence were no match for the brutality of the Sorcern. They were too defensive. The Sorcern killed every one, using so much sorcery in their assault that they destroyed one of the most verdant meadows, leaving it as a blackened, dead, scorched, cracked and barren wasteland. That place serves as the reminder of the Sorcerns' power and superiority.

People no longer praise the day that magic-users enter their town. The Sorcern use their powers to oppress and command the non-magical folk into submission. That I have also seen. I have seen towns levelled and villages burned to the ground simply because a villager gave a Sorcern a funny look. The same happened to me.

The Sorcern took my home from me a long time ago. I have called the wilderness my home ever since. I have met so many poor people on my travels, all fearing the day that the Sorcern knock on their doors.  I do not pity them. They choose to stay still and wait until that day comes, and they do nothing to stop the tyranny of the Emperor and his Sorcern. I take a different stance.

I stop them. I kill them. Then I'm gone. I'm just a traveller, they never see me coming. The Emperor needs to be put down, and I intend on being the one who does it.

Creativity & Knowledge:

I've been having another one of my musings. Instead of thinking about food or my workload for once I am thinking of something a bit more... philosophical, perhaps? Let's go with that. I've started to think about creativity and knowledge. In the past I have always seen these two qualities as being mutually exclusive of each other, as in you either do something which exercises your creative imagination or your intelligence. I think in a very monochromatic view of the world, like an old film, you can see life portrayed that way. I personally blame the Sims for giving me this flawed perspective.

Such phrases come to mind:
"Creative license"
"Knowledge is power"
"Knowledge is the food of the soul."
"A picture is worth a thousand words."

So what has resulted for me is that I have spent most of my life putting things that people do as a hobby or career in one of the two boxes.



For example:

Creativity -

1. Art
2. Drama
3. Music
4. Design
5. Film
6. Writing (Fiction)
7. Dance

Knowledge -

1. Science
2. Mechanics
3. Mathematics
4. Law
5. Logic
6. Medicine
7. Writing (Non-Fiction)

Oh sweet naivety. Its dawned on me that creativity and knowledge are far from polar opposites. At the very least it could be argued that they overlap, and at the very most it can be argued that they are completely harmonious. 

Take an artist:

Creatively they express themselves, their purpose or their ideology through whatever canvas they decide to use. The end product is a result of their imagination.

Knowledge plays a key role also, without it the artist would not have the understanding of the effect of their actions, of the colour fusion, of the brush strokes. Without knowledge of the world they are in, the life they live and the understanding of themselves their art would be void of meaning or ideology.

Or a Lawyer:

Having an extensive working knowledge of the law on an issue will put you in great stead for knowing whether the answer to a legal question is yes or no. Having the legal know-how is the fundamental basis for doing well in the area.

Without creativity we wouldn't have interpretation. Without interpretation the answer to the question will almost always be 'no'. With it, the rules can be questioned and explored for loop-holes. 

The reason I picked up on this is because, as a creative writer, I often re-read my work and realise that I have not mentioned much about the colours of things in the environment, or the texture and shape, or even the temperature. The same thing goes for particular human senses, its easy to rely on sight in description but equally easy to overlook smells and tastes. And as I considered more things that I overlooked in my writing I eventually came to considering character's cultures and ethnicity. 

The ultimate realisation for me was that my creativity in my writing only extended to what I had knowledge of. I would write ancient religious connotations because I had the background knowledge to apply it in a creative way. But I would not write about international cultures or lifestyles because it is an area that I know little about. In effect, we are paint brushes, with the ability to only paint in the colours that we know. If we want to expand our potential we need to learn more colours.

So, the philosophical message to come out of this is this:

In order to be creative, we must expand our understanding and experience. With knowledge, we can use our imagination to look upon what we know anew.

I hope you enjoy this post :)

L.H.

Its been a long time coming...

Its almost christmas, joy-to-ze-world. Its taken me all of three months to manage logging on here to make a new post, which is shockingly terrible. I deserve a thorough beating around my face.

Its been an eventful few months, but those stories belong in the 'Me' tab rather than the 'UNISON:ARC' tab. so yes, suck on that all you viewers who stumble upon this section of the blog purely by accident while googling 'Gandalf v balrog'... shame on you. Though, as searches go, that is a pretty impressive phrase to end up leading people here.

But anywho, just thought I would plug an update here, the UNISON sequel has just broken the 114k word count and is rising! I really really really want to get this done, I'm loving the plot of book no.2 so muchly. Its just so hard to find the time to do this and still manage to get through a Law degree, while also doing extra-curricular shtuff and law-firm applications. How am I going to survive this year is a frequent question in my mind at the moment.

Arrrgghhhh there is just too much to do in this thing we call life. Can someone do some of it for me? That would be tastylishous.

So this book basically has a lot of words. That is just about the only point of this post. Its around 90% complete in terms of my estimated word count and I reckon it will be around 125k words by the end. I hope the simultaneous adventures of Jason Rider and Skye will bring an interesting new character perspective to the mix of personalities in my writing. I have focused on trying to deal with shortfalls in my writing and I feel that the lack of diversity and depth in my characters was in need of improving.

So, if the second book does come along, EVER, and you fancy a read I think you will enjoy the conflict of ARC-partners Skye and Hertz, polar opposites Ridexiel and Apolyon and the powerful Gabriel and Mercurius.

This book will go to the heart of who the Hierarchy really are, what they really stand for and will reveal the 'true' history of creation. Boom. Everything will change in UNISON: ARC, across all the three races, human, hierarch and deymon and everything will lead up to the series finale of book number 3!

I hope I manage to actually get this done within my lifetime!


You are all very pleasing to my face
Merry christmas and all that jazzabaloo

L.H

ARC-1: Skye

UNISON: ARC: "Oh really? When you find someone as good as me, you let me know"

I'm simply a soldier. My duty is to serve, but past that I'm the boss, I do things the way I want.

To be a special operative in the UNISON military I only needed to do two things, the first was to become the strongest soldier around, the second was to leave my life and family behind. Obviously being the best wasn't a challenge. As for leaving things behind, well, I never had them to begin with.

My parents were never a part of my life past my infant years. The birth of the Human Empire and its many rebellions kept them busy while I was left behind as an orphan. Then came the relocation program and I ended up in a new facility while my parents were moved to a more military-dependant colony.

I didn't care that much, it was a case of what you don't have, you don't miss. Though, when I finally had the opportunity to move and find them it became just another waiting game until they were off active duty. Then came the Hierarchy and the Fallen. By the end, all I had was a copy of the casualty list ironically the 'missing in action' section only had two names; Lieutenant A. Hudson and E. Mcann. No family, no friends, no home.

Being a soldier was all that was left for me and it's all I will ever need. They said I was powerful, fast and fearless. Apparently my only fault was my reluctance to work with anyone, I say its their fault for recruiting fools as my superiors, they were always wrong. I never failed them, they failed me. Eventually they realised that less soldiers would end up with cracked ribs and broken noses if they promoted me to a position of independance. I didn't lead many operations, but I went on many and it only took one look for the commanding officer to leave me to get the job done while the boys squabble over "who's watching who's back". Being out on the field in the heat of battle, if you could call it 'heat', was where I belonged. After a couple of years the little rebellion conflicts had gotten boring and I'd thought that with all the new threats floating around since first contact I might have gotten to taste real war, but no.

Eventually I was offered the position of becoming one of Lord Balson's Marshalls, the highest ranking soldier in the army and better yet, a solo operative. There was one position and 25 soldiers ready to show what they were made of but none of them had what it takes, not even close. After knocking the little boys back down to size the position looked like it was mine, and it would have been if Lord Rider had not been paying a visit to Balson that very day.

The next day my identity had been fully abandoned and I became a member of Lord Rider's Academy on the planet Carax. Now I'm training to become the perfect soldier, with Lord Rider's and the Hierarchy's own powers making me unstoppable. I don't get sent out into the frontlines anymore but the simulation training is the perfect substitute, I've fought everything and anything that could threaten the Empire.

When a real war comes to us, I'll be at the front, winning it.