Shores of Night

Hello!  Welcome to Shores of Night, where I talk about probably far too many things for a blog, and where today we're talking about the character John Constantine. Last time I wrote about  My Issues With Superheroes , and why I'm moving away from reading their adventures. In that piece, I mentioned my love for John, though I admit it's a relationship that's had its wobbles over the decades.   The biographical bit is that I discovered John in 1994, in a one-shot written by Jamie Delano just after the Garth Ennis run had finished. I was hooked from page one. It felt different to everything else I'd read: raw, exciting, full of a deep, sarcastic voice. It chimed not only with who I was at the time, but also with the country I came from. More than that, the story was small, intimate even, worlds away from the superhero epics I was used to, in the best possible way. John was smart, and he had a sort of sleazy charm I wasn't used to seeing. He cared about people, not ...

Hi!  Welcome back to the blog, or welcome if you're new. My name's Grim, and today I'm going to have a mini rant about superhero comics. I know it's not really anything important, and the overwhelming everything threatens to eat our sanity, but... I just feel the need.  Until recently, I would have said I was a fan of superheroes. I discovered them at around 12, and started borrowing X-Men comics from my local library. For the next four years, I was a devoted Marvel fan, making a regular pilgrimage to the next town over where a newsagent stocked comics. I didn't know about Forbidden Planet, one short bus ride away in Coventry. In fact, it would take a long time for me to learn about actual comics shops. In the late 80s and early 90s in the UK, comics were still a niche thing, considered childish and crude. It wasn't like you could turn on your TV and see films or shows about them, unless they were cartoons. Even then, you had to hope that the BBC or ITV saw the ...

Welcome back to the blog... or welcome if you're new.  Oh crap, is it really 3 months since I posted?  Ugh, I'm sorry. I've been super busy with work, writing, and trying to put stuff together for roleplaying.  A quick round up might be that: I'm now working as the Green Rep for Unison (please support your union) Trying to be vegetarian, with mixed results.  Sending off some work to magazines and trying to work out if my poetry is worth sending to places or not. I'm also working on new short stories and older, abandoned, pieces to try and just make this year all about short work and base building in order to hit next year running with a novel.  Trying to work out if my niche in fiction is in mature (as in thoughtful rather than X rated) fantasy and science fiction, with a focus on what happens after the big event. The restoration, healing and quiet moments that come after the battle as people pick up their lives.  Trying to master my fears in order to get s...

 Hi, Photo by Mira Kemppainen on Unsplash It's been a while, hasn't it? Not since I posted -  I was generally grumpy about the festive season (humbug!) last weekend - but since I talked about my life here. Reflection is something that comes pretty easily to me, and it feels natural to take stock at this part of the year. It's a natural part of winter, where things are slower and the world a little quieter.  This year has been a bit crazy and it feels like it's been tough, emotionally. In some respects I've ended up running as fast as I can to stand still, as Alice in Wonderland put it. As we grow closer to the end of the year, I'm trying not to feel too aggrieved by things, as well as girding my loins for whatever comes next. Please forgive me because I don't feel I can really go into immense amounts of detail in some areas but will at least touch on the parts which have been difficult.  The good news is that my job is now safe. My employer has had to downs...

 I don't like Christmas.  There, I said it. I've committed heresy, possibly the biggest one I can. Christmas has become such a huge tentpole in our calendar, so associated with happiness that it really does feel like it's a crime to dislike it. Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash Partly, the reason I dislike it is that it starts too early. Here in the UK, you see Christmas items in the shops as early as September. That's usually just as the "back to school" tat gets taken down but before the Halloween stuff gets shelf space. Christmas Carols can be heard as early as the start of November, which is usually when the deluge of seasonal adverts for shops invade the media, in whatever format you're watching or listening. The world and his wife tries to convince you that they're more caring and "Christmassy" than the next brand over, in what feels like a rather hollow exercise in "us too, we love Christmas!" Towns and cities fill up with C...

 Hi,  Welcome if you're new or welcome back if you've stumbled onto my blog in the past. It's been a few weeks since I posted anything — sorry for that! Life got busy, and the posts I write take time to put together.  I've also been fully immersed in a world building project and so haven't really had time to come up for air.  In a change to the planned topic, I'm going to talk about what I'm making and why I've been deep in the creative well.  A few years ago I started writing a novel called Army of Shadows. It's an Epic Fantasy story set in a pseudo Celtic set of islands, inspired by Celtic culture and mythology, and starts with a young woman on the run from the law who takes refuge in a barrow and accidentally frees something ancient and malicious.  From there we pick up with a bunch of other people as the situation worsens and something else ancient is reborn — an underground resistance to the things in the night, as the ordinary people have to st...

 Welcome to the blog, or welcome back if you're a regular reader. Thanks for stopping by. This is Shores of Night. On Sundays we talk about Werewolf: the Apocalypse , White Wolf's eco-horror roleplaying game. I talk about things within the game that interest me, explore areas which I think need to be considered, and sometimes try to make stuff.  Apologies for missing last week, life got in the way. I'm finding things a bit hard at present because I'm consuming too much news content and even though I'm in the UK, current events in the US are weighing heavily on my mind. It feels like life has become that much more difficult and, in the themes of Werewolf, that what's happening will only lead to the planet suffering more. It feels like our cities will become darker and less pleasant too, though perhaps not to the extent that they would be in the World of Darkness. At least we can be relatively sure that what's happening in the "real world" (if such a...