Metal Madness: Album Review - 'Venereal Dawn' by Dark Fortress

How the heck can it be September already?

*sigh*

That would be a gloomy sigh, but right now I'm listening to the new Dark Fortress album Venereal Dawn and I just can't quite be gloomy because metal awesomeness is pouring into my ears and as much as I want to feel gloomy about how the year is passing so fast and there's a disappointing lack of awesome writing sitting on my computer, I also want to headbang and generally act all crazy and hyperactive over the music.

Um... yeah. Readers of this blog already know the Blackwood is not quite sane so the above is probably neither news not out of character.

Anyway, Dark Fortress. When I decided to attempt an album review my initial thought was that it was probably going to start with something about how I want to mash the keyboard, headbang, jump around, scream and generally act crazy, but at the same time I feel like I'm probably supposed to be intelligent and sensible about it. Then I was just going to add some links and do a bit more flailing.

So...

DARK FORTESS HAS A NEW ALBUM GUYS AND ITS TOTALLY AWESOME AND EVERYONE SHOULD LISTEN TO IT!!!

Listen on Spotify, read more about it on Encyclopaedia Metallum, or there's 'buy' links on Last.fm and through Century Media.

Sound good?

Okay, done.

*starts combing knots out of post-headbang hair*

Now it's probably time to sound intelligent and sensible or whatever.
The music is black metal... sort of. Looking around the internet, you find a lot of trailing off and adding 'sort of' to genre classifications for bands that have Morean in them. The lyrics are like some kind of bizzaro/sci-fi poetry and well worth a read all on their own.

Every time I listen to the album (and I've pretty much just had it on endless repeat since the release) I pick up new bits and pieces in the music. It's huge and complex, overwhelming in the combination of head-exploding metal and layered subtlety. I still don't quite know how to process it all, which is probably why I started my post the way I did.

Okay, that's about all I've got. Go and listen to the album already.

Links again:

Listen on Spotify, read more about it on Encyclopaedia Metallum, or there's 'buy' links on Last.fm and through Century Media.

Siana Blackwood's insane plan

A random picture of Gypsy the kitten.

I'm trying to get my writing life in some kind of order, so I spent part of yesterday typing random stuff until I started to draw conclusions about myself. It works surprisingly well - everyone should try it once in a while. I call it 'wandering down the psycho path' after a joke I heard once:

Q: How do crazy people get from place to place?

A writer's life with goats

I caved in yesterday and wrote about 300 words on Doom. I'm never going to know how much it would have hurt by the next day, though, because I have this awesome life involving goats. The ways you can get injured around goats could make a book (and in fact have appeared in several of my drafts). I've been kicked in the head, had a goat fall off the milking stand and land on me, been dragged through mud, almost dislocated my shoulder trying to stop an invasion of what seemed like a thousand goats...

Camp NaNoWriMo Day 4: a day off

Day 4: ...

I should have things to say about Day 4, but since the day didn't end up including any writing time I'm finding myself at a loss. I got up, did the usual morning jobs around the dairy and then by the time I'd eaten breakfast I just wanted to go back to bed. What had started as a neck-ache the previous day had decided to spread out and include my head, back and arms. Add to that a change in the weather making my knee and lower leg ache...

Word-vomit, pillow-fights and camping

Right, I've given myself a choice: either word-vomit myself a blog post NOW or I have to post the somewhat embarrassing pillow-fight with my muse that I wrote last night. Guess which choice I'm going for?

"If we're going to pillow-fight, we'd better make it fair," Siana said. She shoved her pillow right to the end of the pillowcase and stood up, holding her 'fighting pillow' up in the most threatening way she could manage.
"Why are we...?" Scott started. Siana hit him across the head with her pillow before he could finish the question.
"Why are we having a pillow fight?" Scott asked, catching the pillow as Siana took another swing.
"Because you were looking crabby and you wouldn't talk," Siana said.
"Crabby?" Scott demanded.
"Yeah, and you've gone all broody and ignory again."
"All what?"
"Never mind. What are you - my editor?"

*coughs awkwardly*

I was going to go for the word-vomit, actually. I thought I might talk about Camp NaNoWriMo, trilogies that refuse to stop at three books...

What do you mean, you would have preferred to read about the pillow-fight?

Yeah, this blog post isn't really going well. It's probably more entertaining than something serious, though, so I guess I'll keep ploughing on and see if I stumble across something interesting. That's a surprisingly effective strategy when WriMo-ing season rolls around, by the way. It also works to let the characters get irritated with the lack of action and go and cause some mayhem. If you're not too attached to a few of your other characters, anyway.

Now, about the trilogy-that-isn't-a-trilogy and Camp NaNoWrimo. They're linked by the fact that the June session of Camp is where I'm going to be writing the fourth book of my ex-trilogy. If you feel so inclined, you can read what I pretend is a synopsis on my Camp novel info page. At some point I'm planning on replacing that with a real synopsis, but the curse of the pantser is that I really don't know a lot about what happens in the story at this point. I have a list of questions that need to be answered during the story and I know some of the characters - okay, one of the characters - but finding out the rest is going to be an adventure.

Right, that should keep my blog not-quite-dead for a couple more days. I was supposed to post at least four times in May, so I'd better get a move on with three more posts.

Inspiration v. Motivation

I sort of promised myself I'd post on Mondays, so at somewhere close to 1am on Tuesday I guess that means I'm a little late this week. I've been half-heartedly thinking about what to say all day and finally I came up with the topic of inspiration and motivation. People talk about this a lot, but it seems to me that they're always treated as the same thing. On the other hand, I tend to treat them as somewhat interchangeable.

WriYe Blogging Circle post 2: Naming Characters

Hot on the heels of my post on character depth comes one on character naming.

(I joined the circle late, so I'm a little behind and had to do two posts right away. My poor blog has not seen so much activity... well, ever. If the server crashes we'll just call it karma and hope it recovers quickly.)

So how do I name my characters?

Siana sucks at posting...

I officially promise that I'm going to do better...

Over the next few weeks (possibly a month or so) I'm going to completely redesign this blog and actually start using it. New topics that you can expect to read about include:

• My works in progress


• My current activities. Mostly, this means comments on whatever WriMo I'm participating in at the time.


• Writing techniques. This is YeoWDam't and if I can't learn a lot about writing throughout the year there really isn't a lot of point doing it.


• Writing resources. This includes lists of websites that give better advice than me, software reviews and all stuff like that.


• Humour. Being me, this is going to involve stuff like interviews with characters, joke writing advice and possibly the odd non-serious short story...

Watch this space for more information about the redesign and new content.

NaNoWriMo day 10: a dodgy approximation of a pep talk

This is my own personal version of a 'pep talk'. I am using the term very loosely. In the general run of things I am about as motivational as a poster saying 'procrastination gives you something to look forward to later'.

Anyway, here's my 'pep':

Write it anyway. There is no idea too good to write.

Seriously. Any idea you've ever had is too good to not write.

Side note: Imagine what would happen if the main characters of every unfinished story haunted their authors until the story was finished. I'm thinking about writing something along those lines in a project or two's time (or maybe next November). Next I'm going to write about zombies, though. Even if I have to make the main character be a zombie, I will get zombies into a story.

Also, drop me a line. It is very lonely here in my little corner...

Siana.

PS - my current word count is 27207!