R.G. Male's Dark Corners: Onward in the Corners

Here it is 2010. Can you believe that? Even a month into the year it's still hard to wrap my head around it. Is there another year yet to come that has received a lot of fictional press? I don't know any--I'm ignoring supposedly real apocalypse dates. Not only is 2010 a new year, but also more than that it's a new decade. Somewhere along the line I'm sure that I will post something about the future of books or writing and multimedia together or similar. It won't be the first time and as long as things keep changing and evolving in the world it likely won't be the last. Some of the articles I intend to write this year are not very dark or horror oriented but don't let that get you down. Some of them I will take special care to make dark and horror-filled.

One of the first topics I want to tackle will be in a sort of pseudo-series. I do not know how many weeks it will take or if I'll do them all at once or not. They are focused on role-playing game writing and use. The main thrust of these will be about the artificial quality of some rules that games have, and ways of avoiding that, hiding it, or otherwise minimising it. I also want to take a look at the ubiquitous and attention hogging vampire. This was a number of ideas, spawned by recent movies and a novel I have knocking around in the back of my head, to really make vampires something to fear again. Before I get to that though we need to look at how they are portrayed now. I also have to cover a bit about some of the myths that have fallen by the wayside and some that are only partially explained.

Back to that idea about the future of writing and the possible changes, I would like to write an article or two further getting into this whole idea of deleted and alternate scenes as well as side stories. The thing about this idea is it is only new in that--especially in the case of side stories--they existed separately before and now they can co-exist. The important part of this topic that I want to get to is about using the bits that exist in the story to set the mood, or to contrast it. How do you set that up? How does the full version change things? Are those changes present elsewhere and just quietly inserted? Of course any of these kinds of ideas could be full-blown articles all on their own. I hope you'll stick around to see.

Mood: optimistic.

Music: Music: Big Guns by Skid Row and Snakebite by Alice Cooper.