Story Ideas

My first book was The Privileged Few, a tale that was more of a short story. My love for Warhammer had brought it back to bubble fresh in my mind, and I used it to form the plot. A young man would join the Imperial Guard in battle and fight his way out of an attack. That was pretty much it (basic huh), but it did give me the confidence to work on a much larger scale.

Another short story I wrote was one about a detective called Grimes. My idea was there would be a serial killer using the ten commandments to decorate his murders. The first one was a Buddhist monk who had converted from Christianity, and the detective slowly hunted the killer down. If I remember, he failed. It might even be an idea to go back to in the end, after all there are nine more commandments, right?

Around this time, I dabbled with lots of ideas. I tried writing a 500-word short story (they are extremely difficult), which saw into the mind of a mental patient (Mr Green), The Last Day (19k Sci-fi that was never finished), Russian Autocracy 1880 – 1914 (historical and put together from my teaching notes) and several others. I’m sure I finished one about a tribe in South America, but can’t remember or find it now!

After a brief dab of sci-fi that was just a few pages long, Demon Rising was my first book, a fantasy zombie apocalypse that is now about to go out on the 12^th of February. I love fantasy, such an amazing genre where you can paint whole new worlds, yet you can also dig into history and draw ideas from our universe too. Demon Rising took me much further, more towards that of a professional than someone who just wrote on a whim. As it goes, it’s got my blog and Facebook page started up as well.

Demon Rising needed to be part of a trilogy, but between this and After Death (its sequel) I went into the world of the Kingdom of Rome. I created a short story from the Rape of the Sabines, when the women of the Sabine tribe were abducted by the Romans to become wives in the new Kingdom. It was interesting as there is so much about the Republic or Empire that everyone forgets Rome before these eras. The main character was Metrius, and I explored the idea that he would be carried forwards in time, allowing me to write about other periods in Roman history and the different kings of Rome. Kind of like a historical Quantum Leap show. I wrote a sequel (longer than the first), and had ideas for the third so that the three could be put together. Metrius of Sabine was another completed short story and I felt the accomplishment. I even tried it in a short story competition, though it didn’t get picked to be the winner.

This took me into my final work, After Death. The sequel to Demon Rising, my wife encouraged me to write it when she enjoyed its pre-sequel so much. I was now employed, rather than self-employed, so had time to fit a bit in every now and then. The completion of After Death and the progress of the characters of Demon Rising has been my most rewarding time as an author and I look forwards to releasing it a few weeks after Demon Rising.

That’s about it. Now I take my work more seriously, having beta readers, drafting, working each day and marketing. I don’t look for tonnes of money and wealth, but it will be interesting to see if anyone wants to try the book when its finally released.

*

If you enjoy the posts here, make sure you like the page and share with your friends! Leave comments below and I’ll write back as soon as I can! If you want to read small tit-bits from Demon Rising or look into the background of characters and places in the fantasy book’s worlds, you can like the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor!

Five Facts About Me

Final draft of Demon Rising in finished and still two days to go till the twenty day countdown! Woohoo! Even more amazingly, I’ve done it through the grasps of covid clasping my head!

After hunting down an interesting website for blog post ideas (actually it was top of the list on google), I’ve come up with some interesting facts about myself (or maybe not so much) for the latest post. Enjoy the read!

1. I’ve done a 360 degree turn in a car

Man, that one was extremely surreal. I did ridiculous amounts of driving when I tutored for a living, commuting back and fore to student’s houses to scrape a money together. Due to lack of money and a low wage, it meant battling my way to the student’s no matter what the weather, be it hail, snow, storms or…ice.

On the way back, driving steadily down the country lanes, my tyres happened upon a fairly large surface of slippery frozen water before I realised it was there. With the car rotating around and my steering wheel unresponsive, I had to just watch as I turned like the handle of a clock. Fortunately, I didn’t even have to do a three-point turn to get home.

2. I once took the pulse of a fatality in a road accent

Probably one of the creepier ones, I was about to pull out to deliver a pizza when someone was hit on their motorcycle about 50 yards from me. As I was checking in that direction I had a close view. Oddly, the driver wasn’t thrown and didn’t do some sort of film stunt, but instead the bike hit the kerb and they fell off.

There’s something invisible that holds you back to go stepping forward in front of everyone, but I got out of the car, summoned up the courage, and checked his pulse. Sadly, he hadn’t made it.

3. I made a magic potion out of diesel

Ah the lovely sweet smell of tractor fuel. When I was a child it was repeated to me that I shouldn’t go touching the fuel tanks on my uncle’s farm under any circumstances. None what so ever. Hywel, don’t go anywhere near them! Of course, this meant nothing to a young kid, particular when they can see a small drip from the tap.

In all due fairness, it ruined the potion I had made from all of the bottles on my nan’s dresser. Up until then it had a fantastic smell, but once the pink fluid had been added the stink made me very reluctant to touch it. Unfortunately, the scent was also picked up by my mother, even after I had secretly washed my hands. Damn.

4. I’ve had twelve jobs.

Oh man I’ve moved from job to job, with several being my main income whilst others have given me a bit of pocket money to top things up. My first job was delivering the Guardian newspaper as a kid, putting a million leaflets into each of a hundred or so newspapers and then lumbering around the neighbourhood with it in my newspaper bag that was bound to give out at any moment. Fortunately, in our estate once the Evening Post deliverer moved on, it was always passed to the Guardian paper boy, like some holy grail. The Evening Post had about twenty newspapers and was about three times the money (mind you, thinking back how low these things were below minimum wage makes me think of slavery).

From there I worked briefly in Tescos during my college years, stacking shelves, until university made me end it. I’d get another shelf stacker job in M&S when I came back, but retail wasn’t my calling. The next job took me to working alongside my uncle (albeit voluntarily). When I failed to get my veterinary grades in college, I decided that the reason why I enjoyed working with animals was the times I had helped on the farm. I’d gradually go further and further into the farming side, working there for 12 years with the sheep and cattle in the summer sun and winter cold. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences in my life, but there came a time to move on.

And of course, you can’t do a job without getting paid. My tutoring, alongside the farming, went on for many years, 17 in all, and it was fantastic to be helping so many people achieve their dreams. I took the work in education even further, lecturing anatomy and physiology and teaching in home education groups, and it wasn’t until I lost faith in the educational system many years later that I gave up on the job. During this time, I also worked helping miners complete claims forms. There was a massive rush for it around that part of my life and we had a phone call asking if anyone in the house has emphysema and had worked in the mines. My dad politely said that there was just his wife and son and, amazingly, I was asked if I’d like a job. Who knew commercial calls could be useful?

I gave up lecturing to sell pork, but this was not to be when my girlfriend came down ill and had to give up her job. I was now searching for work to keep us going and so started delivering pizzas. The boss was one of the best I’ve had and, though I folded millions of boxes and washed who knows how many pizza cooking tools, I enjoyed the experience. I even got a bit of work as a carer while I found my feet again.

I spread my wings into teaching chess in the private schools, a job that stuck with me for quite some time and paid very well for the hours I did. I had some of the cutest kids who loved the game, and, I’d like to say, they enjoyed the club as well. I tried moving into other non-private schools but the new system was to open new clubs and close the old ones each term. In one school I had thirty children who loved the game and then I was told in the next term that it was over. That one completely disheartened me.

Though I returned to dominoes deliveries, my job finally swung in a completely different direction. I looked to take on a well-paid career now I had a family of six (to eventually become seven). I taught myself some software languages and signed up for an apprenticeship with the DVSA and that’s where I now stand, a junior software developer. Hopefully, I’ll make my way one or two more steps up the food chain before settling down.

5. I was once hit on the head with a wheelbarrow

I’ll try to keep this one short! I remember (amazingly) a tonne of us kids going to the next-door neighbour’s derelict garden to tidy the mess up for fun. I would have thought BMXing or climbing trees down the fields would have been more of a thing for children of the 80s, but apparently that wasn’t the case on that particular summer day.

What was the case is that one of the larger boys decided he couldn’t be bothered to take the (kids) wheelbarrow to the bottom of the garden and back in order to dump weeds. Instead, he threw the freshly emptied barrow back towards the top of the garden. That was when I looked up from the weeding I was doing.

I’m not quite sure what happened next. I remember a lot of pain, my brother and the wheelbarrow thrower half carrying me round to the backdoor of my house, and a lot of blood. I think I passed out a couple of times but can’t be sure. Still, makes a great anecdote.

If you’re interested in my blog or want to comment on my bizarre life, feel free to leave something below! Hope you enjoyed the read! You can read tit-bits from my book or read about its background at my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor

Pigs and Writing

In between my writing, parenting and software development, one of my biggest hobbies is self-sufficiency or at least making steps towards it. Work in the veg patch, around the animals or doing the latest DIY project gives me time to contemplate and think about the next chapter when I’m stuck on where to take the story.

We’ve had our pig, Bacon, for four years now, joining the family as a small ginger kune kune and now a huge beast that eagerly scoffs down her food. I’ve kept pigs for a long time, at one time having 60 on my uncle’s farm, and they’re interesting animals. They watch you intently, investigate with colossal curiosity and love to explore. They’ve been great fun to have, even when I’ve had to walk slip sliding across ice in the pitch black to feed them. Even more amusing was when I had to drive them over the slippery surface and chaos ensued.

The sty I have built has been extremely sturdy and is one of my greatest achievements. The best part of five years down the line the walls are still standing strong and the gate (though now tied in place) stands firm. However, the routing of our animals has turned it into a quagmire and I finally built them a new home this summer (with a cemented floor this time) that will be even harder to destroy.

Pigs are escape artists. Houdini has nothing on them. The runs I have built have been broken out of on numerous occasions. The village around us has been fantastic when they’ve seen one of our animals trotting down the road, though the new sty seems to have solved the issue for the moment. There’s nothing quite like waving your hands at a porcine escapee in the middle of the night whilst a car patiently waits behind you!

Maybe I should base one of my supernatural creatures on our pigs? Certainly, an interesting angle to shoot for. Though the world I’ve created isn’t overrun by the supernatural (the beasts are more in the shadows rather than exposed to the everyday civilian), I do have plenty of them. In the first book the strigoi play an important role (the original name for vampires) and it was interesting bringing them into the book as humans slowly transforming. The sequel brings in the world of Elves, shape shifters and even a doppelganger. It’s all go. Perhaps a shape-shifter pig would be an interesting and amusing direction to take the story. Beware adventurer, bacon strikes back!

I hope you’ve found this porcine post interesting. If you know someone else who enjoys blogs make sure you share so they can enjoy too! Thanks! You can read tit-bits from my novel Demon Rising and the background of its world at my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor

Ideas Behind Demon Rising

I’m not quite sure where my idea for Demon Rising came from. Around that time, I was farming, working alongside my uncle amongst the cattle and sheep in the summer skies, and it was probably my contemplation that built the novel. Saying that, I commuted a lot, tutoring for my living alongside my farming dreams. Going out to people’s houses left me plenty of hours stuck in traffic jams and driving to and from the house so there was plenty of book planning.

It was hard to fit writing in between all the work I did and I certainly had no definite structure to it. I liked to look up details on the internet so that my descriptions could be good, find out what taverns were like in the era I was writing about, and see what the typical soldier held in their hand.

I remember I had the sudden idea for Abendale (the main city in the book) being based, bizarrely, on Center Parcs. Granted there aren’t any timber industries or marketplaces in the holiday venue, but the idea of mixing nature and cabins really appealed to me. Good place for a zombie invasion as well! I really did like the second part of the book based on Abendale.

My book’s progress really took off when I started being professional about completing it. With free time in summer, I began writing every day, making sure I did several thousand words with each session. Writers block was blown away, my imagination kept pouring out onto the page (or at least the laptop) and the tale continued to come forth. The end of the story began to form in my head and I saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

With my wife’s support and encouragement, I began writing the sequel, continuing a long plot that I had ready and waiting in my mind. I certainly had a couple of writer’s blocks between the two novels. Writing about the survivors who escaped by boat (you’ll have to make sure you get the book for the full tale) and one place where a messenger tried to escape the zombies halted me for a while. I wanted them in a particular way so it held me up significantly and now I realise it shouldn’t have.

It was certainly amazing when I finished the second novel. I’d actually written two books and it really told me I could now manage another to finish the trilogy.

If you want to know more about Demon Rising, you can go to my facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor to get tit-bits and background behind the world I’ve created. Feel free to leave comments – always happy to chat!

My Love of Fantasy

My love of fantasy was started when my parents bought me a book for holidays. We always took one good read with us and, in this case, I had picked a Choose Your Own Adventure. This was an interactive novel where choices took you to various pages. I think mine was about ninjas but I can’t be sure. It wasn’t even fantasy but it did lead me into Fighting Fantasy, the choose your own style book based around goblins, orcs, elves, wizards and all sorts of creatures that had my mind racing.

Fighting Fantasy were amazing books written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and I loved burying my mind in the story while I rolled dice to see if I had felled the next monster. My collection grew over the years to quite an impressive size, but somewhere down the line my brother’s fantasy game drew me further down the rabbit hole: Dungeons & Dragons.

I loved using my imagination to picture battles and the latest part of the adventure, and moving away from being told the story and into a world of storytelling seemed to be the natural direction in which the stream flowed. My character was a thief, possibly chosen because it sounded cool and different (please note that driving 75mph on the motorway is probably the furthest I’ve pushed the law nowadays), a character who could pick locks, slip money out of the bystander’s pocket and…that was pretty much it.

At one point I bought my own D&D set and my brother was certainly not up for it. He was the dungeon master in the house, no one else, so he swapped it for another gaming book he had. I had now begun my life with Warhammer. This roleplay game took things to an all-time higher level for me; writing adventures; reading stories in their magazines; and designing the latest game. It was fantastic. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40K, Bloodbowl, Space Crusade, Mighty Empires, Warhammer Quest, Epic 40K – I or my brother had them all. I played table top battles, painted miniatures under the lamp and, more importantly, wrote fantasy adventures for my friends to play. In my world, the hero fought the villain, sought the treasure guarded by dragons, and rescued the armies from approaching hordes.

Then university came. University wasn’t really the place for roleplay games and deciding who had the most powerful army (both in the tactical and strategic sense of course.) It was the time for clubbing in the student’s union, studying in the massive library, and staying in bed to watch the Tweenies. Or was it? The spark of imagination in the fantasy world was still there, but I didn’t quite know where to use it. My friends wouldn’t be up for gathering in a circle to fight demons (the influence of The Big Bang Theory was a long way off) and I did want time to chill and not just write. We had a small computer room in our science block, so I took to the internet to poke around and found play by email.

In PBeM you took on the role of a character and poster regular snippets, interacting with other players. You’d leave spaces for them to fill in gaps in conversation or write them together. Based in the Star Trek universe, I was the Klingon Kaa T’Kora, wanting to join security in the Foothold space station, but coming onboard as part of the fleet instead. I fell in love with other characters, fought like Worf on a bad day, and filled the space station with adventure. Today was a good day to die. I’d play it consistently for over four years, and it soothed my writing addiction.

When I finally gave up on PBeM, I finally started on my first book: The Privileged Few. It was the first tidy sized novel I wrote, based in the Warhammer 40k world, but probably of poor quality. What was more important for me was that I finished it, and finished it so that it was a tidy size. It was the point at which I realised I could potentially write a novel, actually be an author, that the possibility was there. I’d enjoyed the writing and immediately began looking to start something else.

If you want to know more about my up and coming zombie apocolypse fantasy novel you can see tit-bits and fantasy background on my facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor. Feel free to leave comments and I’ll reply back asap!

Creating Demon Rising

𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 – 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀?

aIt has been quite a while since I started writing Demon Rising; quite a while indeed. Over a decade ago, I sat down to begin my typing, but life jumped in my way many. Believe it or not, the idea for a fantasy zombie apocalypse came to me a long time before Walking Dead came onto the screens, the TV series causing zombie mania, and that was 12 years ago. I’d like to think my mind was one step ahead!

I’ve always looked for something different to write in my stories and although one advice giver on YouTube stated you’ll never get something unique in writing (quite right), I came up with techniques the combination of which I hoped would make it special. My first was the idea of a fantasy zombie apocalypse. I’d played Warhammer as a kid and teen so there’s always been zombie armies in my life, but what about that slow build up, infection, survival of the fittest style film that Night of the Living Dead brought into the world? I’d never really seen books or films in this area (though I’d guess there are) so it seems a direction to go in.

My next take was first person. It’s one of the trickier ways of writing, giving too many ‘I did’, ‘I walked’ and ‘I hated’ can really kill the buzz, but that made it more of a challenge. Possibly I regretted this after realising just how often you think in the third person when storytelling. As it happens, the style worked out pretty well with my beta readers so I can be fairly proud in that sense.

Another idea was to do each chapter from more than one point of view. There were questions to be asked about this; how many people should they be viewed from; is each chapter repeated, but from other characters thought; is any text repeated. I slowly answered these questions as I thought about it, beginning to develop a style that I really enjoyed and believed was different. It turns out that A Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin had thought of it long, long before I did and I’m guessing a lot more have done it before and since. With hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that this would be the case.

The style turned out pretty well. For most of the book there were 5000 words per chapter, so doing about 1000 words per character seemed to work out nice. At the start, with fewer characters, some came up more than once but the sequence of events continued, rather than being repeated. As one of my beta readers said: first person is hard to do, but because I’d done a slight overlap between each character (about a paragraph) it made it clear and easy to follow.

My last idea was to throw supernatural in as well. I’d read the Dresden series, where the wizard-detective was set in the real that had supernatural elements. However, they weren’t plodding around your everyday life or hidden in the shadows of secret organisations like in Underworld. I went for such a style where the world I wrote in (that of a 17th – 19th century style with no gunpowder weapons) didn’t realise there were supernatural creatures, and so the events becomes a shock to most of its people. It brought another angle that turned into a style I love.

Anyway, I hope these differences make you interested and pull you towards trying the book. I’d like to think it is unique, or at least the combination of ideas is, and it will draw you in. My beta readers certainly haven’t criticised the style, so I hope you won’t too. Remember, Demon Rising will be free when it comes out, so keep your eyes open and give it a go. Enjoy.

If you want to know more about this up and coming novel, you can like my page on facebook to get tit-bits, read about the characters, and see the history of the book’s world. https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor