Saturday, August 27, 2005

Moving steadily further from reality.


dragon
Originally uploaded by jamesandthebluecat.


Ori gets with the viking zeigeist. And Fay gets new glasses. Acting is way more fun than writing. But then writing is way more fun than having a proper job, so I'm not complaining. I may or may not, for example, have purchased some viking lego, which I may or may not be planning to write off to tax.*

However I have been rather immersed in my kid's book of late, to the extent that when I popped into the local museum to have a chat with an old schoolfriend, I couldn't remember a) her married name, b) her kid's name, c) our mutual friend's kid's names d) what day it was.**

What didn't help was that the art gallery had a dragons head stuck up on thewall, which I'd never noticed before. It's the sort of thing I would notice normally, as well. I stared at it for quite some time wondering if I'd lost it completely.

AND, bloody and, I finally found that Sigur Rós song that made my heart explode in a good way when I saw them live was 'Olsen Olsen' off the Ágætis Byrjun album. It's never been the big things that make me happy. The phone call from Patrick that they liked my sample stuff for Green Wing and wanted me to write for them full-time went like this.

PATRICK: So we'd like you to write for Green Wing full-time.
ME: Do I get any extra travel costs? (I lived in Canterbury at the time, so I was only an hour and a half away)
PATRICK: Um, I thought you'd be more excited.
ME: Look, I can't chat now, I'm wanted back on the till.

Sorry Patrick.


*As always happened when I was a kid, I couldn't find some vital bit and started composing a furious letter to Mister Lego ('Why oh why oh why/Some poor child could have/I'm not normally one to complain/In this day and age/Oh, sorry, found it') because it was in front of me all the time.



** And yet if asked, I could tell you without having looked at a Warhammer book for years that the four principle Chaos gods are Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh. And the extra one, for double points, is Malaal, who cannot abide the other gods, and to be honest, I can't blame him.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

aha, Tzeench! God of painful sneezes!

James Henry said...

Housepoint to steve.

irony in motion said...

I'd like to think that when my big break comes (seriously, it will) I'll say something more along the lines of "I can't chat now, I'm wanted back on the till" than "OHMYGOD really?!" and dancing manically. Because, you know, you can write the former off as just being incredibly cool. And you can't really write the latter off as anything other than desperation. Or possibly drugs, but that probably wouldn't help much either.

Omission said...

Dammit, that last footnote threw me into a two hour online catchup session on Warhammer - I can now reliably report that Malaal is no longer canon, and neither are two other minor chaos deities: Zuvassin the Undoer and (my favourite) Necoho, the chaos god of atheism.

Anonymous said...

James, I noticed this over the weekend and thought you might be interested.

www.largsvikingfestival.com

James Henry said...

That does look brilliant. And a display of vintage fire engines as well, I see..

Will investigate further - thanks for that.

Anonymous said...

I was intrigued by the Viking Dog Show!

Abaculus said...

Oooh ooh ooh - let me try and remember what those gods represented... Khorne = war, Nurgle = disease, Slaanesh = lust (cue naked female lead miniatures), Tzeentch = caprice.

Gosh, that game was deeper than I thought.

James Henry said...

Yes, it was really a way of solving rather complex philosophical disputes that just happened to involve lead figures and dice. I was rubbish at wargaming though, I just liked painting the figures.