Who are the Hidden Masters and where do they come from?

I had my first media interview on Tuesday evening with Bill Thompson of the thebookcast.com to talk about the recent global release of The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil. The experience was a little nerve-wracking but not as bad as I might have imagined. (As the experience recedes I suspect I'm forgetting the worst of it.) Naturally I feel I answered some of the questions better than others but one question sticks in my mind.

The concerning question was how the main characters, the very Hidden Masters described in the title, got to be the people they were. For those of you not in the know, the heroes of our adventure are apparently perfectly ordinary individuals whom you might meet in the pub. Their only difference being that they are practiced in the arts of the occult to the point that they save the universe at weekends before going back to work on Monday mornings. They are extraordinary individuals who do not look like the people they actually are.

uncanny

However, when asked how they came about I was stumped. I do have some back story for them, Clint was in the Royal Navy and now drives a road sweeper, Wayne sells beer for a living and might have cheated his school entrance exams and Nigel, well I still can't remember his back story but I'm sure I put one in. I also had ideas about where they get their extensive knowledge about everything under the sun with one constantly hanging out in museums of all kinds across the world, one having an uncanny ability to find any information on the internet no matter how obscure and the other addicted to Open University courses but he never bothers to take the exams.

But how did they get to be these guys? I simply hadn't thought about that. When asked the question I blabbered on a bit about people coming to paganism from all sorts of paths until I realised I was talking generally about paganism rather than the characters in the book. Since then, while I was painting the windowsill in the room upstairs the answer occurred to me.

pianist

Each of us has no idea about the bloke who sits across the isle from us on the train every morning. He might be a mechanic in a bus garage or an administrator in a dog food company. However, more difficult to detect is the thing he does at the weekend. How often have you discovered that the person you meet in your first day at a new job has an extraordinary skill, perhaps being a wonderful pianist or a talented salsa dancer? They don't make any money at their skill because there is no way to do so but they have done the 10,000 hours practice that are said to be required to master a skill completely.

There are extraordinary people walking amongst us every moment of the day but we never know it. They're not gods or immortals; they're just ordinary people who are quietly getting on with life. They don't brag about it, they just do it. Aleister Crowley once said that every man and every woman is a star. The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, are extraordinary in that very way but it didn't take some miraculous back story for them to get there because, basically, they are just like you and me.

Find out more about The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil here.

See the You Tube video here

The hunt for The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

Okay, so a week on from Smashwords premium catalogue approval I've discovered that there is a delay between the Smashwords catalogue being shipped and the book appearing on the web sites.

So here's the thing.

The book is slowly due to appear on retailer web sites in the coming weeks. I've been checking the sites recently to see if the book appears but there are a few sites to check and the process is a bit repetitive. Therefore I'm offering a prize for each site.

For the first person to post a link to a retailer site where The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil is on sale I will give a free download of the book from Smashwords.

Post the links in the comment section below. The download will be in the format of your choice (see the list of formats in my post from last week). I will email you a voucher code to download a copy direct from Smashwords.

If you want to know what you stand to win you can read about it here.

Here's the promotional video on You Tube

More cover designs for the second edition of the Hidden Masters

After the series of very dark covers for the second edition posted in March, a reader commented that it looked like Stalag Coronation Street or something, a friend has been enthusiastically working on some ideas. Let us know what you think. They are only rough at the moment so they'll have to be developed properly if one is chosen.

1. First of all he was just playing with ideas from the classic Las Vegas design

2. Then he adjusted it after a bit of feedback about the plane and the text

3. Then a yellow one just to see how it looked with a brighter cover

4. Then trying to combine the elements with the earlier designs

5. This was an attempt at the classic blockbuster novel front cover with the author's name writ large

6. And again combining some of the Vegas elements

7. Finally a combination of the Vegas elements, the image from the 3D model and blockbuster text

Do tell us what you think.

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If you want to know more about the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil here are some extracts:

Chapter two on astral travel

Chapter three on breaking down on the M6

Until the second edition comes out you can still get the first edition, complete with the original typos, from Blackwells

Building virtual Blackpool

Click on the image to see the (lack of) detail

Using the 3D model of the Victorian alleyway, created for the animation, I'm trying to create some art for the book cover for the second edition of The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil. Unfortunately copying and pasting something like 1000 houses, each individually defined right down to the window frames and chimneys is proving a bit of a stretch for the PC. (See the previous post on viral marketing for how it should render including the brickwork texture.) Even with a spanky fast machine it's proving too much. It's not rendered any of the textures or the small details such as the red chimney pots. It hasn't even bothered with the houses in the distance, showing whole terraces as wire frames. Notice the top of the image shows Google SketchUp as 'Not Responding'. At the time of writing it's been like that for over an hour, every few minutes becoming active then locking up again for a similar time.

The grey windows of the further streets are deliberate as the model was never intended to be seen from this angle. (All the action in the viral animation takes place within a single alleyway so the houses are only seen from the rear. Read chapter 7 for the details.) For the book cover these windows will have to be painted in individually. Also the wide screen format of modern monitors doesn't suit the portrait format of a book jacket so chunks of the landscape image will probably be chopped away. The distant houses, if SketchUp can ever be persuaded to render the middle distance, will probably have to be painted in later.

Chapter Titles from the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

1      The Esbat
2      Elastic
3      Ritual Mechanicians
4      It’s a Beer Thing
5      More Beer
6      The Devil’s Legs
7      Illuminating Experiences
8      Dodgy Characters
9      Chocks Away!
10    The Taste of Dragons
11    Elementals My Dear Wayne
12    Creatures of the Night
13    Vortex
14    Board of Enquiry
15    The Return of The Devil’s Legs
16    Just The One Then
17    Mission Improbable
18    Dubious Infidelity
19    Death By Sword
20    Black
21    Escape to New York
22    How Many Magicians Does It Take?
23    My Number Which is 300
24    Stake
25    Trouser Negotiations
26    Round Table
27    Hit it!
28    Enheavyment
        Epilogue

If you want more click here for an extract from Chapter 2: Jack Barrow on astral travel

And click here for the whole of Chapter 3.

Publisher's blurb here

Don't forget Amazon aren't selling this and list it out of print. It's never out of print as it's print on demand. It's best to buy it from Blackwells here or order it via your local book shop on the ISBN 978-0-9515329-1-1

Storyboarding an animation

I’ve been trying to do a storyboard for a promotional animation for my novel (a scene from the end of Chapter seven). It’s taking ages because I’m really fussing over the dialogue. I tried cutting it down to make it fit a two minute time slot and I just became depressed that it removed all the humour. Now I’ve restored the original dialogue and I’m trying to storyboard it again.

I’ve been at this for months and I continually meet people who have animator friends (they come out of the woodwork) but I find them so frustrating because they offer to help or simply offer advice but without the storyboard they can’t see my vision. Then they ask why I've not made any progress with it.

I’m going around in circles. Trouble is I'm a writer not an animator.

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This post was a couple of years ago. I've made more progress now. I decided not to animate it and did it in a graphic novel style so the storyboard really is the finished article, only with speech bubbles. It's just gone up on You Tube here.

If anybody want to take it further and actually animate it fell free. The Wayne character (the guy with the beard) should have a received pronunciation voice so should sound like an upper middle class Englishman or an old fashioned BBC presenter. The Clint character is less specific except that he's an old hippy from just north of London.