What I want to comment on is about endings. Endings are important. Crucial even. A good one can make a story. A bad one, well, they can destroy it. There is an example floating around now of just that, but unless you are into computer games it may have escaped attention – though possibly not, as it has slipped out into the mainstream media in a few places.

I’m referring to Mass Effect 3, the last (possibly) instalment in the Mass Effect series, a space opera in the style of Star Wars or Star Trek. The first two games, and 95% of the last, are great games, with very good writing, characters and all that. Unfortunately then it has an ending so bad that it has sparked fan outrage like I have never seen before. The ending is jarring. Not only is it bad writing, but it falls victim to many other problems, including character derailment, plot holes you could drive a starship through, lack of closure, implications from previous events that are dire, and worse of all, the introduction of a character never even hinted at before to offer the hero three options, all of them unappealing, to solve the issue. Plus more. And it pretty much invalidates anything that had happened before.

Not surprising the fans that have been following the game since the beginning are more than a little upset, especially given they got precisely what they were promised they wouldn’t be getting.

Part of the problem is that it seems the head writer wanted to go with an ‘arty’ ending when it was completely against the general feel of the series to date, and worse, if rumours are to be believed, didn’t get peer review like the rest of the game did. It shows, if true. If not, then something else has gone horribly wrong.

So, endings matter. They are probably the hardest part of a story to write, at least for me. But they are rather important to get right.

They strapped the lego man and a camera to one of those high altitude balloons and launched it, getting to the edge of space – and they were able to recover the lego when it finally came crashing back down to earth as well.

At least they can launch something into space nowadays, unlike the Australian space program, which vanished way back, or even the US one, which seems to be scrapping any prospect of manned space flight in the foreseeable future.  That kind of thinking seems very short sighted.

One of the memorable things about the book is that it has a lot of songs and poetry, and by the prominent way one of them is part of the trailer, it would seem that they have included them in the movie.

First up is to finish the re-edit/re-write of Winter Wolves. I’m down to the last 2K to go, so hopefully won’t be long. After that I need to work on a new cover for it, like the others of that series.

Secondly is to finish off Dawn of Wolves – it has been sitting there for a long while now. At 40K down, there is about 10K to go for it.

Lastly is to do another short anthology of short stories – somewhere between 3 and 5 of them. I’ve got a couple of collection in the works – just need to work out which to finish first.

There may be some construction work in the meantime in case you stumble across anything broken.

In them they test the Brown Bess flintlock musket and the Baker Rifle that were used by the Britsh forces during the Napoleonic Wars, testing for rate of fire, accuracy and more. The information that I gleaned from it will be very useful – I’ll have to change a few things in the revamp of the various stories to take into account the new data I got from it.

Baker Rifle Ammunition and Accuracy

Brown Bess Musket Accuracy

Flintlock Musket Tap Loading

Baker Rifle Sustained Fire

Lets see, we have Weeping Angels, Cybermen, Hitler, Rory punching Hitler, what looks like the eye of the Face of Boe and possibly River being eyepatch lady.

They are trying for a unique look for each of them, and there is debate about whether all of them are suitably dwarvish, especially regarding beards (or lack of length there of) and especially Kili. He seems to be getting the Legolas treatment, being the ‘pretty’ one of the dwarven band.

Dwarves have always been at the top of my favourite fantasy races (in the top four alongside minotaurs, trolls and phoenixes) so I’m very much looking forward to seeing them in action. It also has me hankering to write something with dwarves in it – proper bearded, hard as nails dwarves.

The series is set in England and the US in the 1930s, and revolves around ‘Bertie’ Wooster (played by Hugh Laurie), a young man of independent means, and Jeeves (played by Stephen Fry), his ‘gentleman’s personal gentleman’ or valet. Bertie is an amiable young fellow who is always getting into misadventures, either helping out friends and family who get themselves in a pickle, or by accidentally falling into engagements – which seems to occur on a regular basis. It falls to Jeeves, the brains of the outfit, to extract him and his friends and family form their problems.

One of the amusing things about the show is the way actors keep changing – some characters are played by up to four actors across the four seasons, while some actors play a couple of characters.

And then you have the theme…

As a big fan of Robert E Howard’s works, I am looking forward to this – it looks more true to the source material than Arnold’s version did.

The trailer can be seen over here.