Life is one long stretch of time where shit happens that is good and bad.

True is this for real people and fictional characters. This blog entry will focus on Kone, one of Alistar’s friends in Blestemul, the new book I’m writing. Kone is an Ironsoul, which means that he has mechanical parts mixed in with organic ones. After a particularly nasty bit of business in the plot line, Kone had most of his living body destroyed, meaning now he is almost completely mechanical. His brain did not survive; rather they stuffed “Kone” into an extremely sophisticated CPU, where he is who he is, but now he can process like a computer. Traumatic to say the least, but not without its benefits. Kone now is a sophisticated war machine, meaning that he has all sorts of military-grade treasures and goodies (I won’t reveal why). Navigation systems, enhanced tracking and sensory awareness, strength, reflex, and agility augmentation, hacking, electronic disruption, and a whole laundry godman list of other terrific shit. Take a look at some (shitty) concept art that I drew for Kone 2.0:

The skin on him cannot even fit over the mechanical parts, making it look unnatural. The face plate is synthetic, and does nothing to add humanity. I can’t say why I did this to Kone. And not in a “reveal the ending” kind of way, I truly don’t know why I did this to him. Perhaps I deemed him uninteresting, and needing a new angle. Maybe I was getting lazy, and needed an ace in the hole for later chapters. Maybe I just felt…cruel that day. Or maybe it was a combination of something else entirely. I don’t know.

Shit happens. We are all aware of this, whether it is fictional or real, everything happens to everybody for a specific reason. These reasons are either identifiable immediately, or take some time to reveal themselves. Sometimes, I can feel the world plotting. And I don’t mean people, I can feel the noose of life tighten around my fragile, mortal neck and then loosen when I least expect it. I felt the world plotting against me all my life, but I didn’t really understand what it meant until recently. Yesterday, my car got smashed into by an old man with shitty eyes and a big car. I could feel the incident looming long before it occurred.

Sometimes, I feel as though it maybe is death keeping my ego in check. God, devil, demon, angel, who knows. I worry. I worry because I this time of year always means trouble for me. And as the demons travel in threes, I worry. I worry because maybe this isn’t the end. I worry because maybe there’s more darkness to come.

I will always be on the edge of the abyss, staring into the black. It’s where I belong. Partially (mostly) by choice. And maybe sometimes this bleeds into my writing. Maybe all this shit means something, and I am just a lil’ ol’ pawn in a Chess game so grand and convoluted that I’ll never be anything more than just a basic piece. Maybe I’m full of shit.

Feelings of doom, bad omen, signs. They are everywhere. They can be heeded, ignored, embraced, destroyed, hidden, a whole manner of things. The feelings I get, the thoughts I have, the dream I dream. They are all connected somehow in a massive web that connects me to life, and all the forces that drawn upon it.

Or maybe I’m just a Pawn aspiring to be a King.