• Hyperlands
• 90 Degrees to reality
  • Datascape
  • Alone
  • Lifes Edge
  • The Monastery
  • Machines
    • The Story part 1
    • The Story part 2
  • The ideas file
  • Flash Fiction
  • Short Fiction
  • Script Frenzy
  • NaNoWriMo
  • Alex Hunt
  • Other Writing
• Lightpath Gallery
• Digital Anthill
• Code and Coding
• Miscellany
• World view
• Downloads

This story came out of a little challenge I set my self as a warm up to nanowrimo in 2007 (more details on how it went here).
A friend suggested a title or possibly a theme of ‘drawing the short sword’. I played around with this idea for a while and since I’d just finished my story ‘The Merlin Artifice’ I was still thinking in a fantasy type of way. So I came up with a few (very bad) ideas around the sort of Arthur and Excabiliber theme. None of them really worked and for sure wouldn’t have worked in the sort of length of story I needed for this warm up.
So I switched track to a sort of half idea I’d had a while back about a world where the people are kept in check by huge machines, that they have no control over and no virtually nothing about. The short sword suddenly had a new meaning in context of this idea. It was going to be some kind of weapon to use against these machines. I started work on the idea and the story its self. However as often happens with my ideas, it grew and suddenly I had a whole world and lots of epic scale stories to tell. None of which really fitted in to the short story length I needed for the warm up.
So the idea got left in my ideas file (this page is now hopelessly out of date and in fact won’t be updated again!) and I gave up the idea of warming up for nanowrimo.
The next year (2008) I tired the same thing and recycled the title of ‘drawing the short sword’ but again I couldn’t really fit the idea in to the length of a short story.
I finally deiced it was time to give the story the room it needed to expand in to in 2009 and this is the result.
As I mentioned I do have the back ground of the whole world, sort of worked out, although many details are still very vague, so this story is very much an introduction to one maybe two of the main characters in what could become an epic saga (one day, maybe!)