Tuesday, 17 May 2016

Vampires Vs Aliens



Product Description

A fragile truce exists between Human and Vampire.
The peace brokered by Damien Argent; ex-SAS Captain, ex-Slayer Leader and currently the Vampire King for thirty years.

But Aliens arrive and with it the opportunity to win the feuds between humans and vampires, and internal vampire factions.

The first contact is soon realized to be an invasion by the alien empire.
For Humans and Vampires, it's 'better the devil you know.'

The Humans and Vampires with other supernatural forces of Witches and Werewolves, must come together in a dark alliance to save the planet.

Vampires Vs Aliens: Dark Alliance, is a mash up of when the worlds of science fiction and supernatural collide.

Amazon only

Sample Chapter

http://www.thornsneedles.com/2016/05/vampires-vs-aliens-sample-chapter-1.html

Vampires Vs Aliens - Sample Chapter 1

http://www.thornsneedles.com/2016/05/vampires-vs-aliens.html

Chapter One

As the sun began its cooling descent, Eva felt the humidity of the summer day finally begin to lift from her head, a pressure had built around it all day. Normally the oppressive atmosphere signalled to her a storm was coming, but she couldn't see a cloud in the clear blue sky. She rubbed her temples to clear her mind and gently pushed herself back and forth on the swing in the park, allowing the breeze from her motion to wash away the stifling humidity.
Her friends sat crossed legged on the floor in front. They swung in and out of her view whilst they tapped away on their phones, texting, face-booking or twittering. She didn’t know which, or cared much. The day grew late, and she would have to say goodbye to another summer’s day and head home for a late tea. 
 She closed her blue eyes, swung back and forth, and continued to enjoy the cooling breeze on her face, while her dark bobbed hair floated away in the air. At home she imagined her parents would be enjoying the peace and quiet now she'd reached those dreaded teenage years. She got on with them okay, for parents they were good and they had allowed her to go to the park by herself.
She had spent most of the day with her friends exchanging gossip about school friends and celebrities. They had teased her a little about her crush on Josh, and encouraged her to finally try and do something about it this year. She had tried as they broke up for summer holidays to arrange a get together, but he was in such a rush to go off and play football with his friends, that she hadn't gotten the chance. Eva had been told through a friend of a friend that he was interested. That was as far as it went.
Definitely this year. She idly daydreamed about being his girlfriend and her pulse raced faster. She pushed her legs harder back and forth on the swing, gaining extra height and speed with each movement.
“No way,” Gemma, her friend, shouted out.
“What?” Jean answered, looking up from her phone.
“Check this out,” she said, and shoved her phone into her friend's lap.
A moment passed and she guessed they had stumbled across some celebrity gossip. She waited the news without any excitement - who's dating who, and who looks fat? That kind of trashy celebrity headline.
Jean gasped. “No way. It’s been photo shopped. They are messing with you.”
“Yeah, what about all the others. It's tweeting everywhere, follow the hashtag #aliens,” Gemma answered, her voice quickening.
That wasn’t the sentence she expected to hear, and leapt off the swing and staggered over.
On the phone in front of her, a multitude of photos of huge shiny white rectangle ships forcing their way through the Earth’s atmosphere. She dropped to her knees by their side and drew in a sharp intake of breath while placing a hand to her chest.
They flicked through the pictures being reported all across the world and posted online. A huge space ship had cast a shadow over the Whitehouse in America, and then one over the Houses of Parliament in London.
London! That meant they weren't far away. Her immediate reaction was a hoax. Maybe a CGI stunt to advertise the latest Sci-fi blockbuster. But that hope had evaporated when the BBC streamed live pictures from the Houses of Parliament as the massive white spaceship drowned out the sunlight. She rubbed her temples again, the oppressive atmosphere was squeezing her head further and the tension in her body mounted.
The storm broke and thunder banged over head. A shock wave squeezed her face first into the soft tarmac of the playground. Eva rolled over onto her back and looked up into the sky. The summer’s clear blue sky had darkened as a huge white spaceship masked the warming glory of the Sun and a cold shiver shuddered through her spine. They are here.
She wriggled her phone free from her jean’s pocket and held it up. Her hands shook making the image of the space craft wobble on the screen. She swallowed at her dry throat and tensed up to click a few photos, and then sent them to her social media accounts. Her friends did the same as the ship continued to descend bellowing plumes of smoke into the sky from which ash rained down.
Eva lay next to her friends transfixed at the descending space ship. She couldn't think of anything to say. Aliens had arrived and all she could think to do was take a photo.
The first of the ash floated within reach, and Eva raised her hand up to greet it but it wafted through her fingers. The next piece of ash floated down onto her gaping mouth and she wiped it away.
Behind, shouting and screaming came from the road, and a smashing of metal and screeching of tyres. Soon sirens began to whirl and the old air raid warning wailed out. It was a sound she had only ever heard in second world war films, but she knew what it meant - get somewhere safe.
The chaos made it real, this wasn't some fantastic special effects or 3D movie, this was real life. Aliens were coming and no one knew what that really meant. She stared at her friends laying either side of her on the soft tarmac of the playground, hoping they had an answer, but they stared mouths slacked and eyes enlarged.
“I am going home,” Eva said, and jumped to her feet as more ash drifted down into her face.
She ran, her heart pounding and muscles on fire. Her two friends had likewise taken the hint and headed their separate ways back to what they would normally consider safety. She wanted to get home to tell her parents and feel protected. As she ran home, the ship dominated the sky bringing its reality shattering bulk closer to the ground. Home and safety, mum and dad, was all she could think of as she sprinted through the chaotic streets.
A blue Ford fiesta skidded across the road towards her and she leapt out the way as it collided with the lamppost. In front her teacher, Miss Clark, staggered out into the road and stared up at the ship. A car skidded across the road as it swerved to avoid hitting a man in the back as he ran home, only to smash Miss Clarke onto its bonnet. Other cars screeched to a halt and shunted into one another as too distracted by the spaceship overhead, or trying to avoid the collision.
She should have stopped, but the reactions of the people spiralled her into a panic. Instead she sprinted harder, pushing past people to get home as quickly as possible. Tears rolled down her face, but she wouldn't slow to brush them away.
The road quickly became littered with cars and people as they stopped in their tracks to watch. She carried on weaving her way through the mass of people staring mouths open and eyes wide to soak in the space ships, like zombies caught in a trance. She continued down the street, through the alley and avoided the red post office van turning right as it hit a motorcyclist. Her heart jolted again and body jerked away from the accident.
She burst through the front door and straight into the living room to find her parents sat on the sofa glued to the TV set showing the alien space ships. She jumped on to the sofa and into the safety of her parents arms.
“It will be okay, Eva,” her father said, as he looked down into her tear filled eyes.
But she could tell from his frown he was as scared as her. The safety she craved from her parents wasn’t something they could offer. It occurred to her no one could guarantee her safety. The planet lay at the mercy of these unknown space ships and the entities that had brought them here. Any technology that could travel across space, would have powerful weapons that Earth could never match.
She silently passed him the phone and brought up the pictures.
“Here?” he asked.
She just nodded, swallowed and pointed outside.

Book News

New book on the way  - "Vampires Vs Aliens"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F60ONHO
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01F60ONHO

Guess what it is about?

It is due to be published for the 16th June 2016.
The book will only be available from amazon for the first 6 months.
It will be on the kindle unlimited subscription and I will make the first 2 days FREE.

I have been working on this book in the background between other writing. This year I set aside time to finish it off.

I hope you will all enjoy reading it. It was quite a challenge to think how these two worlds could collide.

In the forth coming weeks I will publish the blurb and the cover via these pages.

This should be 1 of 2 books I will publish this year.

The second is called "I am Fury".
Another supernatural and paranormal story with new characters. More later.

Sunday, 31 January 2016

Who is Rey?

In this blog post I hope to explore a number of the questions that came up in the film “The Force Awakens.”

Some of the most important questions that came about in the film are:

Who is Rey?

Why is Leia not a Jedi?

How and why did Ben Solo fall to the dark side?

Why is Luke Skywalker really hiding?

To explore these questions we have to go back to the beginning or to the end of the first trilogy ‘The Return of the Jedi’. At the end of that film Darth Vader had turned to the light side and the Emperor was destroyed. We would have assumed that the Empire was also destroyed or broken without a leader. ‘The Force Awakens’ takes place 30 years after ‘The Return of the Jedi’, and it is clear that the character Ben Solo/Kylo Ren is about 29 years old according to the novels and of the age of the actor.

So we can assume from this that Princess Leia immediately got pregnant almost straight after ‘The Return of the Jedi’. She may know the Jedi are not allowed to marry or to have children, because it is believed the emotional connections may lead down the dark side of the force.
It is something that was explored in depth with the fall of Anakin to Darth Vader, when he let his emotions run riot due to the death of his mother and then later on when he had the force visions of the death of his two children. Maybe this answers our first question why is Leia not a Jedi? Possibly because she became pregnant and decided to have the baby. She was therefore persuaded by Luke not to follow the path of the Jedi. She probably agreed to this as didn’t want to fall down the same path as her father. She did not want to gain great Jedi abilities and slip to the dark side through fear or worry of protecting her own children.

So Luke Skywalker goes off to set up a Jedi Academy and probably finds a number of force sensitive people to join. At some point Ben Solo would have joined. As shown in previous films, when a force sensitive is discovered they are taken from their parents at a young age and put into training. Ben would have shown force sensitive traits at a very early age and probably been taken from Leia and Han and given to Luke to be trained.
He would know that Luke Skywalker is his uncle. Maybe the Jedi Academy was on the same place that they all live together, so he remained with his mother and father. Or maybe he was separated from them.

Ben Solo would have been a very powerful Jedi and probably shown the most promise of all the other students at the Academy. He also knows Luke Skywalker, the master of the Jedi, is his uncle. And that his grandfather Darth Vader was the chosen one. It’s fair to assume that he would have considered himself very important and the heir to the Skywalker crown. He would have probably been the most talented student, picking up the Jedi skills more quickly than anybody else. He would have excelled at all the training and he would have been the number one student and given a lot of attention by his uncle Luke Skywalker.

Let’s move on to Luke Skywalker. Luke is the master of the academy and would have come into contact with a number of people. It is possible that he may have met a female Jedi during this training. He may of fallen in love and had a child. Jedi are not allowed to have children, and he could not keep that child around him. He would have worried it would lead him to the dark side, as it had his father. Also other people would have been upset to know that he had a child and broken his Jedi code, including his sister, as he had insisted previously not train as a Jedi and had to give up her son to him.

I would assume Luke’s lover went away or she would have agreed to leave and have the child elsewhere. This would save Luke Skywalker the embarrassment and prevent a rift within the Jedi Academy and the resistance. However, a child of Luke Skywalker and another Jedi was going to be powerful in the force and after a few years her powers manifested. Other people would have noticed that she was a force sensitive. The dark side were looking for other Jedi, may be looking to turn them over to the dark side or looking to destroy them. It could be that this woman then returned to the Jedi Academy with her daughter and asked Luke to protect her. At this point no one would have known it was Luke Skywalker’s daughter, apart from Luke and her mother. It was safer to bring a potentially powerful force user to the light side, than to leave them to be killed or turned into a powerful dark weapon.

Luke Skywalker’s daughter would have excelled at the training, possibly better than Ben Solo had done. If we look at the time line to say she arrived when she was five years old and Ben Solo would have been 15 years old. At 15 years old he would have been full of teenage angst and hormones, and considered himself the best in the Academy. If a  young girl turns up at the age of five and starts picking things up very quickly, it would be noticed that she is doing better than Ben did at a similar age. Therefore better than Ben when fully trained. This may push Ben to feel threatened or embarrassed or concerned that what he considers his rightful role as the new master of the Jedi to be under threat from this unknown female. This may start Ben on his slide to the dark side. As the daughter of Princess Leia and the grandson of Darth Vader, he feels it is his right to be the best student at the academy and one day the Jedi master like Luke.
This is how I think his slide to the dark side begins. But what we must consider is how does his dark side slide continue. How does supreme Chancellor Snoke find him, talk to him and introduce the dark side? Can only surmise that somehow Snoke sneaks into the Jedi Academy in disguise, or had someone else working there for him. As Ben’s was nose put out of place by the strength of the new student, they slowly groom him to join their side. As time goes on the young female gets better and better and continues to improve over the next five years until she is 10 years old and Ben becomes 20.
In the film “The Force Awakens”, it makes the point that the Jedi Academy was destroyed 10 years ago and then Luke Skywalker went into hiding, so we can assume that when the Luke’s daughter reaches 10 and Ben was aged 20, was the point of the academy’s fall. The dark side Jedi destroy the Academy and join Chancellor Snoke and the First Order.
Obviously with this young female being Luke Skywalker’s daughter, he protects her, and I believe takes her to the ocean planet you find him on at the end of the force awakens. Rey mentions in one of the scenes that her lasting memory of home is a planet full of oceans. Yes, you guessed it, I believe Rey is Luke Skywalker’s daughter.

I believe Luke used a memory mind wipe on Rey in order to protect her. This technique was seen in the Knights of the old Republic with Revan. The Jedi Council use it to wipe his memory but through contact with the force the powers came back again. We’ve already seen that they are using much of the expanded universe to create a rich new set of films. They are borrowing from the Knights of the old Republic and the story of Revan. The outfit Kylo Ren wears is very similar to Revan’s. Rey’s memory has been wiped but through contact with the force, in respect of Luke Skywalker’s light sabre and the mind interrogation from Klyo,  the force has awakened in her. She doesn’t remember how she was trained, she just knows how to use the force. This is very similar to the Darth Revan character in the Knights of the Old Republic prior to him remembering that he was once a Jedi.
Therefore we could see a similar scene in the second film when Luke Skywalker completely repairs her memory, or she remembers everything. I would imagine this is going to be very early on in the film and that we will have a series of flashbacks explaining exactly who she is and how she ended up on the desert planet.

Also during the film when Klyo Ren heard it was a girl that escaped or a girl that did the various actions that could be associated to a force user, he seems to react in a particular way. That reaction is not because it is a female, but as he knows of a girl that could be of a danger to him. Maybe he had a vision of a girl that will destroy him or beat him.

So I’ve answered the question of why Leia is not a Jedi, because she had a child and it would have been against the Jedi rules.

I’ve answered the question who is Rey. I believe her to be Luke Skywalker’s daughter.

I explained why I believe that Ben Solo falls to the dark side of the force. I believe that was due to jealousy of Rey’s ability and her being more powerful in the force than him and more likely to take the mantle of the master Jedi. He may have even discovered she was actually Luke Skywalker’s daughter and therefore been annoyed by the fact that he was training her directly, when he cannot be with his own family. This is may be why he’s so disappointed that his father hadn’t fought harder for him. Maybe he is disappointed in Han Solo because he’s not a Jedi.

The final question was why is Luke Skywalker really in hiding. I think it is because the destruction of the Academy. But he is also hiding because he’s very embarrassed about the fact that he had a secret daughter and then trained her at the Academy. Maybe he spent too much time with her at the expense of the other students. I think he knows the reason Ben Solo went to the dark side, because of the jealousy that Luke was training his own daughter or favoured a student. A student that would be stronger than him one day and the Master Jedi of the new order. If only both his parent were Jedi’s. Ben is annoyed at Luke for being such a hypocrite.  

I think Luke blames himself through his actions of having a child and then training her as part the Jedi order, when Ben wasn’t allowed to be with his family. Luke probably kept Rey a secret from Leia and Han Solo was well. With Ben Solo being a powerful Jedi, he managed to detect the feelings between Luke to Rey and worked out the real relationship between them. Luke is really hiding as he feels that he is responsible, not with the lack of proper training and guidance, but from his hypocritical actions as the Jedi master.

However, this all could be wrong, we have to wait until the next film to find out the truth. I hope you enjoyed reading my fan theory.