Vincent Blake's Fairytales - 1 - Red Autumn

Guess what? The people here at TF141 Media have decided to WRITE A BOOK!

Alright, so you're not impressed. I really don't care. Anyways, after looking over the Amazon store's Kindle, which is arguably the most popular electronic device ever sold publicly since the iPod. It's got over 820,000 books on the damn thing in the span of three years. Amazing, isn't it? Sometime in November, I was talking with the new recruit, Daniel Justice. He had bought a kindle about half a year and brought up the idea of writing our own eBook, and saying that we'd probably earn a lot of money. Now that was an idea in my mind.

Here's the prototype version of the cover.

The cover was drawn by me and Finn Smith, the world's greatest soldier artist. As you can see by this picture. It was based off a photo we had seen shot of a marine. And since we didn't want to keep him standing there in that same pose for several days, we just took a picture.

This was inked by Pierce Sanders and Alice Thompson, the greatest inker duo in the world.

Anyways, the idea had actually come up by Vincent Blake during the wee years in college. While he was busy getting drunk watching cute girls shred off their bras, I was searching around in his drawers, trying to get back the $20 he borrowed, and then I saw a little dusty paper, typed up. The label read 'Vincent Blake in his debut novel: The Wasteland.'

Here's the original notes, zoom in to see

I snuck it out and left it in my oversized backpack, then went off to beat him with the end of a .44 magnum.

Anyways, I took him by surprise when I slapped the story onto his desk, directly after talking with Justice. I told him that I had found the story in his cabinet, and the newbie had mentioned about writing a book. Since I didn't want anybody else to steal his thunder (I'm a lover, not a fighter), I asked him if he wanted to write that mini-epic. Well, he seemed pretty excited by that idea, and we got to production.

Writing about Red Autumn is half based on our own ideas, 25% based off the Fallout games, and the last is just about various Marine stories that Gregg shared. The best place to write about a war story is at a bar, because everybody's getting drunk and hitting one another over the head with glass.

Now, for those of you who thinks it's going to be one of those cheapo war simulation dingies that seven-year olds play in those stupid video games, let me assure you, that you are so

In fact, we're actually going to try and make it seem graphic, but not graphic in the way of 'blood and guts', or guys saying 'fucking shit' every paragraph. Nope, it's not one of those. In fact, Vincent was pretty strict in how he wanted the story to be written. You had to make war seem BAD. That's what we're striving for. Sure, some books (and films) have tried to make that work, like Saving Private Ryan, The Pacific, Sunset Over Fallujah, Hurt Locker, you know, the usual flicks.

Video games do the exact opposite, making them seem INCREDIBLY ridiculous.

About the story in particular, you're supposed to FEEL for Caesar and Elinor. That's what war games and movies can succeed at is making you like the characters, because you KNOW that they're innocent, and really just want a peaceful life (I mean, most of them, right?), and they're forced to kill to make sure they aren't. So when you see your hero die, it's sad. We want to make it seem sad without any major deaths. Red Autumn is supposed to be scary, it's supposed to be more graphic, it's supposed to be emotional OF ALL things above, and it's supposed to have a stinging moral like none other. That's what we try to strive for.

War is hell.

But it's only cause they make it hell.