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Glad to see you're able to make a but more progress. And it's on a part I'm very interested in, nonetheless. (Who wouldn't be curious to see how a grot and a commisar get along?)

Chaos is foul. Especially up close and personal. It's a tricky line to walk. I'd say if you're finding it uncomfortable to write then it's most likely uncomfortable to read. Striking the balance between "true to chaos" and enjoyable to read is a tough one. Maybe having the bulk of the worst part happen "off screen" as they say in the movies, might mitigate some of the nastiness. At least you're not actually making a movie.

[143.938.M41] [Journal Entry: Commissar Yorke]

One of my duties, and by far the one I'm least fond of out of them all, is recording the dead. Quite often we aren't even entirely sure someone has died. The vast majority of guard do not get graves or memorials. They don't even have bodies to bury. Sometimes we find scraps of uniform or tokens, dog tags if we are exceptionally lucky. Often we are not gifted the time to look.
We have become so beautifully, brutally efficient at destroying one another, that there's simply no way of identifying exactly who was in a set place at a set time, if the unit was killed.
I say killed, I say died, I do not say destroyed or wiped, because these were people. They had lives, thoughts and hearts all their own. And now they are tattered fragments on the wind, or grit beneath our boots. With only other guard and commissars to remember them.

And when we are killed too, and those around us, it ends. It ends with us, the story of all we remember. Bits of data and lists, sent off to some central bank, for what true reason, I'll never fathom. Why even pretend that each soul matters to the sightless machine that logs them?

Two hundred and eighty five. That is how many of the 183rd have died on my watch. Most of them young, some of them frightened, all of them believing they ultimately could make a difference. That's a small town, a village. The difference that many people could have made to a world without war is staggering. But also irrelevant, now.

And I go, and I fill out the stub paperwork that represents a life. And I then step to our chapel, and the detachment I could briefly pull around myself ends.
It's a place for soldiers to pray for the dead, and reflect on those we lose. There are small tokens everywhere. On the ledges, tables, even tucked in the corners. At first glance it may seem superstitious, but then you realise that button or sergeant's stripes may be all that returned of a squad. Many are faded beyond recognition, fabrics and colours I cannot even guess the origins of. In one corner there is even a lens from an Astartes helmet, the dark glass catches light and movement.
There are notes and prayers, seals and candles. So many candles. There must be light.

It's occasionally my shared duty to tidy up in there, and I must know which items may be cleaned and moved to the upper shelves, and which are recent, living memory.
Captain Gaskell took me through it when I first arrived. I remember. There was a commissar hat and sash on the front table. Bloodied and recent. I knelt to look at them and he turned his face from me. The only time he wouldn't meet my eye in our years serving together. They belonged to the man who came before me. I didn't need to ask.

And so I put each name into the book of remembrance in the chapel.
A book of remembrance. One. There's a back archive behind a faded curtain, as big as the chapel again. Dating back centuries before us. Each page listing the name, rank, age, and a small space for personal comments about them. I try to remember what I can when I fill them out. Many, many of those spaces remain empty in the older books. Time, knowledge of the person, or compassion are scarce resources in our time.

Sometimes I look through those older books, see the handwriting of those before me. Tasked with the same duty. Priests, Captains, Commissars, aides. Even occasionally fellow troopers when a deployment has gone so terribly wrong, and all were lost.

Sometimes the pages are torn or defaced where a guardsman was later found alive. They're not frequent, but they exist.

Sometimes if a whole squad or platoon were killed, there is a prayer, an epitaph beneath. As we come closer to present day, they are less and less common. Not because people aren't dying en masse, but because they are killed so thoroughly that there is nobody left to pray for them.

Sometimes the entries are smeared with what looks like water, and carefully rewritten beneath. We know it's not really water, there's no plumbing in the chapel. Humans are the only source. Sometimes those waters fell midway through the main entry, meaning that it cannot have been visiting troopers. Do priests cry? Commissars do.

The books at the back are nothing but dust now themselves. The covers holding together by sheer volume of those pressed against them. I drew one out once to see which regiments travelled aboard the Nubila in the past, and the lives in it evaporated into the air as I breathed upon the pages.

Did their contribution to the war matter? We have to believe it is so.

*

In the grim dark future, your job still sucks.

A little culture fluff for their home, the Inter Caput Nubila.
Even the hardest weathered commissar or priest would have to deal with the death reports. I think it would take a strength of faith to remain certain in the justness of their cause after doing it year in, year out. Though as Cat notes, that may not be for very long.

I was going to give this piece its own topic, but I'm already cluttering up the DF front page. What do you think?

I thought it was really interesting, and gave us a bit more insight on Yorke's struggles with a job that makes you do some rather upsetting things, to put it very lightly.

I'm glad you thought so. I also hope it comes across that he isn't saying out and out that war is wrong, just that the sheer scale of it renders the individual to nothing. I didn't want to come across as anti-war, but instead as anti-system.

It may be the only bit of this topic I add to the Dakka wiki, as it stands alone well enough.

I'm still chugging along with this, but I suppose lack of whimsy in my own life is making any attempt to write cheerful grots feel false and forced. I had this problem before when I was writing children's books.
Do t get me wrong, I'm not depressed, I'm mostly just weary. Certainly still in love with this story and still writing for it. I've added a great deal to books two and three, including some very dark scenes about the subtle effects of chaos on the unguarded.

But I've also written some nicer stuff, Sergeant Ronson gets a little introduction and character building in "the present" when we next return, and I've actually revisited Valse to give Gatchi and Yorke an ending.
That's ready to roll, it just feels like stalling on getting this boat afloat again, so to speak. Any opinion on what I should post next? Push on and get the main line going again, rather than keep distracting myself?

This week I'm painting like mad, the weekend is a tournament, and then the OH is whisking me away to Berlin to see Christmas markets. But in between and after, I'm hoping to get back to camping. I've written some, it's just walking the fine line between scene building and trimming.
Dialogue is clearly my passion, but getting some time lapse rolling would really help.

I know it's not what you're looking for, but I'd say write up whatever. If you want to push on with the story, go on. If you want to do some side stuff, that's fine too. Both have benefits, and both are bound to be interesting

I have to agree with 2BJ1. Write up whatever, we'd love to read it whatever it is.

To be honest I'm probably done with off-shoots for a little while. I enjoyed finishing the Valse line, and giving Gatchi a future, but a lot of my side scenes involve characters we haven't met yet.

I recently started writing a section, realised it was not going to fly due to being too personal, finished it and banked it under "optional chapter", a bit like the Space Wolf hangover.

There's basically now a bonus chapter for book II where two characters get a bit of peace and time hanging out together, and when I first wrote it, I thought "this is a good idea, this book was horrible to everyone." reading it now, I think, "this is a great way to give myself a terrible reputation."
Part of me wants to include it, because 38,000 years in the future, people would be mortified by soldiers of different rank being a couple, but not homosexuals. Part of me realised it runs a real risk of making my story uncomfortable reading for people who are not keyed into that idea wholeheartedly.
I'm not even taking sex, just two members of the 183rd finding solace in one another. It was never supposed to be a big thing. It was just a peaceful conclusion.

Like anyone else, I want my stories to be read and enjoyed, but staying away from certain subjects for the sake of that makes me feel a coward. Same reason we often write male leads and villains; they're easier to access on a casual level.

I guess it's about how it's handled, in the end. It's a war and sci fi story with occasional cuddles, not a romance novel after all.

On a side note, my villains make me worry which corner of my mind they crept out of.

Cheerful grots? I have no idea what you're talking about. Mouse and his pals live a life of perpetual fear and drudgery. They're lives are under constant threat and they've probably been dropping like flies for weeks. A cheerful grot is either laughing at his dead mate's idiocy or is about to die himself... Or both. Or he's Smirking and therefore immortal.
Anywho, I unsurprisingly vote for more camp grots.

Cheerful compared to a life full of awareness of war and the greater decay of your species on the whole.
I think grots are the most human characters in contemporary terms because they only really have to deal with the current situation and a slightly longer term survival. They don't have to cope with the bigger picture.

And actual imperial guardsman would have to be very stupid, very depressed, or very brainwashed (or all three) to avoid grasping the true scale of the war and not painting the inside of his helmet with his own lasgun.
Cat touched on the sensation, but I think we couldn't grasp it as a culture ourselves.

It's likened to WWII in space. But in WWII, generals and leaders knew there had to be an eventual end.

So yes, cheerful. Just relatively so.

I had Cat explain toilets to them, which is probably my favourite thing in the chapter.
Commissar Yorke: The Biography With a Surprising Amount of References to Body Waste

Who says sci fi can't be glam.

Actually, I've read that in the Guardsman's Primer there is an asston of outright lies (like orks being small and weak) to keep them from being depressed or absofethinglutely terrified. Of course, that only applies to new recruits who have never fought though, so the rest are fething BADASSES!

There's Fifteen Hours, which explains how truly unprepared and short the average guardsman's life is in some sectors.
Also the FFG Only War book has diary excerpts from a trooper who went from believing Orks were slow and stupid, to being the last living member of his squad, waiting for death.

I have the 183rd survive, because it they don't, the book ends, but they're only really doing small scale deployments and in some cases, planetary defenses. Mordians all start in the PDF, so they're the perfect diplomatic regiment to drop on a newly settled planet.

I'm officially back on the horse.
I loaded up the 183rd into my ebook reader and re-read what I've done. As well as noticing a few typos, I've got a better feel for where we're headed.

I'm also going to make the decision now to change and update Commissar Yorke's name to Raymond, as much as I love "Ramirez", it doesn't make any sense as a first name, and now I'm not playing the story for laughs, the story behind his name isn't very credible.
It's not a major change, and everyone calls him Ray or Cat anyway.

I've done a bit of work on various things away from the main plot line, but I'm happy to return to Mouse and Co, very soon.
I wrote the history of Cat's predecessor, some more about Creer, and some character journals from Michelle of all people.

Glad to see your return. And I don't mind the name change, like you said, it won't be the end of the world.

I know I don't keep up with this a lot, but I'm loving what you write here. You're doing great.

Thanks guys, it's something I really enjoy doing.
I don't think I would ever write a book like I wrote this again, because it's been very very scattered, and I think my consistency has suffered slightly.

Sometimes I just like to pick up a book and flick through the pages and be reminded what it is that makes it great.

Great Forum Books like this one deserve the same treatment. This one gets a well deserved BUMP from me.

Thanks fella. I'm actually planning on coming back to it in the new year. Got a lot done.