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Year: 2010

I’ve Been Podcasted!

I’ve Been Podcasted!

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Wow! I just listened to the wonderfully done podcast version of “The Taste of Starlight” at www.lightspeedmagazine.com

This is the first time I’ve had a short story of mine read aloud and podcasted. It’s one of the coolest things about LIGHTSPEED–they do podcast readings every month. And let me tell you, Kristoffer Tabori does an AMAZING job of bringing this story of Dr. Pelops and his dilemma to life.

This guy has a voice you could listen to for hours. However, the story podcast is only 64 minutes long. WARNING: Do  not eat anything while listening to the story, and if you don’t have a strong stomach, skip it altogether.

Tabori’s voice brings all the gravity of an OUTER LIMITS announcer to the story, and his lively, chilling tones are worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe tale. I feel that the story has been elevated to a whole new level by Tabori’s bravura performance.

Even if you’ve read the story, I recommend paying another visit to LIGHTSPEED and listening to it through Tabori’s immense talent.

Here’s the direct link to the podcast.

Fantastic!

John R. Fultz

Art Evolution 7: Jeff Easley

Art Evolution 7: Jeff Easley

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Six artists were now represented in my Art Evolution project, beginning here, and the feelings of dread that I couldn’t get this accomplished were turning into the problematic emotion what will I do if this success continues? I needed to push forward with the concepts involving Art Evolution, and the Eras of Art that I’d put into play.

mmii-254My newest contribution, ‘Planescape Lyssa’, gave me a great snapshot of the twilight of TSR. This time-period was something I called The CCG Era [Collectible Card Game], and with the artists I’d already collected I had wonderful representations of The OGL Era of the two-thousands, The Independents Era of the late eighties, and The Groovy Era of the late seventies. A fine collection, but I was missing one glaring contribution, something from The Masters of Oil Era of the early eighties.

To fill this slot, I was going to have to go after at least one of the Big Four, Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson, or Clyde Caldwell. I’d studied the names and their art, and for the first time began putting my research down in a written format. Research became paramount as I started piecing together my feelings on the subject matter.

Styles came out, mediums used in different time periods, and what the industry was leaning toward from year to year. It was a revelation, and I used whatever knowledge I could to push the project forward.

Of the Master of Oil, Easley was certainly the most prolific in gaming terms of the remaining artists but he had no website or available email. I managed to get some contact information from Jeff Laubenstein, who had met Easley during his time at FASA and at several renaissance fairs around the Chicago area. Connections inside the industry were starting to come together, and the more I talked to artists, the more entwined I became in their world.

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Nov/Dec Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine Now on Sale

Nov/Dec Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine Now on Sale

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fsfnov-dec2010aHuzzah!  The latest issue of my favorite fantasy magazine goes on sale today.

Ahem.  Favorite other than Black Gate, of course.

The big November/December double issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction includes contributions from Robert Reed, Alan Dean Foster, Albert E. Cowdrey, Alexander Jablokov, and many more.

Here’s what the editor, Gordon van Gelder, tells us about the issue:

The Robert Reed story about running in this issue is so effective that I lost 8 pounds and knocked 0:31 off my best mile time just by editing it. Speaking of editing it, it is 100% true that when it was on submission, I read one of the stories in the issue while attending one of my daughter’s tea parties. (I won’t say which story.) Jerry Oltion has bought 5,000 copies of this issue and stored them away, just in case he might need them in the future. Alex Irvine didn’t get the memo that he was supposed to send me a story just so his name could be on the cover.

We last covered F&SF with their Oct/Nov issue, with Richard Chwedyk, Michael Swanwick, Terry Bisson, and Richard Matheson. If you missed it, maybe it’s time to consider subscribing?

Complete details (and a subscription form) are available on their website.

“We Belong Dead”: Bride of Frankenstein

“We Belong Dead”: Bride of Frankenstein

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I will be one of the Black Gate team present at the World Fantasy Convention this weekend, so if you are there as well, just look for the guy who appears lost. (I’ve never been to one of the big conventions before.)

bride-of-frakenstein-universal-weeklyTwo weeks ago I discussed the key Hammer Horror film for Halloween, Dracula (1958). It would be a grave omission not to discuss my key Universal Horror film for Halloween—especially since this year is that movie’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

This is going to be a “strolling” review, in which I walk through an entire film and simply point at things. It’s a good sort of October stroll, I think.

Three-quarters of a century ago, on April 22nd, Universal Pictures released the long-rumored, delayed, and awaited sequel to their 1931 smash hit adaptation of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Bride of Frankenstein. The world of Gothic film has never been the same. Bride is the highest achievement of the Universal Horror series, the best film ever from director James Whale, and a defining moment in the cinema of the fantastic, weird, and grotesque. Every viewing of the film is an unfettered joy and a voyage through the dark imagination.

(Promotional materials advertise the film as The Bride of Frankenstein, but the actual on-screen title eliminates the definite article, and I’m a martinet about these things.)

Universal in the 1930s built their House of Horrors on the twin success of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931. A later successful double feature of the two would create the Universal Horrors of the 1940s. And it was the director of Frankenstein, British import James Whale, one of many theatrical directors who were given film directing jobs in the new world of the “Talkies,” that the studio pegged as their great hope not only for horror, but to put the studio on a competitive level with MGM. Whale wasn’t only a sure hand with horror movies like Frankenstein, The Old Dark House (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933), but also produced successful stylish comedies, musicals, and murder mysteries for the studio.

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Black Gate at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention

Black Gate at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention

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Only a few years ago I looked on attending a convention as a useless expenditure, an indulgence I didn’t think I had time for — probably because the unfamiliarity of it made me uncomfortable.

wfclogo1Fortunately, my friend Eric Knight shook up my composure, insisting it would be good for me to go. So I went, and my first convention ever was The World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin, 2005, and I can still recall how nervous I was and how astonishing it was to be standing in the same room or even rubbing shoulders with writers I had respected and admired for long years. Luckily, Eric took me under his wing and showed me around. Before long we’d found our way to the dealer’s room — which didn’t seem too different from a cave of wonders — and I was soon talking for the first time with Black Gate‘s publisher and editor, John O’Neill.

A few months ago I wrote a brief primer about why conventions are worth attending, and rather than covering that again, I’ll point you there. If you’ve gone to other conventions you’ll be surprised by WFC. Only about 1,000 attendees are allowed, which promotes a greater intimacy than you’ll find at many other conventions. There are no costumes, and the many panels and readings and workshops are focused fairly specifically on writing and editing and working in the industry. Professional editors, publishers, writers, artists, and agents are everywhere, because this is the serious industry convention, although serious in this instance shouldn’t be confused with dull.

This year the 36th World Fantasy Convention is being held in Columbus, Ohio, from October 28-31, and Black Gate will be there in force. It’ll be pretty easy to find our booth in the dealer’s room, but one or more of us will be visiting panels, participating in panels, attending readings and signings, or wandering from one late night party to another, so if you want to meet us it should be pretty easy to accomplish. If you’re planning to be there we hope that you’ll drop by the booth, and that you’ll make sure to come to the Black Gate reading Saturday night, where you’ll be able to hear several dozen Black Gate authors reading from their own works.

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.5 “Live Free or Twi-hard”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.5 “Live Free or Twi-hard”

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SUPERNATURALThe episode opens with a young man (Robert), dressed all in black and wearing too much product in his hair, romances a girl (Kristen) in a bar. He is enigmatic and tentative, recoiling at the sight of blood from a papercut. “We can’t be together,” he says. “You think you know me, but you don’t. I’ve done bad things. You should run. Now.”

“I can make my own decisions,” Krsten replies. “I’m 17.”

No, they haven’t called in Stephanie Meyer to guest write this week’s episode of Supernatural. Instead, they’re taking a turn at dark parody, pulling the cliches from the Twilight saga into their more nitty-gritty vampire mythos. In Supernatural, vampires are flat-out monsters, not dark romantic leads.

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The Book Fair

The Book Fair

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Book Fair flyerThe McGill book fair is the largest English-language used book sale in Montreal. It’s been held for decades, every October, on the second Wednesday and Thursday after Thanksgiving (which in Canada is on the second Monday in October). Every year an eclectic mix of thousands of books are sold, helping to raise money for scholarships.

I’ve been coming to the sale for about a dozen years. I’ve found novels by Lord Dunsany, a biography of C.S. Lewis, a book about Hypatia of Alexandria, a Dennis Wheatley omnibus, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Paul Park’s Celestis, a volume combining Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, collections of poetry by John Clare and Francois Villon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Southey and Don Marquis, a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds — and all of these (along with books by Neal Stephenson, Tad Williams, and T.H. White) in just one year, 2008, when I bought a total of 65 books for $161.

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JOHN CARTER OF MARS (or: Barsoom, Anyone?)

JOHN CARTER OF MARS (or: Barsoom, Anyone?)

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A great painting by Joe Jusko featuring a convergence of Barsoom's most memorable elements. That's John Carter and Dejah Thoris in the midst of all the savage beasties. The setting is one of Mars' ancient ruined cities, home to the savage green Tharks.

It’s a sublimely gorgeous rainy day here in Napa. I’m listening to the ancient, pattering rhythm of the rainsong and thinking about Mars.

No, not the red dustball of our modern age, where tiny robots scour the dunes for microscopic life. I’m thinking of BARSOOM, the title the red planet bore a long, long time ago.

I’m thinking of ancient cities crumbling across dead sea-bottoms, tusked green warriors standing ten feet tall, snake-haired plant-men, four-armed white apes, ten-legged lions, flashing swords, and blasting radium pistols. I’m thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his most original creation John Carter of Mars.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, his first novel. John Carter, his rugged hero, was a Civil War veteran who stumbled into a mystical cave and was transported through space and time to an ancient version of Mars (Barsoom) where various races of Martians (some obviously descended from Native American stock, some wholly alien in design) battled constantly for survival among the remains of a fallen civilization.

Here was swordplay, swashbuckling, and adventure in the grandest style. From 1912 to 1964, Burroughs wrote a total of 11 novels set on Barsoom (most of which featured John Carter).

These books, not to mention the author’s Tarzan, Venus, Pellucidar, Westerns, and various other works, make ERB one of pulp fiction’s towering giants.

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A Review of Warriors, edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois

A Review of Warriors, edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois

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warwarriorsWarriors, edited by George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois
Tor Books (736 pages. $27.99. March 16th, 2010)

Warriors is a unique anthology. With its smorgasbord of genres, there is a tale and a Warrior for any reader. Well, there is a tale for every reader. Similar to Swords & Dark Magic, the other 2010 mega-sized mega-star-studded co-edited anthology, Warriors’ cover — title and text — misleads the reader as to the nature of its contents.

The cover — which at my very first glance I mistook as a pencil rather than a bared blade of steel — gives the impression of being a ‘how-to’ text on writing about Warriors. This struck a chord with me, for it bears a remarkable resemblance to a looming RBE publication. Turns out, this is not the nature of the anthology. This is a collection of…what, exactly? Experimental works? Writing exercises? Explorations of what being a Warrior is? Perhaps. Yet the back cover cites Homer, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Crane, and Jones, and does not in fact mesh well with an experimental/instructional image, or the actual contents.

Unlike S&DM though, I was unable to read Warriors straight through. No, this anthology took me several months to read, months of setting it down to fill my sparse personal reading time with something more entertaining, more exciting, then reluctantly returning to and finally bulling through it due more to Black Gate’s looming deadline than any other reason. Fortunately for me, five of the final seven tales were winners. In these (and a few earlier) delightful tales, I also happily discovered a few authors new to me.

Unfortunately, almost half the tales contained in Warriors are not of ‘Warriors’ as such titling and portrayal would have one believe. ‘Fighters’ most certainly: every tale delivers a fight. ‘Survivors’ more accurately: every fight delivers a survivor… But Warriors? I think not.

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My Agent Hunt

My Agent Hunt

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childoffireI should start by introducing myself: my name is Harry Connolly and I’m a Del Rey author. My second novel came out on the last day of August and I’m pretty proud of it. I’m also proud that my first fiction sale was to Black Gate: “The Whoremaster of Pald” headed the table of contents of the second issue (and can be read for free on this website). Happily, there have been a couple of other sales here, too. I also spoke about the details of my first novel sale last Saturday, and my interview with Howard Andrew Jones appeared here Monday.

Anyway, per John’s request, I’d like to describe the method I used to find my agent. I’m a cheap bastard, so I didn’t spend any money but the search did take a while. I’ll also detail the mistakes I made, which may be instructive for others.

First, I don’t need to say I spent a long time revising my query letter, right? You guys all know that the letter has to be specific, intriguing and on-point, I’m sure. So let’s skip the part where I recommend you revise it several times and ask smart friends for feedback.

But where to send it? Being cheap, I went to the internet. Specifically, I went to agentquery.com and used their “Full Search” to compile a long list of agents that represent fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Thank you, copy and paste.

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