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Year: 2010

E-Books That Cost More Than Hardcovers?

E-Books That Cost More Than Hardcovers?

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fall-of-giantsThe New York Times is reporting that two recent bestsellers — Fall of Giants by Ken Follett, and Don’t Blink by James Patterson and Howard Roughan — are priced higher in their e-book versions than in print by Amazon.com.

As of press time, Fall of Giants, published by Dutton on Sept 28, is $19.99 for the Kindle edition, and just $19.39 for the physical book (all 1,008 pages).   Don’t Blink is $14.99 for the e-book, or just $14 for the hardcover.

As you can imagine, this has ignited something of a firestorm in Amazon’s Customer Reviews section, resulting in both novels taking a critical drubbing.

Fall of Giants has 63 five-star reviews versus over 200 one-star reviews, with comments ranging from:

Refuse to pay this much for an ebook

and

Let’s boycott the gougers

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Goth Chick News: Let the Screaming Commence

Goth Chick News: Let the Screaming Commence

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image004It’s the first of October and that means the countdown has started.

For the next thirty days there will a lineup of great stuff on TV, a schedule full of movie festivals and new theater releases, a litany of themed events and a virtual plethora of options for combining adult beverages and questionable behavior.

In short, it’s thirty days until my favorite date on the calendar: Halloween.

For the next month I will average approximately four hours of sleep per night in a manic attempt to juggle my intrusive day job with all the after-dark activities available only this time of year. Soon I will begin to resemble the pale and sallow creatures of my Midnight Movies and bug-eyed demons of the local haunted attraction, but it matters not. I will sleep on November the first.

You don’t have to be utterly obsessed with All Hallow’s Eve to enjoy October. With an internet connection and a little tenacity, you can expend as much or a little cash as you wish and still have a ripping good time.

Here are my top three suggestions for ways to enjoy the only time of year when adults can act like juvenile delinquents in public, and no one cares.

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 6 Arrives

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 6 Arrives

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hfq-bannerThe sixth issue of online fiction zine Heroic Fantasy Quarterly appeared September 30.  What are you still doing here? Jump over to HFQ and check it out!

Contents this issue include the short stories “The Sea Wasp” by Robert Rhodes and “Heart of Man” by David Pilling, as well as poems from Charles Saplak and Shennandoah Diaz.

There’s also an editorial, which includes this amusing update on our pal Adrian Simmons:

After stumbling upon a rare opportunity to level-up, Adrian Simmons will be taking off the next two quarters at HFQ in order take a Numerical Analysis of Data course, as well as a prep course for the Fundamentals of Engineering test. Thus begins a six-month process akin to the development of the classic AD&D bard. If he passes, he looks forward to the ability to charm monsters.

Looking forward to the details at the World Fantasy Convention, Adrian. Bring the harp.

Past issues of HFQ have included contributions from Black Gate stalwarts such as Contributing Editor Bill Ward, Vaughn Heppner (our man!) and Euan Harvey,  as well as Matthew Wuertz, James Lecky, Jeff Crook, and many others. You can find the treasures of the past at their hearty Archives.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is edited by the mighty crew of Adrian Simmons, David Farney, William Ledbetter, and James Lecky. Art this issue is by Mariusz Gandzel.

Art Evolution 4: David Deitrick

Art Evolution 4: David Deitrick

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In my ongoing Art Evolution series, I explained my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists of all time for a shared project. They were to illustrate a single character in their most recognizable style. So far, the list has included Jeff Laubenstein, Eric Vedder, and Jeff Dee, with this week adding again to that prestigious list.

a-doomsday-254Three down, and I now had a “1st Edition D&D Lyssa”, but I’d only scratched the surface of my goal and all the artists I’d collected so far weren’t cold calls. These were people I’d already worked with, friends and partners, and the list that remained loomed much larger than this current success. I kept asking myself, ‘do you want this for you, or do you want it for something greater?’

I chewed on that as I read through an old Dragon magazine one afternoon in late August [a pastime I strongly suggest doing once a month to anyone still role-playing]. While reading, I stumbled on a beautiful advertisement for the Traveller RPG.

I recognized the art as something I’d loved in my teens, but had no idea who drew it. Going to my bookshelves I pulled down a copy of FASA’s House Davion supplement for Battletech and managed to put a name to a style… David Deitrick.

I remembered him from a hundred different pictures that had shaped my role-playing life in the late eighties. Everything about his work screamed military, and that style lent so well to the science-fiction bent of the companies he helped characterize.

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Rigor Amortis: Love and Zombies

Rigor Amortis: Love and Zombies

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rigoramortisRigor Amortis, a collection of zombie erotica and romance flash fiction edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt, was officially released October 1.

According to Jaym, who came by our booth and entertained us during slow moments at Dragon*con, Rigor Amortis started out as a joke on Twitter, and quickly snowballed into a  real book.  A bizarre and strange book, but still a book. Check out this description:

Horror and erotica. Zombies and romance. Rigor Amortis.
       Maybe a tender love story is your thing, a husband doting on his wife’s rotting corpse. Or perhaps a forbidden encounter in a secret café, serving up the latest in delectable zombie cuisine, or some dirty, dirty dancing in the old-time honky-tonk. Voodoo sex-slaves and vending machine body-parts? You’ll find those here, too.
       Whatever your flavor, these short tales of undead Romance, Revenge, Risk, and Raunch will leave you shambling, moaning, and clawing for more.

Contributors include Armand Rosamilia, Jennifer Brozek, Annette Dupree, Alex Masterson, Edward Morris, and dozens more. The sexy and disturbing cover is by Robert “Nix” Nixon.  Rigor Amortis is $14.95 (print) and $2.99 (e-Book) for 148 pages, and published by Absolute XPress.

More details are available on the website.  Show us a little zombie love, and support a quality small press.

Seventy-Eight Cards to a Better October: The Halloween Tarot

Seventy-Eight Cards to a Better October: The Halloween Tarot

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halloween-the-worldhalloween-back-of-cards1October has come, my favorite time of the year. I have my special rituals during this season, such as reading classic weird tales (Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James are among my top picks for seasonal fun) and evenings watching Universal and Hammer Horror films.

Another tradition I have is dragging out of the sock draw my Essential October Totem: Kipling West’s The Halloween Tarot, published by U.S. Game Systems, Inc. If I ever needed to describe to someone all the wonders of my favorite holiday, all of its joys and sensations and beauties and cross-cultural marvels, I would simply hand them this deck of seventy-eight colorful cards with their black-and-orange silhouetted backs and say, “Look through that. Then you’re ready for October. Now, where’s the candy? You got Pixy Stix? Okay, then I’ll take a Baby Ruth.”

Collecting tarot decks is a minor hobby of mine, one I don’t indulge in that often, but over a decade has brought into my hands about forty different decks, ranging from historical reproductions of the original tarocchi decks of fifteenth-century Italy (back when tarot was simply a game, the origin of the modern playing deck) to utter modern weirdness like The Tarot of Baseball, where The Devil has become The Manager. Tarot, for me, is strictly an art hobby with some historical interest and potential for creating stories from the images. I know the meanings of the archetypal symbols on the cards and the history of how these meanings got invested into a deck of playing cards (there’s some fascinating Renaissance history and 18th and 19th-century occult revival stuff behind it), but have zero belief in the New Age “fortune-telling” aspect of tarot. I just love seeing how different artists interpret the symbolism.

The Halloween Tarot deck is an idealized nostalgic childhood look into Halloween traditions—which include fortune-telling games at parties. Kipling West’s artwork is simple, sturdy, and extremely autumnal and affecting. She based the images on the most famous of modern tarot decks, the Waite-Smith—sometimes called Rider-Waite, after the Rider Card Company that first published it in 1910—that was developed by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith. This is the deck that almost everyone thinks of when they imagine tarot; Smith’s images, especially for the numbered cards (which were rarely fully illustrated in older decks) have become the standard template for most modern deck interpretations.

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A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

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witches-karres-aI decided to review The Witches of Karres mostly because I remember seeing some sequels, written by different authors, as James H. Schmitz died in 1981.

I’m not surprised; The Witches of Karres feels like it should have been a series all along. The setting seems designed for multiple adventures. The book itself is less a space opera than a space operetta — it never takes itself too seriously — but it’s still distinctly an adventure story, not a straight-up comedy.

Captain Pausert is a decent and friendly man, perhaps a touch too in love with his notion of himself as a square-jawed space adventurer. For instance, we find out quite early in the book that he faked a log entry about a desperate fight against pirates when he actually just spent a few hours blowing up asteroids — partly to test his ship’s guns, partly for the fun of it.

Still, he can’t resist helping someone in trouble, especially when that someone is an apparently helpless teenage slave girl. Despite the anti-slavery laws of his native planet, he’s quickly maneuvered into buying her, then her two younger sisters.

Pausert may be a bit bumbling at this point in the story, but he’s not quite stupid; he notices that the slave-owners are extremely eager to sell, and that there’s something slightly off about the three girls.

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Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

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World Fantasy Award Nominee
World Fantasy Award Nominee.

A growing number of Black Gate authors have moved on to book deals, and some were published novelists before they appeared in the magazine.

Two of us, James Enge and myself,  landed book deals featuring recurring characters that had appeared in Black Gate short stories.

They were the Dabir & Asim stories for me (“Whispers from the Stone” and “Sight of Vengeance“) and the Morlock tales for James (six appearances in BG so far, starting with “Turn Up This Crooked Way” and “Payment Deferred,” and most recently the novella “Destroyer” in Black Gate 14).

Back before James got nominated for the World Fantasy Award in the Best Novel category (for his first novel, no less! — that’s Blood of Ambrose, if you don’t have a copy yet) the two of us got talking one day about the connections between magazine sales and book deals.

We decided to turn the thing into a public back-and-forth discussion about writing serial fantasy characters, starting with a look at the idea that short story successes lead naturally to selling books.

I’ve captured and condensed that conversation here for your enjoyment.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.2 “Two and a Half Men”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.2 “Two and a Half Men”

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Since having children, I’ve found that anything hinting at children in danger is a lot more emotional than it was before. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would have probably had no real impact on me a few years back, but watching it now those last few minutes, where Button is aging younger and younger, undergoing dementia as his toddler body gets smaller and smaller, forgetting even how to walk … it still haunts my dreams. (I probably should have put a spoiler space there, but if you haven’t seen it by now, you probably aren’t going to.)

Dean and a cute little kid. Grab the tissues, this is going to get ugly.
Dean and a cute little kid. Grab the tissues, this is going to get ugly.

So the promos for this week’s episode tell me that it’s going to be a rough one, emotionally. There’s a baby and, from what I can tell, he is either a monster or eaten by one … or possibly both.

The first moments of the episode, as is often the case, are action packed. Camera zooms in on a family photo which is then smacked by a blood soaked hand and falls to the ground. A woman runs through the house, clutching her baby in bloody arms. She hides in the bedroom. The phone gives a busy signal. Someone’s forcing the door open, so she hides under the bed with a baby. There is absolutely no way that this plan will work, and to her credit you get the idea that she knows it, but this is a horror series after all and it’s not like she had a lot of options.

Holy crap, Dad’s bloody corpse is under the bed with them!

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Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

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chainmail_3rd_editionI’m an old TSR module fan, and as such I’ve always been intrigued by how the concept of such media came into existence. For the most part they fall in series, kind of like writers follow Tolkien with the concept of connected books and characters in a trilogy. It makes perfect sense, especially if you’re trying to create an extended campaign with a gaming group that meets on a regular basis. Series modules facilitate that, and recently I had the opportunity to chat with one of the original designers of a TSR foundation adventure path, the L Series ‘Lendore Isles.’

The author, Lenard ‘Len’ Lakofka is probably so ‘old school’ he’s beyond the term. His inclusion into the realm of RPGs predates the genre entirely, as he was a member of the International Federation of Wargaming. This institution came about in the sixties before the creation of Gygax’s Chainmail and was the original organizer of the first Lake Geneva Convention, i.e. GenCon in 1968.

At that first convention, people were playing Avalon Hill board games and Diplomacy during the Saturday only gathering, but that first year a chosen few were invited by Gygax to try Chainmail on the following Sunday after the convention was over. Lakofka was one of these founding fathers of the game.

From those humble beginnings, Chainmail would evolve into Dungeons & Dragons and Lakofka would continue to play the game with verve for the next forty years.

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