I’ve finished reading all the Black Gate e-submissions. I have a dozen or so responses left to write and a few decisions to make; everyone awaiting e-sub information should know the fate of their story within the next few days.
Howard
John and I are making big strides into the submission pile. John still has some older physical subs to get to before he can get to the (relatively) newer e-subs I set aside for him. I think, however, that things will soon be under control. When I came on board we split the subs down the middle, with me taking the e-subs and John taking the physical subs. The one was a lot easier to send me than the other.
I’m almost to the end of the e-subs, and have begun to send forth responses. I have about a dozen left to read, and one or two I’m considering as I sort through these rest. A few of those left to read are longish and well-written, so they alone will take several hours.
Lest you think that you’re alone out there with your rejection pile, I’ve been accumulating some rejects lately myself. A while back I fashioned a new protagonist and a new setting, but despite my own sense that I’m making new strides and charting new ground — and despite an excellent reception from one of my most trusted first readers — the market has not been interested. Frustrated genius? Bitter hack? I’m more puzzled than bitter. I hope I’m not a hack; I’m danged sure I’m not a genius. Anyway. As I did with Dabir and Asim, I will continue to write these stories from time to time, just because they please me. Maybe a market will open up. My focus right now, though, is on novel writing.
I think I mentioned that I was working on a polishing pass of my mist world novel, which is sitting now at about 93 thousand words. I was shooting for between 90 and 95k, so I’m pretty happy with that. I’m trying something new with this pass, which is to focus on getting ten pages revised a day. Some days I’m doing more, but most days I’m just combing back and forth over the ten pages, slowly. I think the prose is getting stronger for it. I’m currently about a third of the way in, and should be done around the first of next month. And here my goal was to get it done by mid summer! Ah well. Better a late strong draft than a cruddy one on time.
Two other folks I regularly direct vistors to have posted some interesting writing tips lately. Eric Knight has one on a Jackie Collins novel he stumbled across — rather than rolling his eyes he points out some strengths to learn from, and James Van Pelt is teaching some creative writing to high schoolers. I think it’s important to go back and revisit basics — they’re far too easy to forget.
Howard
My father would have been 75 today.
I can’t help thinking about him on the day of his death, in May — I think about him most days, although after seven years the pain of his absence is no longer an ever-present ache — but I forcibly choose to celebrate his memory on his birthday.
I don’t do anything elaborate. Dad’s birthdays were never elaborate occasions when he was alive, though sometimes finding a gift could be. There wasn’t much he really lacked; he took comfort and pleasure in the people he loved and the things he already had. On his birthdays these days I take down his picture, light a candle, sit down with a good drink, and think out loud. Those steps are likely some kind of tradition, somewhere. I’m sure I didn’t make them up out of whole cloth.
A few years back I used to get choked up whenever I talked to my children about my father, and I was so obviously affected that my son said, one day, that he’d stop asking about his grandfather because the topic so clearly upset me. That obviously wasn’t the route I meant to travel. Today I can tell my children all sorts of tales about their grandfather.
Regular visitors will note that I usually talk about either Black Gate or writing matters. This may be the first time I’ve strayed into more private concerns for any length of time, but then my parents were instrumental in a lot of my interests. It was my friend Mike Boone who really introduced me to science fiction; he gave me my first phone call ever (I was 5) to let me know that the “new” show he’d told me about was on (the original Star Trek, in reruns). Dad wasn’t a fan, but he turned over whatever he was watching just in time for me to see Kirk and Spock beaming down. I was hooked immediately. My mother loves science fiction and fantasy, and as I grew older she handed me book after book, series after series. Neither genre was Dad’s thing, but he loved to talk writing. Once he was discussing Jungian archetypes and their influence on mythology, indeed, upon all stories, and I asked him to perform an analysis of Star Trek. Dad said that Kirk was obviously the hero, and his internal dilemmas were played out between Spock, his reasoning half and McCoy, his emotional half. “What about Scotty?” I asked.
Dad thought for a moment. “He’s some aspect of the physical.”
His analysis impressed young teenage Howard — moreso, apparently, than most of our other talks about writing, which my feeble memory has already garbled or forgotten, just as it has confused my recollection of where we had that particular talk. In the living room, whilst standing on our brown carpet, or did the whole thing take place while we were jogging north from the park? All I recall now are the words, and I curse myself for not remembering more.
All this talk of Dad and story theory may leave you with the impression that he was an egghead, or ivory tower intellectual. He wasn’t. At Dad’s funeral, one of his best friends called him the most unassuming intellectual he ever knew. Dad never trumpeted his knowledge. If you wanted to talk Moby Dick or Hawthorne he was all for it, but he was just as happy to talk golf swings or basketball or car repair.
He took early retirement and left the university to master piano tuning. I was married and living in Kansas by then, and the thought of him tuning anything professionally horrified me. He’d always used me rather like a sound meter before playing his guitar, and over the years his ear never seemed to improve. I was under the impression that you either had a good ear or you didn’t and there wasn’t much you could do about it. Dad proved me wrong. Soon he was not only tuning pianos, he was rebuilding and refurbishing them. The last time we talked, however, he had been playing piano. The keyboards had always been my instrument and Dad came to it later in life. He was asking me advice about improvising good bass lines.
When I heard from Mom a few days later I assumed she was calling to check up on my three-year-old, who’d just had his tonsils removed. No. Dad had died, instantly, of a heart attack. The only mercy was that someone saw him fall and CPR assistance was almost immediate. We know, then, that if there was anything that could have been done, the help was there to do it. It was already too late.
I miss him terribly.
Howard
I mentioned taverns in the last post, particularly stories that start in them. I want to expand on that. It’s not that BG has solemnly declared that a good fantasy story can’t start in a tavern. I’m no fan of those kind of absolute declarations, as though we or anyone else speaks from on high, so I thought I should make myself clear. I spoke to John Hocking about this tavern issue the other day and he summarized my ramblings into some succinct statements; together we managed a coherence I’ll do my best to paraphrase.
In many, many hands, the character type and location are a shorthand way to describe a thing without bothering to fashion any originality. When John O’Neill and I complain about stories starting in taverns, what we mean is a tavern that’s just a cardboard movie set. Here’s the tavern. Here’s the ranger. Here’s the elf. Here’s the wizard. There’s no real invention going on here, no innovation. The tavern and the characers from central casting who’ve walked inside are just ciphers for original work.
Can you start a story in a tavern? Sure! One of the greatest of all sword-and-sorcery stories begins with a scene in a tavern. Well, truthfully it begins with a cinematic overview of what’s going on in the area outside the tavern; the action, though, begins within a tavern… hey, I’ll shut up and let Robert E. Howard work his magic:
Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night. In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarters, and watchmen, well paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport. Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring. Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings. Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.
In one of these dens merriment thundered to the low smoke-stained roof, where rascals gathered in every stage of rags and tatters — furtive cutpurses, leering kidnappers, quick-fingered thieves, swaggering bravoes with their wenches, strident-voiced women clad in tawdry finery. Native rogues were the dominant element — dark-skinned, dark-eyed Zamorians, with daggers at their girdles and guile in their hearts. But there were wolves of half a dozen outland nations there as well. There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame — for men wore steel openly in the Maul. There was a Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard. There was a bold-eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunderman — a wandering mercenary soldier, a deserter from some defeated arm. And the fat gross rogue whose bawdy jestes were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper come up from distant Koth to teach woman-stealing to Zamorians who were born with more knowledge of the art than he could ever attain.
That’s “Tower of the Elephant,” in case you didn’t recognize it, text courtesy of the Del Rey The Coming of Conan collection.
See, all you have to do is create cinematic imagery in an original setting with brilliant prose. Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. Here’s how Lin Carter advised his friend Poke Runyon to bring a tavern scene to life:
The scene in the inn: low rafters, a-dangle with hams and dried onions; roaring fire in huge stone fireplace with roast moofobar turning on creaking spit; sailors with bristling beards and told rings in ears sprawling on low benches wrapped in black cloaks stiff with dry salt; roar of son, scuffle of argument, rich smells of hot steaming meat and spilled grog, etc; wavering orange light splashing over everything, casting huge black flapping shadows on the walls.
(from a letter of Lin Carter to Poke Runyon, published in Poke Runyon’s novel Drell Master.)
This seems excellent advice to me. In short, if you’re going to take your readers somewhere, take them somewhere interesting. Bring the place to life. Even some place as ordinary as a tavern.
Black Gate 11 continues to find its way to mailboxes and bookstores scattered across the globe. If you folks like what you’re seeing, I sure hope you’ll spread the word and tell your friends to subscribe. Send ’em to the Black Gate site. We’re growing in strength, but we still need your support! Right now Black Gate is running a HUGE back issue sale with ridiculous discounts, so now’s your time to catch up on any issues you’ve missed. The zombies are getting tired of tripping over the boxes of old issues, so we’re clearing the warehouse. Follow the link for details!
John and I are back to reading submissions. Interesting peculiarities pop up while you’re working your way through — John encountered a knot of almost a dozen stories that ALL began either IN a tavern or with characters on their way TO a tavern. I think at this point for either one of us to like a story that starts like that it’s going to have to be written by REH, Leiber, Moore, Vance, or some new lass or bloke with those kinds of chops. Odds are that if you’re submitting your first or second story and it starts in a tavern, you don’t yet have those kinds of chops…
My submission peculiarity popped up yesterday as I suddenly realized the next half dozen stories were all more than 9k words long, and that each of them seemed well enough written that I’d probably be reading my way to the end. It’s probably not fair to the authors, but I think, for my own sanity and for the sake of some feeling of progress, I’ll have to intersperse these long stories with shorter ones that were sent in a little later.
Some months ago I mentioned I was back to the drawing board as to novel revising. Well, on August the 33rd (so declared by my wife, so that I might hit my goal of revising before the end of August) I hammered out a final new 2000 words and completed the new draft. Out with 20 thousand bad, horrible, evil words, and in with 9 thousand completely wonderful brilliant words. Sure.ÂÂ
Anyway, in the process of writing I tried out a new technique. Regular visitors may recall that one of the things I was on about the last time I brought up my writing was POV threads — because I’d started from a less-than-thorough outline I ended up with a number of issues that have been dogging every revision. One of those was ending up with POVs that started with promise and then… poof! went nowhere. I found myself inventing scenes to justfy the previous POV choices, which led to novel bloat and, well, boring scenes. So I ruthlessly killed entire plot threads, and as a result ended up revising in a way I’d never done before. For instance, I finished a new pass of the novel’s final scenes long before August 33rd. What I’d been doing since was strengthening a worthwile point of view thread that needed some added scenes. Rather than revising A to Z, start to finish, this time I’ve been thinking more about plucking out threads, be they POV threads, plot or character development revealed by dialogue, or unfolding dialogue, and working on these as they progressed, shifting from thread to thread as needed — one day I’d be working on one of the mysteries that gets slowly unveiled, the next time I’d be working on a character’s voice and backstory that comes out slowly through dialogue over the course of the book. Every writer’s different, but I think that this method really helped me. Maybe it will help you. Heck, maybe you were already using that method and didn’t mention it to me. Shame on you.
Next I’m going to make another pass that will hopefully be more about honing the language, then pass the thing again to a circle of trusted readers and then, fingers crossed, back out to the wider world. I am eager to get started on a number of other writing projects, including penning some more Dabir and Asim stories, writing some more stories featuring some other characters, drafting another book in a different setting, but most importantly revising and then finding a home for a sword-and-sandal piece I wrote with one of my best friends.
That’s all for now!
Howard Andrew Jones
Black Gate 11 is back from the printer and will shortly be on its way to subscribers and quality bookstores. I know the majority of you were delighted with issue 10; well, issue 11 has even MORE heroic fiction than issue 10. It holds more adventure per square inch than Ben Hur (the story, I mean, not Charlton H in a toga). It’s turned up to ELEVEN.
If you’ve been curious about Black Gate there’s no better time to add your name to our list of subscribers. A single issue (like, say, issue ELEVEN) will run you a mere $10.00. No other fantasy magazine is so densely packed, for our issues clock in at a whopping 224 pages, which is an awful lot of content for your dollar. First time visitors to Black Gate are pretty much astonished — it looks more like an anthology than a magazine. A year’s subscription for four issues runs a mere $29.95, which gets you four issues for the price of three.
This time around Martha Wells, James Enge, Iain Rowan, and Mark Sumner all return with big new installments building on the action in Black Gate 10. Join us for the first meeting of Giliead & Ilias, as Morlock the Maker assists a small fraternity of warriors in desperate battle against the dreaded Boneless One, Dao Shi the exorcist comes face to face with an unkillable demon deep in the Underworld, and the Naturalist returns to civilization to warn of the approach of the terror from the interior.
That’s not all — Maria V. Snyder, Peadar Ó Guilín, William I. Lengeman III and many others offer exciting new stories. A dead wizard hires a thief to break into his tower and uncover a deadly secret, a man fights to save his son from a woman whose charms are literally irresistible, and a modern father is inducted into Valhalla after a particularly challenging roller coaster ride. All that plus four pages of Knights of the Dinner Table. It’s 224 pages of the best in modern adventure fantasy!
Follow this link to a sneak peek of Black Gate 11, with story excerpts, artwork, and even a look at “Neglected Stories from the SF Magazines” from Rich Horton.
Hey, it’s good stuff, or I wouldn’t be hawking it! If you’re already a fan, we hope that you’ll spread the word.
I was just posting about supporting magazines the other day on the SFReader forum. Black Gate writer Peadar Ó Guilín discovered that Adventures of Sword and Sorcery may be rejoining the print world. At this news there was much excitement among writers, who promptly sent off a number of stories to the editor of AS&S. I don’t know whether or not they also sent off subscriptions, though, which is why I posted. Maybe they did — I hope they did. Authors (and I’m in that group myself) tend to look at magazines as PLACES THAT WILL GIVE ME MONEY FOR MY WORDS but they also oughta’ look at them — like the fans of the genres most of them are.
John and I and all our contributors are in this because we love what we do, and we want to keep doing it. I think of Black Gate as a community, and I hope you do as well. We maintain this silly blog and no less than two discussion sites. We provide free web content every week at the Black Gate home (uploaded Sunday) so there’s always plenty to talk about.
It may be that I’ve drifted off topic a bit, or ranted: my point was that if you want a market to live, you ought to support it, be it Black Gate, The Effete Troll, or Golf Digest. Whatever magazine it is that ticks your clock needs your lovin’. Many of them, like Black Gate, have a warm community of folks who are always interested in talking about the kinds of things that bring you to the magazine in the first place.
While I’m on the topic, here are the links to both discussion groups:
Here’s the familiar newsgroup on Sff.Net.
And here’s the new one, with an interface I find easier to navigate, at SFReader. There’s not as much material in our folder here, because it’s new. It can grow with your support. SFReader is one of the friendliest forums I’ve ever belonged to, and there are plenty of interesting discussions going on in other folders all the time.
E-submitters should shortly be finding some responses in their e-mail as I continue to work through the last e-batch of stories I received prior to us closing to submissions.
I had some writing stuff I was going to blather on about, but I’ll save that for another post.
Howard
So life has been busy. I guess it usually is for most of us. I’ve hunkered down with the rest of the e-subs and a few things I’ve been handed in person, and I’m gearing up for more book and game reviews. Outside the Black Gate world I’ve been applying for adjunct positions with my new Master’s degree in hand and steaming ahead on the rewrite of my fantasy novel. And look at that — I got a good review in Locus, which made my day, and it was for one of my Dabir and Asim stories, no less.
Things are a little bittersweet, though, because Flashing Swords is re-launching. I came from Flashing Swords, of course. Daniel Blackston asked me to run a mag for his company, and I did so, and I poured my heart and soul into the thing to build it up and keep it running. I was very proud of my work, but it drained me, and there were certain attendant difficulties that made the project more challenging than it might have been in ideal circumstances. I reluctantly handed it over to Daniel when I joined the Black Gate staff after the sixth issue of FS. Daniel’s publishing company dissolved shortly thereafter, alas, and Flashing Swords folded along with it.
Now Flashing Swords has risen, again, under new management, and they were kind enough to ask if I wanted to be involved in any way. I wish I could be, I want to be, but I’m here, now, with Black Gate, and it’s more important to me than jumping back into something I’ve left, and so I had to reluctantly decline. And so I must reconcile myself to the fact that Flashing Swords wasn’t ever really mine to begin with, and that it will go on in a different way — the important choices are no longer mine to make. But it will live. The authors and contributors and my fellow editors and I did not work in vain.
I’m pleased that the zine must have meant something to somebody if they’re wanting to pick up the torch. May they fly further and higher. I wish them all the best. I’m honored that they credit me on the home page as a founder, and I’m even more honored, as strange as it seems, that they’re continuing to use the little quote I invented at the top of their pages. It’s a tiny little element in the bigger picture, I know, but I don’t think they know it came from me, which means they must just have liked the sound of it. Sometimes it’s the little things that mean the most.
Read David Soyka’s 2006 review of a recent issue of Flashing Swords, with stories by James Enge, Steve Goble, Paul Jessup, Howard Lamb, Trey Causey, S. C. Bryce, and Robert Burke Richardson.
I just got word that Nightshade Books is going to be cancelling its reprint of the Imaro series. The sales have been disappointing — I can only assume that’s because word, somehow, didn’t get out about the books. Charles Saunders’ Imaro is one of the most important sword-and-sorcery characters to walk onto the scene after Conan himself.
Here’s what I said about him in a recent history of sword-and-sorcery article I wrote with some help from Robert Rhodes:
Imaro was the first important black hero of sword and sorcery. The three Imaro novels and a set of related short stories breathe with atmosphere, so much so that the setting is a character unto itself. The customs, people, and places feel real. While the supernatural and fantastic stalk this world, Saunders’ storytelling skills present even the ordinary features of his setting, from savanna to jungle, as vivid and new. Tie in Saunders’ skilful world-building with his taut action and suspense scenes and you have an explosive mix, one that Lin Carter was quick to recognize, printing Imaro tales in several volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series.
Born the son of mixed parentage in a warrior society, Imaro longs always for acceptance, although when he finally earns it his own pride sets him on another path. A mighty warrior, at heart Imaro is a decent, loving man who hides behind a wall of stoicism he’s built both to protect himself during his troubled upbringing and to endure the horrors he’s faced. Most other sword-and-sorcery heroes are rogues born with wanderlust. They’re fascinating to see in action but aren’t necessarily people we’d care to meet. Imaro, however, is honestly likable.
Disastrous marketing decisions killed the Imaro series back in the ’80s. Now it looks like poor market penetration is going to kill it again, and may already have done so. And that means that two never-before-published Imaro novels and any kind of collection of Imaro short stories won’t be seen.
Now I can’t speak for all of Black Gate on this particular issue, but speaking for a moment simply as Howard Andrew Jones minus his editing hat, GO BUY THESE BOOKS. If you like sword-and-sorcery, GO TO NIGHT SHADE AND BUY THESE BOOKS. Maybe we can still save Imaro!!! Do NOT delay!!!
So here’s what I’d been planning to post about before I got the bad news this morning. I didn’t get to do this sooner because I’ve frankly been trying to re-earn some spousal goodwill points after being gone for four days.
The convention was fun as usual: John and I had a good time. A steady stream of visitors dropped by the booth to look over the magazine, and most of them picked up at least one issue — many more subscribed, and some even purchased entire runs of the previous issues! We showed interested parties the unbound copy of issue 11.
In between various panels Steven Silver and Rich Horton dropped by and helped out at the table. Both men have contributed to the magazine and it was a pleasure getting to know them. The little shop at the convention center sold surprisingly good soup, which I lived on during the day, and then John and I would head out with whoever was around in the evenings to grab dinner. The first night we drove into Collinsville, away from the crowded restaurants near the con, and stumbled upon a nice Chinese place — the only open restaurant in town, so far as we could see. The next day the nearby places were even more crowded, and John and Steven and I were joined by Gordon van Gelder and David Marusek, who didn’t actually complain about my awful direction sense as I tried to find my way back to the Chinese restaurant.
Saturday I snuck away from the booth long enough to try out Richard Hatch’s new role-playing game, The Great War of Magellan. His Captain Apollo had been one of my childhood heroes, so it was pretty nifty when he sat down beside me and joined the game.
There was a flurry of sales at the last minute on Sunday, so I hung around later than I’d planned (I couldn’t abandon John when the booth was so busy). Thank goodness Steven was there to help out as well.
I’m a relatively recent convention attender. It still strikes me as pretty amazing how approachable most of the industry professionals are. I’ve looked up to many of these people for years, and it can feel a little surreal to find yourself in casual conversation with them.
It should return in a couple of weeks, and then the zombie minions will start stuffing envelopes and get them in the post.
This week John O’Neill and I will be heading to Archon/Nasfic, which is in St. Louis for those too bored to click the link. We should both be there at the Black Gate table by Thursday afternoon, and will be staying until Sunday. I hope that we’ll see some of you there. If the Black Gate hydrofoil hadn’t been damaged during my last encounter with the Zeppelin Master I’d be there even faster, but I’m falling back on the utility van.
This last weekend John put a sneak preview of the issue on the Black Gate web site, so drop by and take a look. If you haven’t subscribed, why not? Waste no time!ÂÂ
I know it’s been said a million times, but it bears saying again, so pardon me if I sound repetitious. You can’t look on markets ONLY as places to get published. Support those markets that publish the kinds of stories you like to read so that they’ll keep going. I’m not saying this because Black Gate is in any sort of trouble (in truth we’re stronger than ever) but partly because it’s so clear, from the kinds of slush I get, that around 75% of the subs I receive are from people who’ve never read a copy of the magazine. I’m probably preaching to the choir, as the folks who are crazy enough to read this blog surely know what Black Gate is about. Hopefully you’re subscribers as well. Your support can only mean there’s more money to buy more stories with. And that’s a good thing, right? With even more support I could spare even more of my time editing the mag, and then response times would be even faster, and who wouldn’t want that! Plus I could afford more sushi. In summary, if you want more good adventure fiction and want to ensure that I can afford sushi lunches, be sure to subscribe.
Next week I will dive straight back into the submissions pile, and so will John.
Best,
Howard
I’m more than halfway through the new Black Gate, and I can honestly say that, if anything, it’s even better than Black Gate 10. I’m not just saying that — (anyone who knows me knows that I’m neither a shill nor much of a salesman) — the writing from the regulars is even stronger than it’s been in the past. Much as I liked previous entries from Enge and Wells and Rowan, their entries this time had me so spellbound I had to constantly remember that I was supposed to be proofreading, not just devouring prose. I’ve been equally impressed with work from newcomers, and it is all I can do to put time aside for other duties rather than continuing my read.
A lot of people may not realize that I haven’t seen this fiction — indeed, it may still be a bit before anything I’ve sent on to John appears between Black Gate pages. All this is stockpiled from before I came aboard, so I feel a little like the ultimate fan, getting to open the Christmas presents before the rest of you. Some have crowned me with unearned laurels, saying that the adventure fiction quotient was higher than ever before in BG 10 due to me. It’s just not true. I was hired on because of the direction John was growing Black Gate and I have surely helped with the magazine; I have not, however, changed that direction myself.
I’m starting to see some art trickle in for the contents of Black Gate 12, and it looks pretty exciting.
Lastly, we have some new advertisers. One of them, Dark City Games, has had products reviewed twice by us (one product in issue 10 and one in issue 11) and between those reviews, their full-page ad, and the web site, I’m going to break down and try some of these. First John, then Todd McAulty, then Andrew Zimmerman Jones have been raving about these cool games, and I’m just going to have to try them out for myself.
More soon,
Howard