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Author: markrigney

Mark Rigney is the author of numerous plays, including Ten Red Kings and Acts of God (both from Playscripts, Inc.), as well as Bears, winner of the 2012 Panowski Playwriting Competition (during its off Broadway run, Theatre Mania called Bears “the best play of the year”). His short fiction appears in Witness, Ascent, Unlikely Story, Betwixt, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Realms Of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Black Static, among many others. “The Skates,” a comic (and ghostly) novella, is now available as an ebook from Samhain Publishing, with two sequels forthcoming, “Sleeping Bear” (Feb. 2014) and the novel Check-Out Time (autumn, 2014). In non-fiction, Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical (Gallaudet University Press) remains happily in print one decade on. Two collections of his stories are available through Amazon, Flights of Fantasy, and Reality Checks. His website is www.markrigney.net.
In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Five

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Five

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In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-medium

Linked below, you’ll find the fifth installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. In this latest dice-roll of adventures and misadventures, Maer takes steps to learn self-defense, we re-visit the Spur, and we spend some quality time with my favorite villain, Mother Sand –– if villain she truly is. I do love a complex character…

Oh, and a bonus! We meet, at last, a Sindarin. Face-to-face. Yes, the hooks are baited for Chapter Six, to follow in two weeks’ time.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture.

Bear in mind that this is a true serial. I haven’t written to the end; I couldn’t publish all at once even if I wished to do so. I do have the overall arc of the piece ever more firmly in mind, but as to how exactly I’ll write from Point A to Point Z? I predict it’ll be one complication at a time – minimum. I do promise this: I’ll dole out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Four

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Four

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In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-medium

Linked below, you’ll find the fourth installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. In this latest installment, Maer decides on her next steps while Vashear suffers through the aftermath of an extrication. As for Belner, whom we’d met before but not by name, well he’s nothing if not on the run. Things are heating up, with Chapter Five to follow in two weeks’ time.

Bear in mind that this is a true serial. I haven’t written to the end; I couldn’t publish all at once even if I wished to do so. I do have the overall arc of the piece in mind, but as to how we get there? I predict it’ll be one complication at a time – minimum. I do promise this: I’ll dole out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

Tell your friends. Off we go — and if you’re just discovering this portal, don’t forget to begin at the beginning.

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the fourth and latest installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue HERE.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Three

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Three

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Sister Blue TitleLinked below, you’ll find the third installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. In this sequence, we keep pace with Maer and Doss, but we also expand our horizons via Mother Coal and a visit to the capital city. Their entwined fates, and those of Vashear, all lead inexorably to the slam-bang opening of Chapter Four, which I’ll post in two weeks’ time.

As I’ve said before, bear in mind that this as an experiment, an experiment performed in the most chaotic of laboratory environments (which is to say, my basement). I haven’t written to the end. I’m not offering you something that’s already complete. Instead, I’ll be doling out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

Tell your friends. Off we go — and if you’re just discovering this portal, don’t forget to begin at the beginning.

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the third installment here.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Two

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Two

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Sister Blue TitleAs I mentioned two weeks back, I’ve been contributing blog posts here at Black Gate since 2006, and it’s time for a change. Linked below, you’ll find the second installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. The pace picks up in this latest installment (Maer’s in serious trouble), with action aplenty and a wider world beckoning just around the corner.

Remember: this as an experiment, a kind of in-process tight-rope walking, sans safety net. I haven’t written to the end. I’m not offering you something that’s already complete. Instead, I’ll be doling out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

Tell your friends. Off we go — and if you’re just discovering this portal, don’t forget to begin at the beginning.

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the second installment here.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: In the Wake Of Sister Blue

Black Gate Online Fiction: In the Wake Of Sister Blue

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In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-smallHaving contributed blog posts here at Black Gate since 2006 (where does the time go?), it’s time for a change. Time at last to give up on non-fiction, essays, and opinionated screeds. Time to dive headlong into an experiment I’ve long been itching to try, a serialized novel.

According to Black Gate‘s traffic stats, which of course I study daily from the basement of BG‘s vast Indiana compound, my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“) remain perennially popular. That’s flattering – reassuring, even – and I’m grateful for your readership. Indeed, I feel sufficiently encouraged that I’m ready to offer a brand-new fantasy world in hopes that at least some of you will follow me down what promises to be a truly long and winding road.

Think of this as an experiment in tight-rope walking. I haven’t written to the end. I’m not offering you something that’s already complete. Instead, I’ll be doling out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

So the journey begins, in what I expect will be bi-weekly installments. Remember, this is dangerous territory; there’s no safety net. There’s only the story, the one unfolding in my head, the one I promise to set down as best I know how, for you.

That adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue, begins today.

Tell your friends. Off we go.

Read the first chapter of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

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Adventures in Spellcraft: Rope Trick

Adventures in Spellcraft: Rope Trick

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Calling all old-school gamers, the folks who cut their teeth on the Players1st-edition-players-handbook Handbook, the Monster Manual, or even those long-lost oddities like Eldritch Wizardry and Greyhawk. For those of us still standing, which I do hope is the majority, I’d like to take a quick stroll down Memory Lane.

Don’t worry, it’s only a block or so away, just past Green Town, Illinois, and not so far from my last (highly opinionated) write-up on the ill-behaved sorcery known as Chain Lightning.

Great. Now that we’re walking, let me ask, do you remember that clever little escape hatch spell, Rope Trick? Very handy for “taking five” in the midst of a battle not otherwise going well. Very useful for getting undisturbed shut-eye while camped overnight in hostile territory. Very helpful when the goal of your particular role-playing adventure is to drive the GM bats.

The basics, for those who may not recall, is that the casting of a Rope Trick causes a length of rope to suspend itself vertically in mid-air. Anyone shinnying up the rope will disappear, arriving in a pocket of extra-planar space. The Players Handbook phrased it this way:

The upper end is in fact fastened in an extra-dimensional space, and the spell caster up to five others can climb up the rope and disappear into this place of safety where no creature can find them.

(I’m on page seventy-one, second level magic user spells, for those of you following along on the app.)

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Adventures In Commitment: To Watch Beyond the Pilot?

Adventures In Commitment: To Watch Beyond the Pilot?

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Sleepy OneWe live in a Golden Age of television. Quality work springs up every season, clamoring for our attention. Thing of it is, the hours available in any given day have not kept pace. Days on planet earth continue to mete out a mere twenty-four hours total, and I (for one) need to be sleeping for at least seven of those.

For what, then, will I give my precious time?

With books, I have a rule. If a series remains unfinished, I refuse to delve. I call this “The Robert Jordan Rule,” and at present, I am busily applying it to George R.R. Martin. However, I’m feckless, and inconstant besides. I have not applied said rule to Patrick Rothfuss, and I beg you not to apply it to my own burgeoning series of Renner & Quist adventures, the latest of which, Bonesy, arrived September First.

The Robert Jordan Rule proves equally impossible to apply to television. Hardly any series is made with an end point in mind. Most simply peter out when audiences wane, budgets get slashed, or the makers finally admit they have no idea how to wrap things up (and possibly never did). What, then, to do? Does any criteria exist for what show next to watch?

To begin, we must invoke Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Take Me To the Pilot!

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Adventures In Benign Cults: Parable Of the Talents

Adventures In Benign Cults: Parable Of the Talents

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Parable Of the Talents-smallIf a book vaults from mere printed text to a work of serious literature by virtue of posing a question, and then exploring it through the course of the story, then Octavia Butler’s The Parable Of the Talents fits the bill very neatly indeed.

Its primary question seems to be discovering meaning in what is for Butler a necessarily godless world, but it takes on secondary questions galore. Among these: what is the difference, if any, between a religion and a cult? How fine is the line between healthy determination and destructive obsession? And just how often do we reject others simply on the grounds that they challenge those (shaky) convictions on which we’ve built our lives? In other words, we blame and hold accountable people who represent our own failings.

Butler has a field day with all of these and more in charting the life of Lauren Oya Olamina, founder of Earthseed, a cult that locates God in change — the concept of change — and sets its sights on the stars when life on earth (or at least in the Disunited States of the 2030s) is nothing but chaos.

Formally, Butler’s Parable Of the Talents (the sequel to Parable Of the Sower) is epistolary work. The story is related through select journal entries, mostly Olamina’s, with other voices interspersed. These include her husband, her lost daughter, and her estranged younger brother.

First published in 1998, Parable Of the Talents won the Nebula Award in 1999. Like a good many other Nebula winners (such as The Speed Of Dark, which I wrote about here recently), this is not hard science. If you’re looking for the nuts and bolts engineering or chemistry found in Kim Stanley Robinson or Andy Weir, look elsewhere. Butler’s near-future tale focuses on social disintegration, and its rebirth via the benign (?) cult of Earthseed.

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The Speed Of Dark: Paksennarion vs. Autism

The Speed Of Dark: Paksennarion vs. Autism

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A Dark coverWhile wandering the aisles of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon – the kind of store that first leaves my jaw on the floor, then leaves my irises doing swirls straight out of an animated Warner Brothers short – I found myself in the Fantasy & Sci-Fi aisle.

Can’t imagine how that happened. Especially when my shopping list could also have led me to Photography, Sports (Tennis), Literature, Horror (Anthologies), and “Unisex Apparel.” Suffice it to say that I wound up face to face with my old buddy, Elizabeth Moon. Plenty of space opera on those shelves, sure, but also the various editions of the trilogy that made her name, her Deed Of Paksennarion series, together with the two less popular follow-ups, Surrender None and Liar’s Oath.

Then came the surprises. Turns out, Ms. Moon has resurrected Paks’s world, and some few of the characters from the various Paksennarion books in Oath Of Fealty, Kings Of the North, etc.

I was sorely tempted. I was. But in the end, I decided to let my fond memories remain exactly that: fond memories. As books with second-world settings go, and especially of the sword-swinging variety, I rate the Paksennarion trilogy very highly indeed, and as for Surrender None, well, I flat out love it.

The risk of spoiling all those warm recollections was just too great.

Even so, I would have picked up one of those newer titles – risk be damned, you only live once – but then I chanced upon a Moon title that didn’t seem to fit with her other work. The cover was different, for one thing. Not illustrative. Conceptual. No high fantasy or space opera here. No, indeed. But it had to be speculative fiction of some sort, since this unlikely loner of a book, The Speed Of Dark, had won the 2004 Nebula Award.

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The Worst AD&D Spell Of All Time

The Worst AD&D Spell Of All Time

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Arcana UnearthedSo there we stood, surrounded. Demons in all directions, converging fast – and we’re not talking garden variety patsies. Even for our major league party, the future looked bleak, bloody, and painful. On the plus side, we had our pizza in place, our dice at the ready. Beers and sodas hovered with popped caps and bated breath, anticipating action.

“Initiative!” cried the DM.

We each rolled. One of the demons, which just happened to moonlight as a spell-caster, moved first — and what did that pipsqueak no-good blackguard cheat of a demon cast our way?

Chain Lightning.

At fifteenth level.

Two hours later, with the pizza cold and stiff, the beers stale and the sodas flat, we finally finished adjudicating the effects of that single spell. We were in shock, and grumbling to beat the band. The DM, equally weary and perplexed, said, “Okay. Still first round. Who gets to take the next action?”

That I no longer recall, but this I know: we won the battle, and the demons lost. So did Chain Lightning. We made a solemn pledge that very day to never again allow that spell to eclipse the glory of our triumphant campaigning. Banned it was, all but ripped from the pages of the rulebook. And good riddance, too.

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