BG Staff – Page 67

Jay Lake’s “The Hour and Manner of my Death”

Saturday, February 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Fantasy novelist and Black Gate contributor Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer in April 2008, and since then he has followed the progress of the disease and his tireless efforts to combat it with brutal honesty on his blog.

His posts are frequently painful to read, but Jay’s characteristic humor and love of life always shine through. But this week the news turned darker, starting with Thursday’s post titled “The Hour and Manner of my Death.”

The new metastatic tumor sites uncovered during the surgery make things a lot more serious than they already were. And that is saying something. I have not given up seeking a cure… but it seems highly likely to me I will go terminal within the year, or at best, sometime in 2014. Even then, it will take time for me to die, possibly up to another year…

Obviously I do not know the precise hour and manner of my death. But I know it will likely come in the next year or so, and it will come due to organ failure and the related system breakdowns as my cancer advances. The bullet with my name on it has been inching towards me for almost five years. I can watch it spiral in the air as it lazes ever onward toward my as yet still beating heart.

For the past five years, Jay has staunchly avoided a fatalistic tone on his blog, so this change has understandably caused a tremor among his fans, including his friends here at Black Gate.

I first encountered Jay Lake in the BG submission pile over a decade ago. He impressed me immediately — not just for the quality of his fiction, which was exceptional, but for the exuberance of his cover letters and the sheer volume of submissions. Jay is one of the hardest-working authors I’ve ever met, and he never gave up. One of his early short stories featured a hero who builds a fully-automatic, self-loading ballista using nothing but fallen logs and rope. That resilience and never-say-die attitude reminds me of Jay to this day. I purchased two stories from him, the brilliant “Fat Jack and the Spider Clown” (BG 8), and the vividly original “Devil on the Wind” (BG 14, co-written with Michael Jasper). Even after his diagnosis, Jay’s output continued to impress, and his latest novel, Kalimpura, arrived January 29 from Tor Books.

We’re not sure we can get ever get used to the idea of a fantasy genre without Jay Lake in it. We hope we don’t have to.

You can read Jay’s complete post here and follow his daily updates here.

Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery Only $6.40 at Amazon.com

Saturday, February 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

One of the best swords & sorcery anthologies of the last ten years is available at a deep discount on Amazon.com.

Swords & Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, contains 17 original stories — including a new Elric novella by Michael Moorcock, a Majipoor tale by Robert Silverberg, a Cugel the Clever tale by Michael Shea, a Black Company story by Glen Cook, and a brand new Morlock tale by James Enge. Contributors include Steven Erikson, C. J. Cherryh, Scott Lynch, Bill Willingham, Joe Abercrombie, Tanith Lee, Garth Nix, Greg Keyes, Gene Wolfe, Tim Lebbon, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and many others.

Our man Jason Waltz examined it in one of the longest and most detailed reviews we’ve ever published.

At Worldcon, I had the pleasure of hearing James Enge read his fabulous story “The Singing Spear” — which includes the classic line “You killed my bartender!” James is one of our most gifted practitioners of modern S&S, and “The Singing Spear” is one of his finest stories. It’s worth far more than $6.40 all on its own — and if you get the chance, hearing James read it live is worth far more than that.

Our most recent round-up of discount fantasy titles at Amazon is here.

Swords & Dark Magic was published by Avon Eos in June 2010. It is 519 pages, and was originally priced at $15.99. While copies last, it is being sold online for $6.40 at Amazon.com.

The Top 12 Black Gate Fiction Posts in December

Thursday, January 31, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

December was only our third month offering original online fiction, and once again I was very pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic response from you, our readers. Our Black Gate Online Fiction line has quickly become one of the most popular sections of the blog.

The Top Twelve stories in December were:

“The Trade,” by Mark Rigney
“The Whoremaster of Pald,” by Harry Connolly
“An Excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones
“The Poison Well,” by Judith Berman
“The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying,” by Alex Kreis
“The Moonstones of Sor Lunaru,” by Joe Bonadonna
“A Phoenix in Darkness,” by Donald S. Crankshaw
“Godmother Llizard,” by C.S.E. Cooney
“Awakening,” by Judith Berman
“The Duelist,” by Jason Thummel
“An Excerpt from Seven Kings, by John R. Fultz
“The Tea-Maker’s Task,” by Aaron Bradford Starr

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by E.E. Knight, Gregory Bierly, Dave Gross, and others, is here. The most popular Black Gate fiction in November is here.

Art for “The Whoremaster of Pald” by Chris Pepper.

We’ve got plenty more fiction in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Join Howard Andrew Jones on Ask Me Anything on Reddit

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones has put out the word that he’ll be on Reddit tomorrow:

Hope you’ll join me at Reddit Thursday for a live interview, part of their Ask Me Anything series. You can ask me anything you’re curious about regarding this whole fantasy writing gig, so I hope you’ll drop by, and help spread the word!

Howard joined /r/Fantasy for an Ask Me Anything event a year ago, shortly after the release of his first novel, The Desert of Souls, where he was asked “How do you handle portrayals of sexism and racism when writing historical fantasy?”, “What RPGs do you play?”, and “How do you feel about piracy of your books?”

Click here for the official link.

No word on whether or not the chicken will be there.

Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier On Sale This Week

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Myke Cole is a class act. Before he launched a career as an internationally celebrated novelist, he did the decent thing: he apprenticed at Black Gate first.

His story “Naktong Flow” appeared in BG 13, and Dave Truesdale at Tangent Online called it “Thoroughly professional… Think Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now and you’re on the right track.” We attempted to lure him back to our pages with insanely generous offers — his own dressing room, and fresh flowers delivered daily — and even sent the lovely Patty Templeton to interview him, but it was all to no avail. Life as a novelist offered him the one thing Black Gate couldn’t: real money. And respect. And fame. And accolades. And a ton of other stuff, but let’s not dwell on that.

In his essay “Selling Shadow Point,” Myke talks about what it took to submit and sell his first novel, saying “You have to have guts… you have to bite the bullet and take it out to market.” In his case it certainly paid off — his first novel was Shadow Ops: Control Point, which Peter V. Brett called “Black Hawk Down meets the X-Men… military fantasy like you’ve never seen it before.” It was an immediate hit, and the reading public clamored for more. Now Cole has delivered and the second volume of Shadow Ops arrives in book stores this week.

The Great Reawakening did not come quietly. Across the country and in every nation, people began to develop terrifying powers — summoning storms, raising the dead, and setting everything they touch ablaze. Overnight the rules changed… but not for everyone.

Colonel Alan Bookbinder is an army bureaucrat whose worst war wound is a paper-cut. But after he develops magical powers, he is torn from everything he knows and thrown onto the front-lines. Drafted into the Supernatural Operations Corps in a new and dangerous world, Bookbinder finds himself in command of Forward Operating Base Frontier — cut off, surrounded by monsters, and on the brink of being overrun.

Now, he must find the will to lead the people of FOB Frontier out of hell, even if the one hope of salvation lies in teaming up with the man whose own magical powers put the base in such grave danger in the first place — Oscar Britton, public enemy number one…

Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier was published by Ace Books on January 29, 2013. It is 368 pages and priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in December

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

December was the most active month the BG blog has ever seen, breaking every traffic record in our history. It’s good to have you folks hanging out with us, instead of risking your neck skiing or snowboarding or something. Exercise kills, and it especially has it in for long-time readers with weak vision and poor motor skills.

If you’re just joining us, you missed some great stuff last month. Theo took on the entire SF & fantasy establishment, Rich Horton proved there’s still life in old SF magazines, and tantalizing glimpses of the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness triggered some animated speculation on just who that sinister guy blowin’ up Federation stuff is. I compiled a Black Gate Christmas Gift List, Ryan Harvey continued his enormously popular series on Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars books, and Howard Andrew Jones offered up a generous preview of his new novel The Bones of the Old Ones.

That’s just a sample — here’s the complete list of the Top 50 articles from last month.

Tangent Online on Gregory Bierly’s “A Princess of Jadh”

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Cyd Athens at Tangent Online reviews Gregory Bierly’s swords & sorcery novelette, “A Princess of Jadh,” published here on Sunday, January 20:

So often in medieval tales, when a mother dies in childbirth, it is in the process of giving birth to an important, and sometimes only, son. In this dark fantasy, “A Princess of Jadh,” Gregory Bierly strays from that path by giving us a daughter of emperor Thaphsis Amryth X, the youngest of five. Naome is the first red-head born in the empire in a thousand years. In that, and many other ways, she is quite different from her sisters.

At the age of twenty, Naome undergoes the ritual of being presented to her people’s gods – gods in whom she steadfastly does not believe. Though she has a vision during the ritual, and a sensation of being painted, afterward she believes that she has not been changed in any way. It takes little to persuade her otherwise. On her belly, an incomplete but corrupted rune of power now resides. And both the power that began the rune and the one that perverted it are interested in Naome…

“A Princess of Jadh” is a 13,000-word novelette offered at no cost. Read the complete story here, and Cyd’s review at Tangent Online here.

Greg Bierly is a climatologist, professor of geography and director of the honors program at Indiana State University. This is his first fiction sale.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

Harry Connolly: “Let Me Tell You About My Ambitions, and Why They Don’t Include Kickstarter”

Monday, January 28, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

We’ve had some excellent discussions here about cloud funding, starting with Scott Taylor’s “The Pillaging of Kickstarter” last March. There’s no question that cloud funding sites like Kickstarter are here to stay, but the question remains: how much do they really help writers?

Harry Connolly has written a thoughtful and insightful piece on his blog from the point of view of a successful author and self-published writer, titled “Let me tell you about my ambitions, and why they don’t include Kickstarter (right now).” Here’s a quote:

Along with the release of the sales numbers of my self-published novel has come a flood of requests that I turn to Kickstarter to fund The Twisted Path… Currently, I have no plans to do that, and I’m writing this post because I want to explain my reasoning…

I want to be a best-selling author… It’s not about making a whole bunch of money, it’s about having my books in the hands of lots of readers from all over the world.

Several people have suggested that I could get new readers with a Kickstarter campaign, but I don’t consider that realistic. Take a look at these guys: their campaign has been fantastically successful. At the time I write this, they’re over 11,000% of their goal. However, they have fewer than 8,500 backers.

That’s huge for a Kickstarter but Circle of Enemies sold more copies than that and it’s considered a failure.

Harry Connolly’s first publication “The Whoremaster of Pald” appeared in Black Gate 3; his Twenty Palaces novels include Child of Fire, Game of Cages, and Circle of Enemies, all published in paperback by Del Rey, and the self-published Twenty Palaces.

You can read the complete blog post here.

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Gunnerman” by Jason E. Thummel

Sunday, January 27, 2013 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

An action-packed tale of a battle at sea, a desperate swordfight on wind-swept decks, and dark sorcery hidden in the depths of a strange vessel.

“Starboard,” shouted the chief, “run ‘em out!”

The gun port was thrown open and the towmen sent the cannon’s barrel through the open port. Clap gazed down the barrel and could see the hull of the other vessel just out of range riding high and asking for it. It was a ship of similar size, two decks above the waterline, each with ten ports open and guns run out even as he watched. She was flying unfamiliar colors and her paint seemed of foreign design. The trigger rope itched in his hand, begging him for release.

“As she bears and on the roll, boys,” came the command. Clap took one last aim, hoping for the mainmast, stepped aside and pulled.

Jason’s first story for us was “The Duelist,” published as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line on September 30th, 2012. His work has also appeared in Flashing Swords magazine, Rage of the Behemoth, Magic and Mechanica, and other venues. Some of his sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy is collected in In Savage Lands and The Harsh Suns, and the first two novels chronicling the supernatural adventures of occult detective Lance Chambers, The Spear of Destiny and Cult of Death, are now available.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by E.E. Knight, Gregory Bierly, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“The Gunnerman” is a complete 5,000-word sword & sorcery tale offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

“Even a God Can be Moved”: Locus Online on “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye”

Sunday, January 27, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Lois Tilton at Locus Online reviews John R. Fultz’s “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye” published here on Sunday, January 6:

Artifice the Quill, in exile, has joined a company of players and is now about to see his first play staged for the ghosts that haunt Mornitetra, a city where the eye of its god looks down from a tall pedestal in the central plaza. The subject of his drama is the doom of its sister city Ultimetra, from whence the ghosts have come after the god destroyed their own, in wrath at their sin. Artifice has misgivings about this venue, but he is not in charge of the troupe…

The story… stands effectively on its own. The real interest is not so much in Artifice himself as in the head of the troupe, Mordeau, whose sorcery enhances the stagecraft and effects, so that even a god can be moved.

John’s tales for Black Gate include “Oblivion is the Sweetest Wine” (Black Gate 12), ”Return of the Quill” (Black Gate 13), and “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15). Seven Kings, the second book of the Shaper Trilogy, was released on Jan. 15; read an exclusive chapter here.

Tangent Online called “Glimmer Faire” “an enjoyable adventure that reveals the power of art;” read that review here. You can read Lois’s complete review at Locus Online, and “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” a complete 6,800-word novelette of heroic fantasy, free here.

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