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Fictional Frontiers Interviews Howard Andrew Jones

Fictional Frontiers Interviews Howard Andrew Jones

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the-desert-of-soulsSohaib Awan at Fictional Frontiers interviews Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones on his first novel The Desert of Souls, non-Western fantasy, juggling modern expectations in historical fiction, and much more:

Fictional Frontiers: I’m spouting hyperbole here, but I think it’s so well earned…. give us an overview of The Desert of Souls.

Howard: Like a lot of adventure fiction, it starts with the discovery of a body. Of course, it’s the body of a dead parrot. The parrot’s beloved by Jaffar — I guess it’s a little Disney joke, because you know, Jaffar and the parrot. But of course Jaffar was a real character… arguably the most famous vizier in Arabian history. Anyway… his guard captain Asim suggests an adventure into the market. So he and Jaffar and the scholar Dabir go out into the city in disguise, and a dying man presents them with a strange and beautiful artifact, a golden door pull, and he asks them to keep it safe.  And that’s where things really take off. Dabir and Asim are tasked by Jaffar with learning the pull’s origin and purpose. Naturally they’re not the only ones after the thing, and they soon learn it may open a gateway to an unearthly realm, accessed in the ruins of the lost city of Ubar, which is sort of like an Atlantis of the sands.

The complete podcast runs 22 minutes, and is available here.

Dorgo the Dowser and Me

Dorgo the Dowser and Me

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mad_shadowsWhen John O’Neill invited me to write article about my collection of sword and sorcery stories, Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, for the Black Gate blog, I was naturally thrilled and honored. I was also somewhat uncertain.

Where do I begin? What should I say?

So I asked myself… why not first tell readers something about your book — the world of Tanyime, the kingdom of Rojahndria, the city of Valdar, and its main character — and then talk a little bit about how it all came to be? Well, here goes.

Mad Shadows is a picaresque novel — six interconnected sword and sorcery tales featuring Dorgo the Dowser, a sort of private eye set in the 14thcentury of my alternate world. It is pulp-fiction, old-school sword and sorcery with a film noir twist. That’s one of the reasons for the subtitle, The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, and the retro look of the cover.

One reason of the reasons Dorgo is known as the Dowser is because he’s a sort of private investigator, searching for clues and answers like someone searching for water with a dowsing rod. The other reason for his epithet is that he actually uses a special kind of dowsing rod in his line of work. There are all kinds of dowsing tools, and each has its own special use or “power.” I even think that dowsing rods may be the inspiration for what we call “magic wands.”

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Adventures Fantastic Reviews Black Gate 15

Adventures Fantastic Reviews Black Gate 15

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bg-15-cover2Over at Adventures Fantastic Keith West, who wrote an open letter to Bud Webster in response to Bud’s first Who? column in BG 15, has reviewed the Warrior Women section of our latest issue:

The stunning cover by Donato Giancola kinda makes the point.  Eight of the twenty-one stories (not counting the excerpt from The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones) are part of this theme and have their own separate table of contents… Some of the stories relating to the issue’s theme stretch the definition of warrior woman pretty far.  Still, it’s not often that I can find eight stories by eight different authors (four men and four women if anyone’s counting) in a single venue that I enjoyed this much.  Usually there’s at least one or two that don’t click with me.  Not here.  Every selection was a winner.

He starts with “The Shuttered Temple” by Jonathan L. Howard:

Featuring the return of his thief for hire, Kyth, who made her first appearance in “The Beautiful Corridor” in BG 13… a clever tale well worth your time, even if it is somewhat darker in tone.  In both stories Kyth is required to survive by her wits, rather than her brawn or skill with a sword….  Mr. Howard has an inventive imagination, and I enjoyed trying to figure out the puzzle of the temple in this one.

And “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” by Sarah Avery:

This has a traditional warrior woman, who is leading an army in revolt against her former kingdom… Ms. Avery did a much better job than many writers would have done with this subject.  The heroine, Stisele, has to face her old mentor on the battlefield, making this a story of greater than expected emotional depth.  I look forward to Stisele’s further adventures.

He has words of praise for “Roundelay” by Paula R. Stiles:

Paula R. Stiles tells the tale of a sorceress who challenges the Queen of Hell for the soul of her husband in “Roundelay”.  It seems the woman’s son died of fever and her husband went in pursuit of the boy’s soul only to end up trapped himself.  The story takes place on a flying ship over an ocean.  There are a couple of supporting characters, and Ms. Stiles does a great job of fleshing them out so that they are more than just stock characters from central casting.

And especially  “Cursing the Weather” by Maria V. Snyder:

Nysa… is probably as far from the sterotypical warrior woman as you can get.  She’s a young girl working in a tavern, trying to earn enough money to buy the medicine needed to keep her dying mother alive.  Then a weather wizard moves in across the street…  I wouldn’t have considered this one to really fit the theme of warrior woman.  In spite of that, I think I enjoyed it the most.  I’m going to be checking out more of Ms. Snyder’s work.

You can find the complete review here, and the complete BG 15 table of contents here.

Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

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cseBroadly Speaking, the podcast about the adventures of women writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, has interviewed Black Gate website editor C.S.E. Cooney.

For their July episode Broadly Speaking host Julia Rios interviewed C.S.E. Cooney, Gwynne Garfinkle, and Mary Robinette Kowal (sort of) on the ins and outs of writing humor.

Here’s C.S.E. on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

The thing is, I love Jane Austen… I found it delightful to have Elizabeth Bennet wanting to cut off people’s heads when they threatened her honor. I liked the whole thing between samurais and ninjas. I liked that the Bennet sisters fought back-to-back at the Netherfield ball… I do think that there is something exquisitely funny in having girls in dresses with swords. It speaks to my inner She-ra, Princess of Power.

C.S.E. Cooney is the author of Jack o’ the Hills and The Big Bah-Ha. Her poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride” won the Rhysling award for long form poetry. Gwynne Garfinkle’s short stories and poems have appeared in The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 4, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teens Talk Growing Up, and No Body’s Perfect. Mary Robinette Kowal won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008, her latest fantasy novel is Shades of Milk and Honey.

The complete podcast is roughly 39 minutes; you can find it here. And you can find C.S.E. Cooney’s behind-the-scenes article on the interview (including how she managed to channel Mary Robinette Kowal) right here at Black Gate.

Readercon 22: Meeting Mark Twain, Winning a Rhysling, and Sundry

Readercon 22: Meeting Mark Twain, Winning a Rhysling, and Sundry

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PART II.

(Part I can be found here.)

Readercon 22: Saturday

Now. Where was I, where was I?

Ah, yes. Readercon.

Me, Gwynne Garfinkle and My Sinister Puppet Hand
Me, Gwynne Garfinkle and My Sinister Puppet Hand

Think back. Stretch your minds back. It’s Saturday, July 16th. Where are you? Sipping ice tea on your veranda while the dog pants at your feet and the cicadas whine and the barbecue sizzles — and it’s a summery summertime stretch of summeriness — and you’ve even remembered to put on your sunblock? GOOD FOR YOU!

Me, I hardly saw the sun that weekend. I was in the Boston Merriot Burlington, where the air conditioning was fierce and the convention programming intense!

Julia Rios Makes Every Hotel Room a Castle!
Julia Rios Makes Every Hotel Room a Castle!

In the morning, Erik Amundsen and Patty Templeton and I stole away to Panera Bread, to consume an inexpensive breakfast of sandwiches and rubbery room-temperature soufflés. I was back to the hotel in time for my 11 o’ clock interview with Julia Rios.

Ha.

An interview!!!

That makes me sound VERY POSH AND IMPORTANT, doesn’t it? Only it wasn’t like that, really, because the interview was recorded as a podcast for Broad Universe (called “The Broad Pod“), and it was to involve me and Gwynne Garfinkle and Mary Robinette Kowal, and if you think that I’M the posh and important one in that group, then I don’t know which current affairs rack you’ve been hanging your hats on lately, misters and mistresses!

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Win a Limited Edition Copy of Rage of the Behemoth from Rogue Blades Entertainment

Win a Limited Edition Copy of Rage of the Behemoth from Rogue Blades Entertainment

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rotbJason M Waltz, publisher of Rogue Blades Entertainment, is giving away a free copy of the limited edition of Rage of the Behemoth to one lucky winner this week.

Described as “Almost 150,000 words of monstrous mayhem recording the ferocious battles that rage between gargantuan creatures of myth and legend, and the warriors and wizards who wage war against, beside, and astride them,” Rage of the Behemoth gathers 21 splendid tales of pure adventure fantasy under one cover, including contributions from Bill Ward, Andrew Offutt & Richard K. Lyon, Lois Tilton, Mary Rosenblum, Sean T. M. Stiennon, Brian Ruckley, Bruce Durham, Jason Thummel, C.L. Werner, and many more.

How do you win? Easy!

Just comment on any of the three posts this week at Rogue Blades Entertainment’s Home of Heroics , and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a copy. The Home of Heroics is the Grand Central Station for heroic fiction on the Web, and previous writers have included Martha Wells, E.E. Knight, David C. Smith, Charles Saunders, Bill Ward, and many others.

Comments must be made between Monday, July 25, and Friday July 29. Complete details on the contest are here.

Learn more about Rage of the Behemoth here.

You won’t find many contests this easy — or this much fun. Check out Home of Heroics today. You can thank us later.

Mark Lawrence on Prince of Thorns

Mark Lawrence on Prince of Thorns

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prince-of-thornsThat fantasy story you love, the one where the farm boy gets the sword and kills that monster so the bad overlord is cast down and the princess is freed… I didn’t write that one. Those stories, wrapped up in more sophisticated prose with a twist and turn and an OMG, are great. They’re the strength and the curse of the genre. I didn’t write one. I wrote an ugly awkward thing that has seriously made someone blog ‘I got that horrible feeling in my tummy and could not read any more.’ Prince of Thorns is an ungentle book.

In 2004 I got my first ever check for writing fiction, a princely $31 for ‘Song of the Mind-born,’ a story that Black Gate had turned down. Between 2003 and 2006 Black Gate turned down about five of my short stories. John O’Neill writes the best rejections of any magazine editor I’ve ever encountered, and believe me if we lived pre-email I would have enough rejections to reconstitute a sizeable tree.

Reading an O’Neill rejection you know that the man has read your submission from top to bottom and put some thought into letting you know why he’s not going to pay you for it. He lets you walk away with dignity and hope.

This was the last O’Neill rejection I got:

It is with great pain that I am forced to reject you yet again. I really liked this story and read to the end, even though I was sure after the first few paragraphs that it wouldn’t be a fit for Black Gate. It was very nicely done, and hit me on an emotional level. It works at all levels, I think — except it’s not a fit for Black Gate. Please put some of your excellent talent to use on an adventure story with some unique world building, and ship it my way.

I took John’s advice and the next three submissions were all accepted. ‘Bulletproof,’ accepted in 2006, will appear in Black Gate 16, perhaps Spring 2012? And that’s another thing I love about Black Gate (apart from the fact you can actually buy it off the shelves of real shops) – the optimism, the way they put the season on each issue as if the year wasn’t enough to uniquely identify it!

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A Look behind Lod’s World, or How to Strike Gold

A Look behind Lod’s World, or How to Strike Gold

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Lod in "The Oracle of Gog," by Vaughn Heppner (from Black Gate 15). Art by Mark Evans.
Lod in "The Oracle of Gog," by Vaughn Heppner (from Black Gate 15). Art by Mark Evans.

Believable world creation lends greater enjoyment to fantasy and science fiction stories. One need merely consider some of the classics like The Lord of the Rings or Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian to see how vital this is. Dune also comes to mind or Asimov’s Foundation series. In fantasy, Tolkien is the accepted master at world creation, having invented alphabets and entire new languages for his books.

Edgar Rice Burroughs added another trick to this in the Pellucidar and John Carter of Mars novels. Usually in the introduction, Burroughs went to great length to tell us how he received the various manuscripts from the hero of the tale. In this way, he helped create the illusion of reality. It was a powerful practice and was copied by such different authors as Lin Carter and John Norman, both ERB imitators.

It seems that the more one can attach the fantasy world to the real world, the greater becomes the reader’s ability to suspend his disbelief. This temporary suspension of disbelief is considered critical in order for the reader to enjoy a fantasy story.

Howard’s Hyborian Age chronicle helped give the impression that the Conan stories and the earlier Kull tales had taken place in man’s distant past. This feel of reality gives the story greater depth. Instead of feeling as if the hero walks on a cardboard stage, we feel as if he moves through a genuine world and thereby we enjoy the tale more.

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The Man They Call Sean

The Man They Call Sean

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I’ve never had a nickname that stuck.  Well, that’s not completely true — I can think of at least one occasion when people have called me “Flinteye” and expected me to respond, but they were just reading off my baseball cap.  All in all, this is probably a good thing, since nicknames that stick tend to be less cool stuff like “Grinder” or “Shadowman” and more like “Chunk” or “Barfbag”.

A candid look at my gruesome features
A candid look at my gruesome features

So, as much as I’d like to introduce myself as Sean “Dark Smoke Puncher” Stiennon, just Sean will do nicely.  You might already have noticed my name attached to a review of Jasper Kent’s Twelve.

By day, I inhabit an apartment in sunny Madison, Wisconsin (as well as an office nearby) and produce the valuable carbon dioxide that keeps our planet green.  By night, I sleep.  I also read ridiculous books, play manly video games, practice ryuukyu kenpo karate, and otherwise live the high life.  I write fantasy and SF regularly, and if any cool people or gorgeous space princesses out there want to see some, send me a carrier pigeon!

My nerd profile is that of a dilettante.  I enjoy many things, from manga to games, but haven’t really ever plunged into one particular thing.  There are few authors I’ve read exhaustively, few franchises I’ve mined deep enough to go toe-to-toe with their true devotees.  That means my thoughts on any geeky subject tend to be a loose mix of ignorance, knowledge, and apathy.  I love Cowboy Bebop and Trigun, but have never seen Akira or Dragonball Z.  I got sick of Drizzt after three volumes, and only read four.

Anyway, I like to think my broad-but-shallow nerd experiences give me a habit of making interesting connections.  So, when I watch the first few episodes of classic head-bursting anime Fist of the North Star, it brings Superman to mind.

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Readercon 22: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (well, some of them) Encounters Cannibal Towns, Dirty Limericks and Googly Eyeballs

Readercon 22: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (well, some of them) Encounters Cannibal Towns, Dirty Limericks and Googly Eyeballs

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Cannibal Country. (AKA Guilderland, New York)
Cannibal Country. (AKA Guilderland, New York)

The thought that preoccupies me is, “How the heck am I going to find enough pictures to go with this post?”

Unlike that one time when we crashed a Zeppelin into Madison, we did not document our epic journey across America with anything so practical as a camera. No!

Instead, we marked the miles in the bellowing of bawdy (need I say, alternate?) lyrics to “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza,” the scrawling of character notes, place names and plot devices for a story about a stolen moon, the counting of times the word “Beloit” was mentioned in the back seat (Brendan Detzner being an alum and S. Brackett Robertson, or “Brackett,” a current student), in Billy Joel sing-alongs and idle speculations about the nature of certain malevolently leaning shacks in Guilderland, New York.

The B-Train. (AKA, writer Brendan Detzner)
The B-Train. (AKA, writer Brendan Detzner)

“Meth shed?” Patty postulated.

“Cannibals?” I countered.

“CANNIBAL METH SHEDS!” we roared together, with, perhaps, more delighted gusto than was strictly necessary.

“So… Do the cannibals eat the meth heads?” Brendan asked. “Or are the cannibals themselves meth heads?”

The conversation went on. I will not trouble you with further details. By this time we had been driving approximately ten hours and still had nine to go.

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