Browsed by
Category: BG Staff

A Peek at The Way of the Wizard

A Peek at The Way of the Wizard

Comments 9 comments
WAY OF THE WIZARD hits stores on Nov. 16.
The Wizard hits stores on Nov. 16.

It’s almost here! Next month Prime Books releases its new fantasy anthology paperback, THE WAY OF THE WIZARD. It features 32 stories of sorcerers, wizards, magicians and the like. In addition to luminaries like Neil Gaiman,  George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, and Peter S. Beagle (among others) it features my own story, “The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria.”

Editor extraordinaire John Joseph Adams just announced the book’s complete table of contents:

WAY OF THE WIZARD

– Table of Contents –

-Introduction by John Joseph Adams
–In the Lost Lands — George R.R. Martin
–Family Tree — David Barr Kirtley
–John Uskglass and the Cambrian Charcoal Burner — Susanna Clarke
–Wizard’s Apprentice — Delia Sherman
–The Sorcerer Minus — Jeffrey Ford
–Life So Dear Or Peace So Sweet — C. C. Finlay
–Card Sharp — Rajan Khanna
–So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen —  Genevieve Valentine
–The Go-Slow — Nnedi Okorafor
–Too Fatal a Poison — Krista Hoeppner Leahy
–Jamaica — Orson Scott Card
–The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — Robert Silverberg
–The Secret of Calling Rabbits — Wendy N. Wagner
–The Wizards of Perfil — Kelly Link
–How to Sell the Ponti Bridge — Neil Gaiman
–The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories — Christie Yant
–Winter Solstice — Mike Resnick
–The Trader and the Slave — Cinda Williams Chima
–Cerile and the Journeyer — Adam-Troy Castro
–Counting the Shapes — Yoon Ha Lee
–Endgame — Lev Grossman
–Street Wizard — Simon R. Green
–Mommy Issues of the Dead — T. A. Pratt
–One Click Banishment — Jeremiah Tolbert
–The Ereshkigal Working — Jonathan L. Howard
–Feeding the Feral Children — David Farland
–The Orange-Tree Sacrifice — Vylar Kaftan
–Love is the Spell That Casts Out Fear — Desirina Boskovich
–El Regalo — Peter S. Beagle
–The Word of Unbinding — Ursula K. Le Guin
–The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria — John R. Fultz
–The Secret of the Blue Star — Marion Zimmer Bradley

So I’m sandwiched in between Ursula K. LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not a bad place to be!

You can pre-order WAY OF THE WIZARD at Amazon.com

Cheers!
John

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Comments 4 comments
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.

…

Read More Read More

C.S.E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha Available October 2010

C.S.E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha Available October 2010

Comments 7 comments

claire-254Our own C.S.E. Cooney has sent us some good news about her latest fiction extravagana:

The Big Bah-Ha is a novella by yours truly, coming out at Drollerie Press in October 2010!!! It is a post-apocalyptic katabasis story, complete with kiddie gangs, slingshot battles, strange clowns, Tall Ones, and one very dead (very brave) child protagonist.

No, I didn’t know what a “katabasis story” was either.  Thank God for Wikipedia, which tells me “Katabasis is a descent of some type. Katabasis may be a moving downhill, a sinking of winds, a military retreat, or a trip to the underworld.” Oooh, now I get it.

The Big Ba-Ha is a macabre post-apocalyptic fairy tale, a rollicking fantasy of a band of near-feral children who brave a plague-ridden landscape on a desperate quest. To rescue one of their own, they will ally with the monstrous and enigmatic Flabberghast — who arrived only after the world ended and eats the bones of the dead — and penetrate the mystery of Chuckle City, home to ravenous packs of balloon aminals, murderous Gacy boys, and the elusive Gray Harlequin. The Big Ba-Ha — it’s The Goonies meets The Road Warrior, perfectly suited for both ordinary children and gifted adults, and one of the most original fantasies I’ve read in a long time.

…

Read More Read More

Letters to Black Gate: Vampire Earth, Pete Butler and Gary Gygax

Letters to Black Gate: Vampire Earth, Pete Butler and Gary Gygax

Comments 2 comments

tale-of-the-thunderbolt2Jesse Moya tells us how she discovered Black Gate:

I recently started The Vampire Earth books by E. E. Knight.  On the cover of Tale of the Thunderbolt (Book 3), there is a brief descriptive quote about Knight, and Black Gate is listed as the source.
So I thought I would check out what Black Gate was all about. Unlike my younger days, I no longer have as much time to read, so I thought if your site did reviews I might learn about authors/series that I might otherwise never discover.
Noticed you were a magazine so I decided to see what kind of stories you published. I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten in the (bad) habit of sticking to the authors I know (on the basis that I don’t want to “waste my time”), so I’m trying to expand.
In the last couple of years, I’ve caught back up to current music thanks to my oldest girl and her iTunes downloads. Now I just need help getting to know who good new authors may be, and I hope your magazine helps me.

Thanks, Jesse. Glad to see such as healthy attitude towards trying new writers (and magazines). I wish we saw it more often.

And wow — that’s the first time we’ve ever won a customer from a cover blurb.

Hear that, Reviews Editor Bill Ward?  I want cover blurbs on every fantasy novel in North America. Get on it.

…

Read More Read More

Harold Lamb’s Swords From the West and Swords From the Desert

Harold Lamb’s Swords From the West and Swords From the Desert

Comments 4 comments

haroldlambSwords From the West
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (602 pp, $26.95, 2009)

Swords From the Desert
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (306 pp, $21.95, 2009)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

Harold Lamb (1892-1962) is an author in danger of being forgotten. This should not be the case, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Lamb is good — from his historical biographies that read like action-adventure novels, to his actual action-adventure stories that cemented his status as a king of the pulps, Lamb is a terrific writer. He is also a diverse writer, having achieved success in both fiction and non-fiction, magazines and books, and even as a Hollywood screenwriter.

And, not to be overlooked, he is a historically significant writer in the evolution of fiction — serving as a bridge from the pulp era to the post-war era, and as a grandfather figure to the kind of adventure fantasy pioneered by Robert E. Howard and then expanded upon by the greats of the field such as Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Leigh Brackett, Steven Brust, and Charles Saunders. The idiom in which today’s current crop of rising Sword & Sorcery stars work within can be traced right back to the nineteen teens and twenties, and the historical adventures of Harold Lamb that did so much to inform the approach of the future creator of Conan.

…

Read More Read More

A Review of The House of Dead Maids

A Review of The House of Dead Maids

Comments 11 comments

house-dead-maidsLast week I was contacted by Barbara Fisch at Blue Slip Media, who’s been recommending and sending review copies to me for nearly fifteen years. Barbara had flagged The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle (author of the Hollow Kingdom trilogy), just released in hardcover from Holt, as of possible interest to Black Gate readers. And from her description, it sounded like she could be right:

The House of Dead Maids is billed as a prelude to Wuthering Heights, as it features a character who will come to be known as Healthcliff. The novel is a scary blending of Yorkshire lore and Bronte family history. The child (Heathcliff) is already a savage little creature when Tabby Aykroyd arrives at Seldom House as his nursemaid. The ghost of the last maid will not leave Tabby in peace, and her spirit is only one of many. As she struggles against the evil forces that surround the house, Tabby tries to befriend her uncouth young charge, but her kindness can’t alter his fate.

The real task, as always, was matching the ideal reviewer with the book… a bit more of a challenge for a 151-page book with an eleven year-old narrator, I grant you.

As luck would have it, I happened to have an eleven-year old reader in the house, who innocently picked up the book the day it arrived.  I know when the stars have aligned, and sat down with a notepad and pen to interview her minutes after she finished reading The House of Dead Maids.

We’ll call this young reader “Tabitha,” because of what happened when her mother found out I was going to use her picture and real name on the Internet.

…

Read More Read More

Werewolves and Ghost-powered Zeppelins: Sample Chapters from The Wolf Age Now Available

Werewolves and Ghost-powered Zeppelins: Sample Chapters from The Wolf Age Now Available

Comments 6 comments

thewolfageJames Enge tells us (rather gleefully) that “A slab of The Wolf Age is up at the Pyr samples site. Werewolves. Ghost-powered zeppelins. The usual stuff.”

The Wolf Age is the third novel of Morlock the Maker.  Morlock, the soft-spoken hunchback and recovering alcoholic who may also be the finest artificer the world has ever seen — not to mention a formidable swordsman — featured in Enge’s first published story, “Turn Up This Crooked Way,” in Black Gate 8, and has appeared six times (so far) in our pages, most recently in Black Gate 14.

Tired of dominating Black Gate‘s pages with an iron fist, Enge turned to more ambitious goals, producing the first two Morlock novels Blood of Ambrose (2009) and This Crooked Way (also 2009 — it makes other writers look bad, doesn’t it?), both published by Pyr.

Blood of Ambrose was recently nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the obvious next step in Enge’s ruthless plan for domination of Western civilization.

You can read the first two chapters of The Wolf Age at the Pyr website, and see for yourself how Enge’s evil scheme is taking shape.  It’s not to late to stop him.

Werewolves. Ghost-powered zeppelins. On second thought, it probably is too late.  Join the Black Gate staff in line to sign up as Enge’s evil henchmen, and get your black leather tunics and infrared goggles before they’re all gone.

Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

Comments 14 comments
Ye olde trusty notebook.
Ye olde trusty notebook.

From the time I was in grade school all the way up until after I graduated from college I wrote in notebooks. It seemed such a natural process that I wonder now how I got away from it, and why it was such a revelation when I took up writing in notebooks again.

In my school days I used to carefully comb through available notebooks  and select one with multiple subjects, college-ruled. Usually it would be a spiral-bound Mead, 8 1/2 by 11, but sometimes I’d experiment with slightly smaller sizes. When I was older and wandering through the Kansas City Renaissance Festival with my wife, I purchased a lovely Celtic leather notebook cover with an unlined sketchbook, and I filled a succession of replacement sketchbooks between those covers with my scribbles for years after.

As striking as that notebook was, though, I eventually fell out of using the thing. It became impractical to drag it wherever I went: my student days were over so I no longer had a backpack over one shoulder, and I didn’t have the kind of job where I always toted a briefcase. In those rare instances where I DID have a briefcase, it was already so loaded down that something weighing as much as a hardback book was a nuisance. I never used a notebook for writing unless I was at home, at which point I might as well have been writing on the computer. I thought that I had “outgrown” the use of a notebook.

…

Read More Read More

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

Comments 4 comments

games-of-cagesThe most interesting title waiting for me when I returned from our adventures at Dragon*Con was Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages, the latest in his Twenty Palaces series and the sequel to his first novel, Child of Fire.

We’ve been big fans of Harry since his first story appeared in Black Gate 2, and his “Soldiers of a Dying God” (BG 10) is one of the finest short pieces we’ve ever published. It’s been great to finally see him get some well-deserved recognition.  Child of Fire received some excellent notices, and Jim Butcher said it contained “Excellent reading… delicious tension and suspense.” Here’s the cover copy to Game of Cages:

As a wealthy few gather to bid on a predator capable of destroying all life on earth, the sorcerers of the Twenty Palace Society mobilize to stop them. Caught up in the scramble is Ray Lilly, the lowest of the low in the society — an ex-­car thief and the expendable assistant of a powerful sorcerer. Ray possesses exactly one spell to his name, along with a strong left hook. But when he arrives in the small town in the North Cascades where the bidding is to take place, the predator has escaped and the society’s most powerful enemies are desperate to recapture it.

We tracked down Harry at the exclusive club where he now writes, between eating oysters and sipping Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Before we were thrown out by the bankers at the next table, Harry did say a few words about his new novel, which Howard Jones managed to transcribe in the hidden notebook he always carries in his pocket:

Ray Lilly is an ex-con, an ex-car-thief, and current minion in the Twenty Palace Society, a secret organization that protects our world from deadly, magical “predators.” Ray may only be a driver — and a decoy — but he’s the only operative close enough to deal with an emergency situation: An auction has gone terribly wrong releasing a predator into a small town, and the bidders — murderous, wealthy bastards all — tear the town apart looking for it. Ray just has to hold out until his sorcerer bosses arrive, but it may already be too late.

Howard had a few choice words of his own about “wealthy bastards” as we dusted ourselves off, but at least we got an exclusive quote.  After his third novel, we’ll probably have to bribe his bodyguards just to get close to Harry. Don’t be one of the last ones to catch on. Check out Game of Cages today — the first three chapters are available online, and the book can be found at better bookstores near you.