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Goth Chick News: 13 Questions for Catherine Mary Stewart

Goth Chick News: 13 Questions for Catherine Mary Stewart

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image015The gentlemen staff of Black Gate tirelessly seeks out ways to entertain you. There have been cross-country zeppelin rides and waist-high stacks of manuscripts to pour over, seeking only the crème de la crème of stories to tell and the most interesting tidbits to pass along. The boys often go for days without showering, living only on beer and pizza while spending countless, sleepless hours reading the latest comics or playing the latest video games; all for your enjoyment and approval. During these marathon sessions of creativity, toilet sets are left up and the communal fridge sprouts intricate science experiments, which I am sure have some unobvious value.

It’s exhausting to watch, really.

But here in the underground bunker of Goth Chick News, we’re generally just concerned with the tequila supply and whether plugging in the blender while five Xboxes are going upstairs will cause a breaker to trip.

That is, until two weeks ago.

It was then that I brought you a collection of favorite scary movies from the 80’s, gleaned from an outwardly cool-looking, mixed group of New Years Eve revelers; with a goal to either remind you of a picture you’d forgotten, or tempt you into something classic that you may never have heard of.

As it turns out, plenty of you have heard of Catherine Mary Stewart.

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Art Evolution 19: RK Post

Art Evolution 19: RK Post

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Art evolves, one generation of role-players leading into the next and each attaches it’s best memories to the artists that defined their games of choice. This ongoing series continues, but if you’ve missed previous entries they can be found here.

deadlands-doomtown-or-bust-255With the help of Wizards of the Coast I had my ‘Caldwell Lyssa’, and the weeks for the project were growing short. These final days became the most trying for me as artists started to hedge, deadlines were missed, and suddenly I faced the possibility that I might not get twenty artists when I was assured only months before that I’d have twenty-five.

Still, with every prick of a thorny dropout, there were those who provided a silver lining. Out there among the countless catalogues of incredible gaming work there were some artists who simply smiled and said ‘when do you need it’.

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Goblin Fruit: Winter 2011

Goblin Fruit: Winter 2011

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"Come buy, come buy!"
"Come buy, come buy!"

Do you remember Amal El-Mohtar? Poet, writer, Black Gate blogger?

Well! As I may have mentioned once or twice, she and Jessica P. Wick (who turns back into a mermaid when you spray her with a hose) co-edit a ‘zine called Goblin Fruit, which publishes “poetry of the fantastical.”

And… THE WINTER ISSUE IS LIVE!!! It’s ALIVE, I tell you! With (O my leaping lords of the great down under), soul-salivating art by Melbourne’s Omi Fam!

If we go by the art alone, this issue would be like a wolf pelt stuffed with sentient diamonds, or a lantern carved from a human skull. But I know the names of some of the poets (Rose Lemberg of Stone Telling, Leah Bobet of Ideomancer, Mari Ness of the Oz Blog at Tor.com, Loreen Heneghan, Christopher W. Clark, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Michelle Muenzler, and Neile Graham), therefore the possibilities for this issue are as endless as a winter’s night.

Go check it out! If you dare.

We last covered Goblin Fruit in our three-part review of the magazine.

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews HeroScape

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews HeroScape

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Heroscape expansion packs

In 2004, I made my first trip to GenCon and was overwhelmed by the experience. I don’t remember much about the specific tables I visited, but I do remember coming across this new game, HeroScape, which applied a modular style to tactical war gaming – not just in the building of the army (which was usually modular in some sense), but in the design of the playing surface and terrain.

Just as Howard describes himself below, I was also the sort of person who always chose storytelling games over wargames. I had bought some Warhammer units, but had spent so much time painting them that I’d never actually gotten around to playing the game … and even if I had, the lack of terrain would have annoyed me.

With HeroScape, all of these elements came packaged together in a master set, and you could expand on the experience easily enough with various expansion packs. Six years later, Howard describes his experience with the current incarnation of the game.

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“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

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jerry-goldsmith-conductsI always write with music playing. That’s not much of an admission. A few writers prefer to work in silence, but most that I have talked to say that they need to have music in the background while they work at their keyboards or notebooks. Some writers like to listen with headphones on as an extra seal against the rest of the world, but I only do that if I’m working in a public environment. Otherwise, I let my massively stuffed iPod play through the huge speakers in my apartment to surround me with music as I work.

Just as every writer has a different method of writing, so does every writer have difference musical preferences for underscoring his or her work. But “underscore” is the key word, since I have discovered that film music is perhaps the number one choice for music to write by. One reason for this is that film scores usually lack lyrics (at least in English; Latin chanting is a standby, Ave Satani!) that can distract from the author’s own words. Film music, regardless of its style, also inherently has a dramatic feel that parallels how writers often think.

The situation is a bit different for me. I do listen to film scores while writing, but that’s because film music is my favorite form of music. I have listened to film scores more than any other type of music since high school, when I turned into an avid collector of soundtrack albums. My collection is now somewhere in the thousands, and ranges in obscurity from John Williams’s Star Wars scores to films nobody remembers except film score collectors (The Cassandra Crossing). The chronological scope of my collection is just as wide, from silent movie scores to films released a few weeks ago. Film music is one of my deep passions.

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Cloning Mammoths — Will Neanderthals be Next? (We hope so)

Cloning Mammoths — Will Neanderthals be Next? (We hope so)

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hey-a-mammothCNN is reporting that a team of Japanese, Russian and American scientists are attempting to clone a mammoth, an extinct beast from the ice age. Apparently, they’ve achieved recent breakthroughs by combining the genetic code of an elephant with the DNA of a shag carpet. The researchers hope to produce their little cloned bundle of joy within six years, which is just about as long as it took my wife Alice and I to produce a baby (if you count the three years it took to convince her to go out with me).

Mammoths are big.  Big big big. Hence, the name “mammoth.” The word comes from the Russian mamont, meaning “humongous,” or something like that. Probably. Anyway, Wikipedia reports the largest known species reached heights of 16 feet at the shoulder, and may have exceeded 12 tons. That’s four times as much as my Uncle Phil’s Hummer. Wherever they’re doing the cloning, I hope it has vaulted ceilings.  And maybe a fenced yard, so the little tyke can go outside to do his business.

Incredibly, Wikipedia also reports an 11-foot long mammoth tusk was discovered north of Lincoln, Illinois in 2005, about three hours from where I live. Can you get enough DNA to clone something from a tusk? [Hey Alice — road trip!!]

Contrary to everything I learned in eighth grade, mammoths are not dinosaurs. They’re giant gorilla elephants. They’re also mammals, like that other famous extinct not-a-dinosaur, the saber-tooth tiger.  Scientists have chosen to clone the mammoth first, rather than the saber-tooth tiger or the Tyrannosaurus Rex, because they’re unimaginative losers.

As every well-read science fiction fan knows, cloning mammoths is just the first step on the slippery slope towards cloning people, cloning cats, Clone Wars, and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. I hope that in the interim, we get around to cloning Neanderthals. Because let’s face it — that’s what cloning is for.

The Book of Modred: An Excerpt

The Book of Modred: An Excerpt

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Last November, I blogged about my participation in NaNoWriMo. The following is an excerpt from what I wrote that month, for those who’d like to see how it turned out. Editing is minimal, principally for spelling. Although the story’s from the middle of the book, it should be fairly self-explanatory. It’s the story of Modred at the court of King Arthur, a young Modred who does not yet know the secret of his father’s identity, much less what’s coming for both of them in the future. As the excerpt begins, Modred’s about eighteen, possessed of a magical sword called Naught, and accompanied by his squire, who also happens to be the King’s bard, a somewhat older man named Taliesin …

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Steampunk Thoughts: The Novels of Felix Gilman

Steampunk Thoughts: The Novels of Felix Gilman

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ThundererI want to write about the novels of Felix Gilman, who I believe is one of the strongest new novelists in fantasy fiction today. He’s written three books, Thunderer, Gears of the City, and The Half-Made World, all of them accomplished and powerful, fusing imaginative range with a compelling style and real insight into character and voice. I’ve written about Thunderer on my own blog, and was able to interview Gilman at the 2009 Worldcon. I’d like consider now all three of his novels, and what makes them work. Before trying to describe the virtues of these books in detail, though, I think I first need to write a bit about steampunk.

I need to write about the genre because it’s a form that seems to me to be intrinsic to Gilman’s work; or, put another way, I think Gilman’s work illustrates something of what’s remarkable about steampunk. To explain that, I need to explain steampunk, and what it means to me. As it happens, I’ve seen a couple of essays lately which criticise steampunk on various grounds, so I want to consider these objections as a way of defining exactly what steampunk means, and where I think Gilman’s work fits in with it.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Two: “The Cry of the Nighthawk”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Two: “The Cry of the Nighthawk”

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nighthawk“The Cry of the Nighthawk“ was the second installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story made its debut in Collier’s on December 26, 1914 and was later edited to comprise Chapters 4-6 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in 1916 in the UK by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.returnolandnpad

Rohmer’s tale bears definite similarities to his first Fu-Manchu story, “The Zayat Kiss” (1912) in that the story opens with Dr. Petrie at work in his principal vocation caring for a patient called Forsyth who has turned up at his residence late that evening with a badly infected hand. Petrie, in true pulp fashion, fails to recognize that Forsyth is the spitting image of Nayland Smith with a moustache.
Finished with his patient, Petrie goes to his study to find Smith with the lights out staring frantically outside just as he had at the opening of “The Zayat Kiss.” Petrie joins him and they watch poor Forsyth walk to his doom under the elms. They hasten outside after hearing the cry of a nighthawk and retrieve Forsyth’s dead body with its mutilated face. Only then does Petrie realize that Forsyth is Smith’s doppelganger and the duo then deduce that the poor man shared the fate intended for Smith.

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Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

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image0041The holidays are over and according to AccuWeather, approximately 70% of the United States has snow on the ground and for a whole lot of you, this may be just a rare enough occurrence that for the moment, you’re mildly amused. But trust me when I tell you the novelty of throwing it at each other, sliding down it, or for a select group of you, writing your name in it, is going to wear off. And that’s when the cabin fever sets in.

The reality is that 70% of otherwise (fairly) stable Americans are trapped like rats with family members, classmates or co-workers for another two months at minimum. We are all now horror-movie fodder, Steven King style, holed up without sunlight and fresh air; susceptible to maddeningly repetitive sounds like the British accent on that lizard in the insurance commercials, until the only remaining coherent thought is squishing him flat in your uninsured Hummer.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The point is, you’re in need of mind-diverting entertainment until the thaw comes; before you end up being the subject of an HBO special and some Dancing With the Stars contestant is playing you… badly.

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