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After Halloween: Novel Writing

After Halloween: Novel Writing

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NaNoWriMo web badgeTonight, children go trick-or-treating, and many adults go to Halloween parties, thereby, perhaps, proving Ogden Nash’s line that children get more joy out of childhood than adults get out of adultery. For myself, though, I’ll be counting down the minutes to midnight, scrawling notes and making plans. Because at 12 AM, November 1, National Novel Writing Month begins.

National Novel Writing Month, more accurately International Novel Writing Month, is a worldwide challenge anyone can sign up for: you pledge to write 50,000 words in the month of November. You have to have those words written by midnight, November 30; otherwise, anything goes.

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Remembrance of Things Past

Remembrance of Things Past

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_49643496_009891365-11The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

This was Ray Bradbury, quoted in Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, in observing that the “seashells” he had made up for people to listen pressed against their ear had actually been invented with the transistor radio (a very, very, very primitive iPod, for you youngsters).  Ray’s point was that the seashells transported people into artificial environments that imperiled human interaction.

This quote appears on the back of my Ballentine Books 1962 paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451 (purchased when I was in sixth grade for the enormous sum of 50 cents).  As you should know, the novel is an indictment of a media-obsessed dystopia that burns books so people aren’t exposed to disturbing ideas and can be kept “happy” with mindless entertainment.  This was written in the early 1950s, and while Bradbury may not have had the details right (and that’s never been his interest), he certainly anticipated our Internet Age (which Ray has described as a “waste of time”).

While the transistor radio may have been the first step, the real giant leap in which we’ve beomce technological islands unto ourselves was the invention of the portable cassette player, the  Sony Walkman, in 1979. With the transistor radio, you listened to what someone was playing for you, usually for the purpose of selling you something. With this clunky piece of machinery, you could choose what you wanted to listen to, wherever you wanted to listen to it. Not quite as passive as today’s MP3 player as you actually had to load into it a a cassette tape, the contents of which you may actually have put some effort into creating as your own personal playlist, without the assistance of a computerized “genius” that’s supposed to know your tastes for you.

The Walkman officially no longer roams the Earth. Sony has announced that production has shut down. Another era has passed.  Alas, Bradbury’s vision of a witless America hasn’t.

Marvel’s The Monster of Frankenstein, Part Three

Marvel’s The Monster of Frankenstein, Part Three

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fm12The 19th Century adventures of Mary Shelley’s famous monster conclude with Issue 12 of Marvel’s The Frankenstein Monster as the new creative team of writer Doug Moench and artist Val Mayerik begin the drastic process of updating the series to the present-day.

The Monster is dying of a gunshot wound inflicted by Vincent Frankenstein in the previous issue. After surviving an attack by a pack of wolves, the Monster falls off a cliff into an icy river. The story then jumps ahead to 1973 as an oil freighter hits an iceberg containing the frozen body of the Monster. This being a comic book, the Monster never died of his gunshot wound since the ice preserved him in a state of suspended animation.

The sailor who spotted the Monster trapped in the ice has a brother who runs a carnival. They conspire to steal the body before it can be turned over to the authorities. We are then introduced to a young neurosurgeon, Dr. Derek McDowell who sees the Monster exhibited at the carnival and correctly concludes that it is the immortal creation of Victor Frankenstein.

mu2From here we segue to the pages of Marvel’s more mature (as in free of the censorship imposed by the Comics Code Authority) comic magazine, Monsters Unleashed which first launched the Frankenstein 1973 feature in their second issue the preceding year under the aegis of Gary Friedrich and John Buscema. The events of The Frankenstein Monster # 12 would now be considered an example of ret-conning in order to retroactively satisfy the continuity established in the sister magazine.

Friedrich’s portrayal of Derek McDowell is far from appealing. He’s an abusive hippie loser who beats up his fiancée, Tisha in frustration when the carnival refuses to sell the Monster to him. McDowell believes he has the skill to bring the Monster back to life whereas Tisha just wants things to go back to the way they were before he became obsessed with the journals of Robert Walton and the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation. To this end, Tisha decides a little arson at the carnival is in order.

The fire ends up not only disfiguring Tisha, but ironically melting the ice and reviving the Monster. The military is called in while the Monster climbs to the top of a roller coaster. He’s shot with a mortar, falls to the ground, lands on some cables and is electrocuted. The issue ends with the hard luck Monster who can’t seem to catch a break apparently killed off mere minutes after he awakens from his 80-year slumber.

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The end of Realms of Fantasy begs the question: Too much fantasy on the market?

The end of Realms of Fantasy begs the question: Too much fantasy on the market?

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realms_of_fantasy_199410_v1_n1This post over on the Cyclopeatron blog closely mirrors my own thoughts on why I think Realms of Fantasy and other magazines in the short fiction market are largely a dying or endangered breed.

It’s not necessarily the bad economy (though I don’t doubt this is a contributing factor). And it’s not necessarily the changing face of publishing, which is moving from print periodicals to PDF and/or web delivery (though this likely is a contributing factor, since publishers of all stripes have struggled with monetizing content delivered on the web).

Rather, like Cyclopeatron, I’ve long believed that there’s simply too much fantasy fiction on the market, and that magazines have gotten the squeeze as a result.

At first this may seem like a ridiculous notion. Realms of Fantasy, one of the few remaining print fantasy magazines in the market, goes under, and it’s because there’s too much fantasy for it to complete against? Yes, at least in my opinion. Here’s why.

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Goth Chick News: Featuring Tabitha, Goth Girl in Training

Goth Chick News: Featuring Tabitha, Goth Girl in Training

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lovely-bad-ones2During Goth Chick’s absence she’s asked our resident Goth Chick in training, eleven year-old Tabitha, author of our recent review of The House of Dead Maids, to fill in.

Tabitha: What exactly are we supposed to be doing?

Black Gate: Your friend Goth Chick is on vacation this week. She’s asked you to be her replacement on the Black Gate blog.

Tabitha: Goth Chick? The one we go to scary movies with?

Black Gate: Yes.

Um… okay. So what am I supposed to do?

Black Gate: How about you pick some of the scariest books you’ve ever read, and tell me about them.

I’m more of a scary movie person.

BG: But… you’ve told me about a bunch of scary books you’ve read recently.

They weren’t very scary. And there’s only one that jumps to mind: All The Lovely Bad Ones.

BG: I’m scared already. Tell me about it.

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I’ve Been Podcasted!

I’ve Been Podcasted!

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Wow! I just listened to the wonderfully done podcast version of “The Taste of Starlight” at www.lightspeedmagazine.com

This is the first time I’ve had a short story of mine read aloud and podcasted. It’s one of the coolest things about LIGHTSPEED–they do podcast readings every month. And let me tell you, Kristoffer Tabori does an AMAZING job of bringing this story of Dr. Pelops and his dilemma to life.

This guy has a voice you could listen to for hours. However, the story podcast is only 64 minutes long. WARNING: Do  not eat anything while listening to the story, and if you don’t have a strong stomach, skip it altogether.

Tabori’s voice brings all the gravity of an OUTER LIMITS announcer to the story, and his lively, chilling tones are worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe tale. I feel that the story has been elevated to a whole new level by Tabori’s bravura performance.

Even if you’ve read the story, I recommend paying another visit to LIGHTSPEED and listening to it through Tabori’s immense talent.

Here’s the direct link to the podcast.

Fantastic!

John R. Fultz

Art Evolution 7: Jeff Easley

Art Evolution 7: Jeff Easley

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Six artists were now represented in my Art Evolution project, beginning here, and the feelings of dread that I couldn’t get this accomplished were turning into the problematic emotion what will I do if this success continues? I needed to push forward with the concepts involving Art Evolution, and the Eras of Art that I’d put into play.

mmii-254My newest contribution, ‘Planescape Lyssa’, gave me a great snapshot of the twilight of TSR. This time-period was something I called The CCG Era [Collectible Card Game], and with the artists I’d already collected I had wonderful representations of The OGL Era of the two-thousands, The Independents Era of the late eighties, and The Groovy Era of the late seventies. A fine collection, but I was missing one glaring contribution, something from The Masters of Oil Era of the early eighties.

To fill this slot, I was going to have to go after at least one of the Big Four, Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson, or Clyde Caldwell. I’d studied the names and their art, and for the first time began putting my research down in a written format. Research became paramount as I started piecing together my feelings on the subject matter.

Styles came out, mediums used in different time periods, and what the industry was leaning toward from year to year. It was a revelation, and I used whatever knowledge I could to push the project forward.

Of the Master of Oil, Easley was certainly the most prolific in gaming terms of the remaining artists but he had no website or available email. I managed to get some contact information from Jeff Laubenstein, who had met Easley during his time at FASA and at several renaissance fairs around the Chicago area. Connections inside the industry were starting to come together, and the more I talked to artists, the more entwined I became in their world.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.5 “Live Free or Twi-hard”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.5 “Live Free or Twi-hard”

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SUPERNATURALThe episode opens with a young man (Robert), dressed all in black and wearing too much product in his hair, romances a girl (Kristen) in a bar. He is enigmatic and tentative, recoiling at the sight of blood from a papercut. “We can’t be together,” he says. “You think you know me, but you don’t. I’ve done bad things. You should run. Now.”

“I can make my own decisions,” Krsten replies. “I’m 17.”

No, they haven’t called in Stephanie Meyer to guest write this week’s episode of Supernatural. Instead, they’re taking a turn at dark parody, pulling the cliches from the Twilight saga into their more nitty-gritty vampire mythos. In Supernatural, vampires are flat-out monsters, not dark romantic leads.

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The Book Fair

The Book Fair

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Book Fair flyerThe McGill book fair is the largest English-language used book sale in Montreal. It’s been held for decades, every October, on the second Wednesday and Thursday after Thanksgiving (which in Canada is on the second Monday in October). Every year an eclectic mix of thousands of books are sold, helping to raise money for scholarships.

I’ve been coming to the sale for about a dozen years. I’ve found novels by Lord Dunsany, a biography of C.S. Lewis, a book about Hypatia of Alexandria, a Dennis Wheatley omnibus, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Paul Park’s Celestis, a volume combining Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, collections of poetry by John Clare and Francois Villon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Southey and Don Marquis, a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds — and all of these (along with books by Neal Stephenson, Tad Williams, and T.H. White) in just one year, 2008, when I bought a total of 65 books for $161.

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JOHN CARTER OF MARS (or: Barsoom, Anyone?)

JOHN CARTER OF MARS (or: Barsoom, Anyone?)

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A great painting by Joe Jusko featuring a convergence of Barsoom's most memorable elements. That's John Carter and Dejah Thoris in the midst of all the savage beasties. The setting is one of Mars' ancient ruined cities, home to the savage green Tharks.

It’s a sublimely gorgeous rainy day here in Napa. I’m listening to the ancient, pattering rhythm of the rainsong and thinking about Mars.

No, not the red dustball of our modern age, where tiny robots scour the dunes for microscopic life. I’m thinking of BARSOOM, the title the red planet bore a long, long time ago.

I’m thinking of ancient cities crumbling across dead sea-bottoms, tusked green warriors standing ten feet tall, snake-haired plant-men, four-armed white apes, ten-legged lions, flashing swords, and blasting radium pistols. I’m thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his most original creation John Carter of Mars.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, his first novel. John Carter, his rugged hero, was a Civil War veteran who stumbled into a mystical cave and was transported through space and time to an ancient version of Mars (Barsoom) where various races of Martians (some obviously descended from Native American stock, some wholly alien in design) battled constantly for survival among the remains of a fallen civilization.

Here was swordplay, swashbuckling, and adventure in the grandest style. From 1912 to 1964, Burroughs wrote a total of 11 novels set on Barsoom (most of which featured John Carter).

These books, not to mention the author’s Tarzan, Venus, Pellucidar, Westerns, and various other works, make ERB one of pulp fiction’s towering giants.

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