Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update Episode 3: the Salad is Tossed
Gentlemen!
I can indeed verify that Howard von Steppenwolf-Jones’s fearful presentiment about the revelation of our route is correct. We are compromised and our mission imperiled. While returning home from a convivial evening of cards and tawny Port at my club (Le Cheveux Club Pour Les Hommes — best steak au poivre in Chicago, I might add) I noticed my door had been jimmied with a crude textural analysis and took the precaution of drawing my trusty life preserver. Senses, pistol, and wits half-cocked, I entered. From my library, I heard a whispered chant:
Mene, mene, Derrida upchuckin’
Dulce et decorum est, pro postmodernism scribtum
I’d heard those black words before, in the nightmarish 2006 free-for-all at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. A claven of MFA candidates, driven mad by Midwestern Chardonnay and a few passed-around copies of Rosebud, had very nearly cost me my life.
There’s a temporary lull in operations and the skies are clear over Oklahoma, so I thought I’d take the time to set the record straight about our expedition to Dragon*Con via the Black Gate zeppelin, the Harold Lamb. John described the 
Dark Worlds #5 (Summer 2010) is online at last.
Have you ever woken up in an extremely good mood, found you were left enough hot water for a skin-peeling shower, stepped on the scale and found it down two pounds in spite of the bacchanalia of the night before? Have you ever leapt out of bed feeling euphoric and thought, “I really love my life?”
“The city is a different place in the daylight, bright banners waving from towers, houses likewise bright with hangings and with designs painted on walls and roofs. The ships of the river unload by day, and the streets are filled with the babble of tongues, while traders and officials and barbarians and city wives all haggle together. It is a place of sharp fish smells and strange incense and leather and wet canvas and unwashed rivermen who bring outlandish beasts from the villages high in the mountains, near the birthplace of the river.”
Under the Mountain (1979)
Newcomers to fantasy collecting may be unaware of the scope of pertinent and very useful information on the web, and particulary the resources assembled by members of the Yahoo Fictionmags Group. The terms “Big List,” “FMI,” “Galactic Central,” “Locus Index” and many others crop up without necessarily being understood. Fictionmags includes the authors of some of the most seminal and definitive reference works on magazine Science Fiction, Fantasy, and General Fiction. Not only is this material substantial and providing of answers to many questions, but it is also FREE to anyone conversant in accessing the internet.
In 1998, American writer James Stoddard published his debut novel, The High House, and two years later followed it with a sequel, The False House. They’re two of the more remarkable fantasies I know.