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Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

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Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
— William Faulkner

CHINA TOWN, NAGASAKI, JAPAN by June OkaBecause this series about riding about the dragon called Publishing is geared at writers just starting out writing fantasy stories and novels, I thought I’d pull together another list (I love lists!) that include all the helpful stuff I wish I’d known back in 1995, when I was just starting out.

Ten Things I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known When I First Started

YOUR FAVORITE STORY OR NOVEL THAT YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN SHOULD BE THE ONE YOU’RE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW.  Enthusiasm for your current project is priceless, in my opinion, and you should never rest on your laurels.  Always try to improve yourself as a writer, just like an athlete or musician always works to get better for the next big game or performance.

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Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black

Goth Chick News: The Woman in Black

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image0041Anyone who has been reading these entries with any regularity knows that the word “minimalist” will never be used in the same sentence with my name. I seem to be visually starved, needing to be perpetually surrounded by interesting if not strange things to look at. This can easily be proven by the fact I cohabitate with a voodoo doll collection and three German Shepherds.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to Halloween.

I mean, you’ve probably heard people comment on over-the-top Christmas decorations, but I doubt you’ve heard anything but awe-struck admiration for someone who’s gone nutty with their front yard zombie display.

Or maybe my neighbors are just trying to be nice.

In any case, it’s rather odd for me to tell you that one of my all-time-favorite books, which then made it to the top of my theater list — and will eventually, I hope,  make it to my top ten movie list — is anything but visually cluttered. Speaking at least for the book and the play, The Woman in Black derives its horror from its simplicity, and that’s really what a classic fright is about, isn’t it? It’s why no blood-splattered, psychopath training film like Saw or Hostel will ever be as scary as the scare that gets in your head.

Back in 1983, author Susan Hill wrote the tale of a young lawyer summoned to settle the affairs of the deceased Alice Drablow, who had lived on a remote English estate cut off from the mainland during high tide (sounds awesome so far, right?) As he pieces together Alice’s tragic life, the lawyer begins to uncover a tragic family secret and its horrifying guardian, the Woman in Black. It’s a premise just simple enough to make your skin crawl.

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ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

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My wizard story "The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria" appears in THE WAY OF THE WIZARD, coming from Prime Books in November.

“A character is not a simulation of a living being.
It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.”
— Milan Kundera

“Each character is a piece of the writer and
the writer’s experience of other human beings, and also a piece of the reader and
the reader’s parallel experience.”
— William Sloane

 “The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth
about what you see.”
— Stephen King

What a character!

This fourth installment of an ongoing series covers the role of “Character” in Fantasy Fiction. (Previous installments covered Originality, Style, and Plot.)

The heart and soul of any story are its characters. Every story, no matter what style or genre, is basically about PEOPLE. Even if these people are aliens, monsters, robots, or talking fish, they still have human personalities. Why? Because the people who write them are human. Therefore, all stories are stories about people, i.e. characters. If you don’t have believable, memorable characters, you’re not going to have a very good story.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan of the Isles

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan of the Isles

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conan-of-the-isle-original-coverSo far in the entries of my informal tour through the Conan pastiches—with a great guest shot from Charles Saunders on Conan the Hero—I’ve focused entirely on the “Tor Era,” the longest and most sustained period of new novels about Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age hero. Because of the sheer volume of books in the Tor line, which ran uninterrupted from 1982 to 1997, as well as most readers’ and reviewers’ indifference toward them, the Tor Era provides fertile ground for fresh criticism. It contains a few gems as well among the factory-line production schedule.

But I’ve neglected the earlier Conan pastiches, from publishers Lancer (Sphere in the U.K., later Ace in the U.S.) and Ballantine. Before Tor started its Conan factory with Robert Jordan’s Conan the Invincible, the world of Conan pastiches rested mostly in the hands of two men: L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. They filled in a “Conan Saga” that they had imagined through a constructed timeline, and this framework extended into the Tor Era as well, although turning more overstuffed and inconsistent as the books piled up and eventually the whole series put itself to sleep and Howard burst back into print.

One of the results of de Camp and Carter’s addenda to Conan’s history is the odd, uncharacteristic, yet hypnotically entertaining Conan of the Isles. Years ago I wrote a detailed review of this 1968 novel for a forum posting. I’ve pulled up that old review and done some dusting, revising, and re-thinking to present the first “Pastiches ‘R’ Us” installment that examines the controversial First Responders of the neo-Conan world.

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Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part Two

Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part Two

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druid_king2In Part Two of his blog series on the Publishing Death Spiral (read Part One here), science fiction author Norman Spinrad, author of Bug Jack Barron, Child of Fortune, and The Iron Dream, talks about “My Own Death Spiral,” and seeing the cover art for his novel The Druid King the first time:

Knopf’s star art director… had taken photos of some gnarly twigs and photoshopped them into the letters of the book title.  Murky brown against black background, no other illo. Suck City in terms of rack pop. My heart sank when I saw it… To give you an idea of how bad the cover really was, when the book finally came out, Dona and I looked for it in the new books rack.  It wasn’t there! We couldn’t find it.  Major panic! We finally did. It turned out we had looked past it three times without noticing it.  And I was the author.

You can read the complete post, along with lively comments from Jerry Pournelle, Paul Riddell, and Knopf Art Director Chip Kidd, here.

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

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bglgSixteen of your US dollars. That’s what the latest (monster) issue of Black Gate has cost you in these days of fear and crumbling factories. It’s strange, isn’t it? You’ll spend all that money on a collection of fiction and game reviews when the internet is bursting with so much free content. If you go looking right now, you can find a million Sword & Sorcery stories out there that you wouldn’t even need to pirate: the authors, overcome in a delirium of generosity, are only too thrilled to supply them for free.

And it doesn’t stop with short-stories! There are more novels waiting for you online than any dozen people could read in a lifetime, along with plays, movie scripts, poetry…

Oh God. The poetry.

So, what’s stopping you? I’ll tell you what’s stopping me: I don’t want to be a slush reader. It is mind-rotting, eye-burning work that actually becomes worse the more of it you do. Like some sort of cumulative poison. And for every great story we read in the pages of Black Gate, there have been several hundred at least that would have had any sane person thinking more and more about drinking that bottle of bleach under the sink. Oh yes.

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Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry

Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry

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Battles were fought and won based on the strength and keenness of blades as well as the ability to use them effectively. Bob Howard was not only interested in the various types of swords, he was also fascinated with the history they represented. In his poetry and his stories, he uses his knowledge of weapons, historical people, places and events to give us vivid images of those ages. 

In March 1933, Robert E. Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft about his interest in swords:

I envy you your access to the museums you mentioned. I’ve, naturally, never seen anything of the sort, though I remember some very good displays in the museums of New Orleans, especially Civil War relics. Weapons, especially edged weapons, axes, swords, and spears, hold my attention as nothing else can. Long ago I started collecting them, but found it a taste far too expensive for my means. I still have the things I did manage to get hold of – a few sabers, swords, bayonets and the like.  (The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, v. 3, p. 31)

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Faces in the Mirror

Faces in the Mirror

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John Bellairs died in 1991, well-known and well-respected as a writer of odd, gothic mysteries for children; the sort of writer who can come up with books called The House With a Clock In Its Walls or The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, and make them live up to the evocative promise of their titles.

magic-mirrors2But Bellairs was more than that. He was also a first-class fantasist, whose one book for adults, The Face in the Frost, is something unique. Written before his tales for children, on its publication in 1969 it was described by Lin Carter as one of the three best fantasies to have appeared since The Lord of the Rings.

Recently, NESFA Press (NESFA stands for the New England Science Fiction Association) reprinted The Face in the Frost in a volume that also includes the surviving fragment of its uncompleted sequel, The Dolphin Cross, and two of Bellairs’ earlier works, Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly. The resulting book, Magic Mirrors, is unconventional but perhaps essential.

The Face in the Frost is no epic quest, nor is it grim dark fantasy, though a superficial description makes it sound like it could be either: It’s a tale of two elderly and slightly bumbling wizards faced with a mysterious darkness that’s threatening everything they know, and the journey they must take to unriddle what it is and how to stop it.

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Gen Con 2010 Reflections

Gen Con 2010 Reflections

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Kung Fu Fighting gameNow that Gen Con is done, it’s time to offer up some final thoughts, experiences, and, of course, games.

Art Show

One of the best areas to walk around at Gen Con is the art show. This is always fun for me, because I honestly don’t follow artists that much, so sometimes I stumble upon someone really famous whose work I’ve never seen before or who I’ve never heard of. Unfortunately, since the artwork is the artist’s main product, I really can’t reproduce it here without getting into all kinds of messy copyright issues. Fortunately, what I can do is link to the websites of some that I found most enjoyable:

Still More Games

While I covered some fun pulp roleplaying games in yesterday’s post, I didn’t get around to talking some fun games of other types. One publisher that I’d like to discuss is Slugfest Games, which has a wide assortment of card and board games which have a pulp feel to them. The one that I demoed this year was Kung Fu Fighting, a card game in which you play a series of karate moves.

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Gen Con – Day 3 Update

Gen Con – Day 3 Update

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Saturday was my last day at Gen Con, and it will be missed … at least for another year. Tomorrow, I’ll post a bit more in the way of reflections, but for now, let me cut straight to some of the games that I came across.

hollow-earthPulp Adventure Roleplaying Games

For gamers who lean toward pulpy goodness (which I imagine includes many Black Gate readers), there are a lot of great options out there.

One of the best games available for pure pulp action is the Hollow Earth Expedition game (reviewed in Black Gate #12), which is sort of like Indiana Jones meets Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow … with some other craziness thrown in. You really can’t go wrong with a setting that conveniently allows apemen, dinosaurs, Nazis, ninjas, sorcerers, zeppelins, and mad scientists to intermingle.

Since the original release of the game there are now two hardcover supplements available: Mysteries of the Hollow Earth and Secrets of the Surface World. Starting in fall of this year, the creators are planning to begin releasing a series of PDF adventure modules, which they refer to as the “Perils” because they’ll have names like “Perils of Morocco” and “Perils of Brazil” … and, perhaps, if we should be so lucky, “Perils of Scranton.” These PDF modules should be available through DriveThruRPG when they are finally released. In 2011, however, the word is that they’ll be releasing a Revelations of Mars sourcebook … so keep your eyes open for that, lovers of planetary adventure settings!

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