I’m short on time and words today, but I didn’t want to fall into a slack habit of not posting, so here’s something freakishly weird and wonderful that’s been around for well over a year, but I didn’t know about until a few jumps of the grasshopper ago: the Corpus Clock or Chronophage.
I guess this is in honor of those wrestling with NaNoWriMo… or any of us who are writing on deadlines these days.
[The grasshopper waits beyond the jump, or vice versa.]
Right before I begin writing any major-length work, I do some important “stretching” exercises. No, not writing exercises; I do those nearly every day of the year regardless of what other projects I’m working on. This exercise is picking some DVDs off my shelves and queuing up a few key scenes that get me in the mood to tackle writing a novel. I don’t watch the whole movie (I usually don’t have the time), only a specific scene that does something to the synapses in my brain and makes me want to charge at the word processor and start slugging.
My list of favorite “inspiration scenes” has grown over the years, adding new films and picking up fresh selections from older ones. Most of these scenes are action pieces (considering what I like to write, this makes sense, but any sort of energy is beneficial for a writer) with a few odd bits mixed in.
Here are the scenes I have turned to over the last few years during the crazy days before I typed “Chapter One”:
Black Gate 14 goes to press this month. It’s a big issue — including a Morlock novella from James Enge, the sequel to “The Face in the Sea” (BG 13) from John C. Hocking, and great new adventure fantasy from Martin Owton, Matthew Surridge, Pete Butler, Michael Jasper & Jay Lake, and many others.
Of course, that’s not all. Contributing Editor Rich Horton delivers another great retrospective piece, this one a detailed look at your best bets for quality reprints of Classic Fantasy, with spotlights on Baen Books, Paizo’s excellent Planet Stories, the SF & Fantasy Masterworks line from Orion/Gollancz, the Science Fiction Book Club, the esteemed Haffner Press, NESFA, and many more.
We’ll also have our usual generous review features, as well as a very special Knights of the Dinner Table strip, as Eddie, Sara and Patty visit their first science fiction convention, and Eddie confronts Neil Gaiman for stealing all his ideas.
I hope to post a complete sneak peek, with artwork and story excerpts, in a few weeks. Stay tuned for further updates. Here’s a look at the wrap-around cover to tide you over, from the marvelous Bruce Pennington:
Very much looking forward to this. 
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Tom Waits as the Devil and Heath Ledger, notwithstanding how they marketed Batman, in his last (albeit, incomplete, which the movie reportedly got around by casting multliple actors in the same role after Ledger died) screen appearance. Here’s the Wikipedia summary. Premiers November 2 and it is to be hoped soon at a theater near you.
On another note, despite my aversion to “dress-up,” I’m going to a party tonight in a t-shirt to which my wife has pinned my daughter’s old Barbie collection (which she never played with, I’m happy to report). I’m going as a “chick-magnet.”
Happy Halloween.
When people ask me what I like to read I usually answer with a simple ‘everything,’ but of course that’s not strictly true. I don’t read trigonometry textbooks or Romance novels, celebrity memoirs or cookbooks, monographs on the evolution of sheep shearing or anything by Dan Brown (in fact, just give me that thing on sheep first). But when I say ‘everything’ I’m being figuratively if not literally honest, because my tastes — especially when compared to the average reader — are very broad. I don’t read only one kind of thing. I’m a generalist.
There are plenty of people — possibly even the majority of people — that have a wholly different approach to reading. They are the specialists, and they only like one kind of thing and that is what they read to the exclusion of all else. It is tempting for me to regard this alien species as outside the category of ‘reader’ as I understand it — you know, the sort of person that, as a kid, spent all his lunch money on books, who’s tempted to get rid of his furniture to make room for his library, and who would rather read than watch TV, play jai-alai, or attend model home open house events in the hopes of a buffet spread. To me, a real reader is a voracious omnivore; metaphorically a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghoul with ink-stained fingers and sharpened teeth who knows an insatiable hunger so keenly painful it has in fact become a pleasure of sublime proportions. Our ghoul/reader will eat and eat and eat to the point of dieing, and ask for more with his last breath. Real readers are all a little bit insane — and they hope that no one ever finds the cure for their condition.
Naturally, a two-hour movie can’t be a faithful adaptation of a picture book that has less than twenty sentences in it. And this is often a sort of extended meditation on the book: variations on a theme by Sendak; a movie about being a child rather than a movie for children. If that sounds a little slow, it is a little slow at times; it’s a movie that isn’t afraid to spend a few minutes to make a certain kind of meditative impact. And it does generally end up hitting its target.
[Where the Wild Spoilers Are: beyond the jump.]
In a few days, the clock will click over from October 31st, Halloween, and pass into November 1st, a day usually associated with the major retailers of North America vomiting out as much Winter Holiday displays they can. (Once they waited until the day after Thanksgiving, but now I think they are prepared to creep into mid-October as well, before the pumpkins are even carved.)
But for tens of thousands of people across the globe, the seam between October 31st and November 1st marks the dramatic beginning of one of most anticipated events of their year: the start of National Novel Writing Month. (www.nanowrimo.org) A month of “literary abandon,” as its website proclaims. Established in 1999 between a few friends in San Francisco who wanted to know what it would feel like to be “novelists,” those magical people who had actually written a full-length novel regardless of whether it would ever go public or not, NaNoWriMo (the customary abbreviation) has expanded into one of largest creative writing projects in the world. As of this writing, 82,000 people across the world, from teenagers to nonagenarians and at least one other Black Gate contributor, have signed up to participate, and the numbers will leap dramatically in the remaining few days before the start mark. The event has not only led to published novels and new careers, but also offered form of therapy and creative exploration for people who never would dream of trying to get published. It embraces noveling as a form recreation, not an idea often associated with it.
James Enge’s Morlock stories have been some of the most popular fiction we’ve published in Black Gate. His first Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, published by Pyr in April, was very warmly received, and described as “A future classic… this novel succeeds beautifully” (The Great Geek Manual) and “Like Conan as written by Raymond Chandler” (Paul Cornell).
The second volume, This Crooked Way, went on sale October 6th. More than just a collection of previously published Morlock fiction, This Crooked Way has 15 chapters, only 5 of which have previously appeared. We’ve received a small number of advance copies, and we want to give them to you.
We’ve asked James Enge to compile a list of questions, the answers to which lie in the five Morlock stories that have appeared in Black Gate. The first five readers to fill out and submit the quiz below with the correct answers will receive a copy of This Crooked Way, compliments of Black Gate, James Enge, and Pyr.
The usual legal disclaimers apply: Offer void where prohibited. No purchase necessary. Must be 18 to enter. Judges decisions are final. Postage costs outside the US are the responsibility of the winner. Additional disclaimers apply as we think of them. Eat your vegetables.
Linwood Vrooman Carter (1930-1988) was one of the heroes of my youth. In the decades since his death his reputation has wallowed in the aftermath of the Last Great Sword & Sorcery Boom. He helped start it, with the Conan books he and L. Sprague de Camp brought back into print, edited, and in many cases wrote, as with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series of works he edited and thus brought back into print. (Not adult fantasy as in sex, but adult fantasy as in great classic works that weren’t kid stuff). Books by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and James Branch Cabell; title I never would’ve read in a million years otherwise, but books which shaped the tastes of many another fantasy enthusiast, myself among them.
Despite the vast number of books written in the Sword & Sorcery genre in the past 80 years, when I found myself again turning an eye toward them, one of the first people I sought out was Carter. I distinctly remember the day, age 13, when I bought his Enchantress of World’s End off the spin rack at the Wal-Mart in Harrison, Ark.
The bare-bosomed, bright red beauty on the cover caught my eye, as did the unpronounceable names (Northern YamaYamaLand, Dzimdazoul’s Deep – not to mention the Ethical Triumvirs of Chx!), and of course the cast: Ganelon Silvermane, muscle-clad hero with the mind of a child, his master the Illusionist of Nerelon, face always hidden behind veil of purple mist, and the delightful, freckled, long-legged and sexy Xarda, Knightrix of Jemmerdy.