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Writing Advice: Embrace Boredom

Writing Advice: Embrace Boredom

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This image reminds me a lot of a culture I have in an as-yet unfinished
five book series I’m working on. It’s like someone reached into my head
and pulled the image out. I love it. Nabbed it from wallpaperaccess.com.

Good morning, Readers!

I am just beginning my third week of working from home, and I’m getting a little too used to it. Returning to the office is going to be difficult, I think. There is something that I’ve noticed, though, now that I’m not away from the house at work, or at martial arts training, or teaching, as I usually am. I actually got bored yesterday.

I feel we’re all so obsessed over being productive human beings, we fill our days with work; most of it unnecessary or superfluous, pointless or meaningless just to keep boredom at bay. As a writer, however, I have a slightly different view of boredom, and if there is one thing I have to impart on aspiring writers,* it’s this:

Embrace boredom.

*I am published, but so very unknown, so take my advice with a giant helping of salt. Similarly, just because it works for one person, doesn’t mean it’ll work for all people, so take all writing advice with a giant helping of salt, no matter the source. Okay, good. Now let’s continue.

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Creating, or Not, in New Territory

Creating, or Not, in New Territory

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It all feels a bit weird, doesn’t it?

Good morning, readers!

I am writing to you from isolation. Well, I say isolation. I share this house with a flatmate and two cats, so I’m not really all that isolated. I am, however, not at work. It seems my office has finally decided to start taking this pandemic seriously, and has requested that I stay home this week. I’m glad they’re at last taking it seriously. I am also fortunate, because I get to keep my job (thus far), and don’t have to worry too much about my next meal. I also live in Canada, where there is a promised safety net if I do happen to lose my job. It’s not as comprehensive as I would like (I rent ’cause I can’t afford a house, so the mortgage freeze doesn’t apply to me), it’s still a damned sight better than many other places. I’m extremely fortunate.

In fact, all I have to do is make a minor adjustment to my daily life.

Yet, I find that minor adjustment has translated into some pretty major issues. Creation has become all but impossible, or it was last week. Here are some steps I’m taking to combat the anxiety-induced malaise that has overcome me since this pandemic got started. I’m sharing them here just in case someone else is similarly struggling. Perhaps this might help those folks get back on track, with a fairly large caveat.

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Rogue Blades author: Robert E. Howard, Conan and Me

Rogue Blades author: Robert E. Howard, Conan and Me

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Howard changed my lifeBelow is an excerpt from author John C. Hocking’s essay for the upcoming book, Robert E. Howard Changed My Life, from publisher Rogue Blades Foundation.

I was a precocious reader.  By the time I was seven years old, guided by the taste of my father, I was reading Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, E.R. Burroughs, E.E. Smith, and Lester Dent’s Doc Savage stories.  Around this time my father, an art and history teacher, a martial artist and collector of swords, became a little frustrated that my mother was less than keen to accompany him to see a new, supposedly pretty hardboiled, Western movie called A Fistful of Dollars, so he took me.

In addition to thrusting upon my youthful eyes an unimagined example of cinematic style, the film presented a powerful vision of a highly qualified good and a frighteningly believable evil in stark conflict beyond anything I’d encountered before.  Every aspect of the movie resonated with me, but the depiction of fearsome, believably dangerous villains being faced down by a hero who was actually dangerous enough to confront and destroy them instantly made most of the reading, TV and movies I’d known seem somehow inadequate, even false.

Then, in the summer of 1967, my Dad brought me a copy of Lancer’s Conan the Adventurer.  The Frazetta cover promised much, but I read the first story in that collection, Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle,” on a quiet sunny morning and it blew my little mind.

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Tabletop Looting in Riot Quest

Tabletop Looting in Riot Quest

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RiotQuestBox-1

The current storyline in Privateer Press’ Iron Kingdoms setting is leading toward the apocalypse, as otherworldly Infernals swarm across the nations of Immoren. Characters familiar from the Warmachine/Hordes game setting will (and already have) died, but others may escape Immoren to become the progenitors of the upcoming Warcaster science fantasy wargame (with 3 days left on its Kickstarter).

But what of those who survive, left behind on the Immoren after the Infernals have harvested souls, and broken the nations that make up the Iron Kingdoms? When the swan of Cygnar has fallen, and even the undead cannot remain safe within the land of Cryx? Well, at that point … might as well start some looting.

That is the theme of Riot Quest, released at GenCon 2019. It is a miniature arena game, where players field teams of models to go up against each other to collect treasure and cool equipment. As your team appears on the field, randomly located near one of 6 spawn gates, players try to make it to treasure chests located at randomly-determined treasure points. Once a treasure is obtained, another treasure spawns, and the race is on again. As you gain treasure, and defeat opponents, you gain loot tokens that can be used to buy special Riot Gear cards to boost your characters’ abilities.

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“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

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Gabe S&S-small

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

These days, in intersection with my Conan gaming (I enjoy both Monolith’s board game and Modiphius’s roleplaying game), I have been reading a lot of two things: weird fiction from the turn of last century into, maybe, the 1940s; and sword & sorcery — anything that, on its cover, features a muscled male wielding medieval weaponry — predominantly from the ‘70s or ‘80s. (This latter does the double duty of encouraging me to work out.)

As is to be expected, these works offer various levels of quality. Early-last-century weird fiction is in a class of its own, and, though writers of that era freely borrowed tropes, themes and elements from each other (they very much appear to have been in conversation, literally or otherwise), the form of the weird tale is not as calcified as that of sword & sorcery appears to be by the ‘80s. Even within this latter’s straitjacket, however, I have encountered some standouts, including John Dalmas’s The Orc Wars (beginning with The Yngling, 1971), Gordon Dickson’s and Roland Green’s Jamie the Red (an unofficial Thieves’ World novel, 1984), and John Maddox Robert’s The King of the Wood (1983). Why I like these is for the reasons that one would like any work of fiction, of course, but with one addition: they present a sense of verisimilitude. I should add here, for anyone who might not be privy to how sword & sorcery is supposed to be subdivided from its parent genre of fantasy, that sword & sorcery is supposed to be more “realistic.” The world presented in such tales is premodern. Life is hard. The cultures do not have our present technology (nor magic — magic, in this subgenre, if not “low,” is rare and mysterious and terrifying and usually very, very “wrong”) with which to ease the drudgery of existence. In other words, the characters in such stories live in the way that folks in the Middle Ages lived, possibly in the way that many of our grandparents or great-grandparents lived, if they were homesteading somewhere.

This is why I no longer write sword & sorcery. I am a city boy. I am modern. I have no idea what “real life” is like. And yet I somehow have enough of one to know — intuitively or otherwise — when a writer knows even less than I do. To catalog the many errors of some of our most famous current fantasy writers is outside of the scope of these observations, but I’ll point to the occasion that spurred me finally to write on this topic here.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes On Screen – All of ‘Em!

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes On Screen – All of ‘Em!

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Sherlock Holmes dang itI started out with  a Holmes on Screen website many years ago, about the great detective’s appearances in film and on tv. Later, I added stage performances.  Eventually I took it down and moved on to Solar Pons, but I never lost my interest in the subject matter, and over the years, I’ve written over two dozen posts about Holmes on small and big screen. So, I figured I’d put up one post with links to all of them. I go all the way back to 1900’s Sherlock Holmes Baffled, right up to BBC Sherlock and Elementary. I happen to think there’s some pretty neat stuff mixed in here. Pick a topic and do a little reading!

1900-1920 Holmes’ Before Eille Norwood
1914 James Bragington – A Study in Scarlet
1916 William Gillette – Sherlock Holmes
1921-1923 Eille Norwood – Stoll Pictures
1922 John Barrymore – Sherlock Holmes
1931 Raymond Massey – The Speckled Band
1931-1937 Arthur Wontner – Five Films
1933 Reginald Owens – A Study in Scarlet
1939 – 1946  Basil Rathbone – The Secret Weapon  & The Scarlet Claw
1949/1951  Alan Napier & Alan Wheatley – Alans on TV
1954 -1955 Ronald Howard – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes & The First Episodes

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Privateer Press’ Warcaster on Kickstarter

Privateer Press’ Warcaster on Kickstarter

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Warcaster_Battlefield

I recently covered some of the new storyline that is coming out for the main product line of Privateer Press, the Iron Kingdoms fantasy setting that is used for their Warmachine and Hordes miniature war games. Part of the impact of that storyline (unrolling through microfiction at the @HengeHoldScroll Twitter feed) is that some denizens from the Iron Kingdoms are escaping, guided by the clockwork god Cyriss, through a portal into another universe.

Fast forward five thousand years, and the Cyriss universe is populated by humans, who have gained dominance over the native Architect and Guardians of the Cyriss galaxy. The overwhelming governmental and military power in the universe is the draconian Iron Star Alliance, who constantly finds themselves in conflict with the independent Marcher Worlds and the shadowy cult-dominated Aeternus Continuum, through a new miniature science fantasy wargame, Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika, now available on Kickstarter and fully backed within just a few hours.

Warmachine has warcasters, as the main leader model in an army, who commands the giant mechanized warjacks, and channels magical focus to empower them. One major difference in Warcaster is that the warcaster isn’t a model on a table, but a distant commander, jacked into a command ship (called a rack) in orbit over the battle. You, in other words, are the warcaster, and you can wield the power of Arcanessence, or Arc, to empower not only the warjacks on the battlefield, but any of the units under your command, through their augmented neo-mechanika armor and weapons.

In other words, in Warcaster you can’t obtain victory by killing one uniquely-important model on the battlefield. And that isn’t the only difference …

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Rogue Blades Presents: A Night with Kevin Smith

Rogue Blades Presents: A Night with Kevin Smith

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Kevin Smith at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, NC.
Kevin Smith at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, NC.

Kevin Smith likes to talk. A lot. So much so that the most recent parts of his career allow him to talk more and more and more. He’s got a podcast. And a YouTube channel. And he’s spent much of the last decade traveling around giving talks about himself, his career, and most recently about his newest movie.

(As a side note, if you don’t know who Kevin Smith is, then you’re probably not a Gen Xer or a fan of super heroes… probably. Smith makes movies, usually funny movies, or at least that’s what he’s best known for. He’s also done other stuff, like writing, podcasting and owning comic book stores and just doing all kinds of work in movies and television.)

I can’t say I’m the biggest Smith fan in the world, though I’ve enjoyed his movies over the last few decades and I’ve generally found him entertaining when I’ve watched a video of him giving a talk, or a lecture, or whatever it’s called that he does when he’s on a stage running his mouth. Anyway, I recently had the pleasure of seeing Smith live at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina. Smith opened with a showing of his newest movie, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, then afterwards he gave the crowded room more than an hour of his time as he answered questions and told stories.

Smith was always the gentleman (though he might not agree with that word to describe himself) and he was always patient with the crowd. His attitude reminded me somewhat of Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer for rock band Queen, in that Smith genuinely seemed to love the audience, loved to interact with the audience, and to entertain the audience — rare qualities, in my opinion.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Poirot’s The Hollow & Holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Poirot’s The Hollow & Holmes

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Poirot_HollowFoxA few years ago, I wrote about David Suchet’s superb performance as Agatha Christie’s Poirot a. Unfortunately, Netflix lost that show before I had finished watching every episode. So, once in a while, I still catch one of those which I haven’t seen yet. And recently I saw The Hollow, which was episode four (of four) in season nine.

The Hollow sees Poirot vacationing in a country cottage. This of course means, there’s a dead body due to turn up. John Christow is one of the guests, as is his wife Gerda, and his mistress Henrietta. When his ex-flame Veronica shows up and they have sex, it’s no surprise he shortly ends up dead, with wife standing over him, gun in hand, and mistress (and another person) present as well.

It’s another wonderful outing for Suchet. As I said in the aforementioned article, “I don’t know that we can expect to see a superior version down the line.” When a key piece of evidence is mishandled, Poirot’s angry look speaks volumes. It’s hard to explain how Suchet’s understated performance dominates every scene he’s in. The plot is twisty enough that I didn’t solve it: the norm for me with Poirot. There’s plenty of depth to the character’s emotions so that it all makes sense.

But what I noticed, as the episode went on, is that there are several Sherlockian connections in this episode. Sir Henry Angkatell and his wife, Lucy, invite Poirot to their country manor for dinner. That’s where the murder occurs the next morning. Henry is played by none other than Edward Hardwicke.

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Hot Take: Fan Fiction is Great

Hot Take: Fan Fiction is Great

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Fantasy Book Clipart

Good day, Readers!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking of late.  Shocking, I know. Anyway, I had been struggling with finishing the second book of a series I’m currently trying to sell, and so decided to move on to another story for a while to give my brain a break and let it figure out the story in the background while I work on other stuff.

This other project, though, is something that I’m not going to be able to sell to anyone. It is, essentially, fan fiction. Sort of. I mean, I’m absolutely using the world and assets of another thing (a video game, if you must know) in order to tell this story.  It’s fan fiction.  But this post isn’t really about the fan fiction I’m writing.  It’s about fan fiction in general, and how wonderful I think it is (with some caveats).

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