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An Excerpt from Prince of Thorns

An Excerpt from Prince of Thorns

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prince-of-thornsJohn told me he doesn’t like to post naked excerpts on Black Gate. Well and good, I thought; it is after all a family site. Turns out though that it means I have to warm you guys up for the Prince of Thorns excerpt that follows.

If you’ve seen many reviews or comments on Prince of Thorns then it’s likely you’ll have read somewhere that it’s the very darkest of fantasy writing, that it’s brutal in the extreme, that it’s wall-to-wall rape… Obviously these are subjective judgements. My subjective opinion is that that’s all… rubbish (family site).

If you look at what’s actually on the page it’s relatively mild stuff. That it has made such a deep impression on so many, and stirred not a few to outrage, anger, and the occasional rant, I shall just have to pocket as a compliment to the writing!

This is described as an excerpt, but it’s an excerpt that starts at the beginning. Really, when you’ve taken the effort to make a story, where else would you want someone to start reading? Anything else would be rather like putting a sheet over the large painting you’ve just completed and attempting to whet the viewer’s appetite with whatever can be seen through a random hole four-inches square. Story needs context. Cut your prose free of its environment and it rapidly loses power. Strip out a line here or there and show it on its own and you make it look as silly as you like.

So read on and hopefully enjoy.

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Sale at Rogue Blades Entertainment

Sale at Rogue Blades Entertainment

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sages-swordsRogue Blades Entertainment, publisher of top-notch heroic fantasy, is having a one-of-a-kind online sale.

Here’s RBE publisher-mastermind Jason Waltz  to ‘splain the details:

RBE has to clear the shelves! Rogue Blades presents its first 2-for-$15 sale. Purchase any 2 of these RBE titles for $15.00 plus shipping!

Rage of the Behemoth, limited editions
Mythic Memories
Demons: A Clash of Steel
Sages & Swords

Simple! Now’s your chance to catch up on some of the best in new short fantasy, including fiction by Tanith Lee, Howard Andrew Jones, Joseph A. McCullough V, Sean T.M. Stiennon, Bill Ward, Elaine Isaak, C.L. Werner, and many others, and all at a great price.

Rage of the Behemoth is one of the best fantasy anthologies I’ve read in the past few years. Contributors include Andrew Offutt & Richard K. Lyon, Lois Tilton, Mary Rosenblum, Sean T. M. Stiennon, Brian Ruckley, Bruce Durham, Jason Thummel, and many more. Read more about it, including Theo’s great review,  here.

Demons is an anthology “devoted to the devilish fiends who seek to wreak havoc among mankind upon the mortal plane.”  Contributors include Bill Ward, Brian Dolton, Steve Goble, Elaine Isaak, C.L. Werner, Laura J. Underwood, and many others. You can read more in our news article here.

At $15 for two titles, these books won’t last long.  Check out this terrific sale today.

Goth Chick News: For Your Halloween Reading Pleasure: The Night Circus

Goth Chick News: For Your Halloween Reading Pleasure: The Night Circus

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image001When I first heard about new author Erin Morgenstern’s book The Night Circus, it was billed as an antidote for the withdraw symptoms Harry Potter fans were experiencing. Though I wouldn’t go so far as saying I’m having Potter DDT’s, I must admit that the sudden void left in my literary life by the lack of pure escapism fantasy was making me a bit twitchy.

But good luck living up to my Hogwarts-sized expectations, I thought. Another book about magic we don’t need.

However, once The Night Circus hit store shelves on September 13th I couldn’t seem to get around the title. It just kept nagging my imagination, which conjured up images of an entire carnival appearing over night in what yesterday was just an empty field, and only being open for business after dark.

“If they’re grouping it in with Harry Potter, it must be a kids book,” I thought, and tried my best to ignore it.

After all, J.K. Rowling’s ability to hit that perfect chord between writing for kids yet entertaining adults was a rare thing indeed.

I busied myself with other things and shunned The Night Circus for a whole 10 days.

Then I read that on September 22nd Ms. Morgenstern’s very first outing as a novelist had reached number eleven on USA Today’s bestseller list, and that a full nine months before the book had hit the stands Summit Entertainment had purchased the movie rights.

All right, fine.

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The Hound on a Hunt: The Evie Scelan Trilogy

The Hound on a Hunt: The Evie Scelan Trilogy

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spiralhuntSpiral Hunt
Wild Hunt
Soul Hunt
By Margaret Ronald
Harper Voyager (320/320/320 pages, $7.99, Jan 09/Jan 10/Dec 10)

Evie Scelan doesn’t want to be a hero. Unfortunately for Evie, she is the Hound. If it’s lost, she can find it, but in her world there is much that’s best left lost. This natural ability keeps drawing her into elaborate mystical conspiracies, drawing more and more unwanted power – both the social and metaphysical kinds – her way.

She’s more than happy to cruise under the radar, using her talent to sniff out lost objects (literally) on a freelance basis, but really doesn’t want much to do with the “undercurrent,” the supernatural world around modern-day Boston in Margaret Ronald’s urban fantasy setting.

You can’t really blame Evie for wanting to keep on the outside of things, because these undercurrent types seem kind of kooky. And not a good-natured type of Harry Potter wizard kooky, but more like Harry Dresden with Asperger Syndrome, sometimes with some pyromaniac tendencies thrown in. Any sane person would want to stay completely clear of this bizarre world, if they could.

Evie, unfortunately, can’t.

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The Road to The Heart of Darkness

The Road to The Heart of Darkness

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oath-of-sixIt took me years to complete the first draft of Oath of Six, the first volume in my fantasy series The Heart of Darkness.

I wrote the prologue pretty much straight through, but then lost steam. After muddling through chapter one, I skipped ahead to the epilogue because I was more sure of the ending than the beginning. I then returned to working on the second chapter, only to jump to the end again, and then back to the beginning. My productivity was even more inconsistent than it sounds since I would stop writing for weeks at a time.

After I did finish, the readers of my first draft kept saying the story started off too slowly. I had to admit there was a lot of backstory and world-building in the early chapters. However, isn’t that the norm in fantasy novels, I argued. An author spends almost as much time creating the world as he does fleshing out the characters and storyline.

Interestingly, my initial readers unanimously agreed that the early material bogging down my story didn’t include the earliest part — i.e. that prologue that I wrote so easily. They were referring to the first eight or so chapters where I was dithering my way through, stopping and starting, jumping around. No doubt my readers had sensed my original inability to immerse myself in my storyline.

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ChiZine Publications’ eBooks Now Available on iTunes Store

ChiZine Publications’ eBooks Now Available on iTunes Store

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isles_coverChiZine Publications, one of the best of the genre small press, has announced all of its titles are now available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod through Apple’s iTunes Store.

This is pretty cool, because I just bought an iPad to experiment with electronic versions of Black Gate, and I’ve been trying to find some good books to read. ChiZine Publications already has their titles — including The Door to Lost Pages by Claude Lalumière, and Isles of the Forsaken by Carolyn Ives Gilman — available for the Amazon Kindle, Kobo reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and other e-formats.

But the iPad is where most of the action is, at least in terms of sales (nearly 4 million per month, and growing rapidly), and iPhone sales are even higher.  ChiZine co-Publisher Sandra Kasturi said this about their commitment to electronic readers:

You can really see the change from a year ago. Get on the bus or subway and you’ll find half the people are reading off a device rather than a physical book. We take pride in our physical books and ebooks. We want to reach both readers and for them to have great experiences because of the writing and the visual impact.

Makes sense to me. ChiZine’s eBooks can be purchased and downloaded via iTunes by searching for the author name or title, and the publisher promises to have direct links on their website in a few days. Other electronic formats are available today.

We profiled ChiZine Publications back in December of last year.

A Pleasure to Read

A Pleasure to Read

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bradbury-burn1Ray Bradbury’s A Pleasure to Burn is a collection of short stories that served as the basis for one of his novels (and what few novels he has written are based on his short stories) Fahrenheit 451. This is repackaging, recycling, and rebranding old stuff (really old, as the novel appeared in 1953 and the stories date back to 1947) to make it appear fresh. Now in his ninth decade, Ray has more than earned the right to let his publishers generate some cash for him the same way the Beatles (as well as a multitude of musical groups from the era) and their heirs keep coming up with repackaged versions of the same old catalog. But, just like repeated listening to the Beatles over the decades, anything that makes you reconsider some “old” notions in a new context still has value.

If you’re not familiar with Fahrenheit 451 (and you really need to rectify that), the premise is that of a dystopia in which television is the ruling order’s opiate to keep the masses content and placid; to that end, reading is literally outlawed as disruptive to social conformity. Firemen no longer put out fires but set fires to surreptitious libraries of the banned books. The protagonist is a fireman who begins to question his purpose and eventually decides to take a look at what he’s supposed to be destroying. Needless to say, his experience in reading books proves the authorities right. Which, of course, Ray wants us to understand, is actually a good thing.

Remember, this was written in the 1950s, back before anyone could even begin to imagine something as stupefying today as The Situation and Snooki, or the anti-intellectualism of the Republican presidential field, or 150 channels and nothing much to watch. This was also the era of McCarthyism, though Bradbury always maintained his novel was not about censorship, easy as it would be to interpret it that way, but rather a critique of American culture.

It still is.

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Kimota! and Marvelman

Kimota! and Marvelman

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Kimota!I’m going to take a break this week from the Romanticism and Fantasy posts, because I’ve just finished a fascinating book, and I’d like to talk about it. It’s not a new book, and it’s not a fiction book. It is in fact mainly a collection of interviews about a comic-book character who hasn’t seen print (officially) in almost twenty years. The book is called Kimota!, and the character has been known both as Miracleman and, originally, Marvelman.

The Marvelman situation is difficult even to describe. Briefly: created in the mid-50s as a British knock-off of Captain Marvel (then the world’s most popular super-hero), the last story of Marvelman’s original run was published in 1963. The character was revived, with his backstory radically re-imagined, by writer Alan Moore for the British magazine Warrior in 1982. Warrior went under before long, but in 1985 Marvelman’s adventures continued, still written by Moore, now published by the American company Eclipse Comics. A few years later, Moore left the book, selecting Neil Gaiman as his successor. Gaiman projected three story arcs; roughly one and a half saw print before Eclipse folded in 1994.

From that time to this, the character has mostly remained in limbo. Marvelman’s the ultimate cautionary tale about the difficulties of copyright law. With every change of publisher, with every change of creator, the question of who owned what grew more complex, more debateable. Two years ago, Marvel Comics bought the copyright from Marvelman’s original creator, and began reprinting some of the character’s old adventures. That’s nice, in many ways, but it’s the Moore and Gaiman work that people have been waiting to see, and waiting to see completed. It may be a while before that happens.

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Take a Journey to Strange Worlds

Take a Journey to Strange Worlds

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strange-worldsStrange Worlds, a new anthology of Sword & Planet stories edited and illustrated by Jeff Doten, is now available. And it sure looks like an attractive package.

Containing all original fiction from Charles A. Gramlich, Ken St. Andre, Paul R. McNamee, Charles R. Rutledge, and others, Strange Worlds is fully illustrated with both full-color and black & white art accompanying each tale. Here’s the copy from the back cover:

New worlds and new adventures.

A sword and blaster at your side, the wind in your hair and the ringed moons rising overhead…

Sword and Planet is where it all started, the original space adventures on exotic and perilous worlds. Strange Worlds is the first collection of ALL NEW Sword and Planet adventures in a very long time. Eight stories and one comic, each story with both black and full color illustrations. This is space adventure at it’s (sic) rawest down in the dirt form, so strap on your gear and let’s get going.

Other than the obvious typo, it sounds good to me. According to contributor Paul R. McNamee, editor Doten provided nine color plates and commissioned nine authors to craft a sword-&-planet tale using one of them as inspiration. Doten also added some black & white interiors based on the resulting stories.

Strange Worlds is available from Space Puppet Press for $27 plus $3.75 U.S. shipping. Order today from strangeworldsanthology.com.

Goth Chick News: The Doctor Will See You Now… So Run!

Goth Chick News: The Doctor Will See You Now… So Run!

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image003Considering what I get up to in my free time, one would not immediately peg me as squeamish. Rodents? No problem. Dead bodies? Nope! I dissected one in college. I’ve even gone so far as to occasionally baby-sit children who are not yet potty trained and not even flinched.

At least not much anyway.

But even those of us that can claim a stoutness of heart in nearly every situation, the operative word there is “nearly;” because everyone has something that makes their skin crawl.

Now this skeeviness is not to be confused with fear. Fear is saved for terrifying things like clowns. I’m talking about that one thing, rational or not, that makes your stomach roll over and all the blood run out of your face until someone asks you if you need to have a lie down.

For me, this is hospitals.

Before you jump in and try to tell me I’ve got a doctor phobia, I don’t. I’ve never been admitted to a hospital or been seriously ill.

However, I did work in a hospital and the results of this adventure are that even passing someone in the mall wearing a little too much white can make me throw up in my mouth a little.

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