Black Gate

Today I want to give a shout out for a book from the minds at the new Flashing Swords E-zine.

Return of the Sword is a multi-author collection of adventure stories. If you’re looking for sword-slinging, action-packed mayhem then you ought to be pretty happy with what you’ll find within. (If you’re more into lit fantasy or urban women who sleep with vampires, then you should probably wander elsewhere, but I won’t be wandering with you.)

In addition to featuring a Morlock story by Black Gate stalwart James Enge, the book contains a thrilling Cossack short from Harold Lamb, tales from authors who’ve sold stories to future issues of Black Gate, like S. C. Bryce and Robert Rhodes, and fiction from numerous friends and colleagues now working with Black Gate or dating back to my own tenure at Flashing Swords, like Bruce Durham, Nathan Meyer, Steve Goble, Thomas MacKay, Allen Lloyd and Bill Clunie, and many others. RotS editor Jason Waltz asked me to introduce both the Harold Lamb story and an in-depth (and interesting, and helpful) essay on fiction writing by E. E. Knight, so my name’s on the table of contents as well.

If heroic fiction and sword-and-sorcery are your thing, or maybe just an occasional guilty pleasure, I urge you to pick up this book. Jason and the rest of the crew at the new Flashing Swords are out fighting the good fight trying to give folks another market for adventure fantasy. They need your support.

For even more details, Eric has covered the book in great depth. Click on the picture above for more information.
Howard

Warning — there’s RPG-heavy talk in this post. Non gamers will probably pass out from boredom…

Our role-playing group gets together almost every Friday, and we decided to work our way through an old 1st edition D&D module to remember the passing of the father of role-playing games. We didn’t know it was Gary Con until I visited The Lair of the Evil DM today (I usually visit once a week or so). The idea of Gary Con was that everyone get together to play a game this weekend. A fine idea, and I’m sure we’re not the only gamers who decided on a tribute without even knowing there was something of an official movement.

I divested myself of almost all my D&D modules at some point in the ’80s. There were a few I couldn’t sell off — not because of sentimental value, but because everyone in my group then, and in other groups in the area, thought Shrine of the Kuo-Toa was dull and that Tomb of Horrors was impossible. For those not in the know, Tomb of Horrors is an expedition into the tomb of an undead wizard and is infamous for its difficult, nay, ludicrous challenges. Because I didn’t want to kill off my players or try to work the dungeon into the existing fantasy campaign, where it had no place, I just told them they were having a shared dream.

This time, what had seemed impossible and annoying proved a laugh-riot. The traps WERE impossible. “Why would anyone DO that?” we found ourselves asking. Instead of grinding our teeth in frustration when something went amiss, though, we dissolved into laughter. All the characters got blasted into smithereens when someone touched an exploding altar, so  I ruled that they woke up from their dream, had a little trouble returning to sleep, then reappeared in the tomb in the same spot…

We didn’t quite finish the whole thing, but we had fun, and afterward we all reminisced about early campaigns and looked over copies of the 1st edition books one of our players had retained. All of us had come from different groups, but we’d all started with AD&D. It’s funny, but I hadn’t ever thought about how MANY of my friends come from role-playing, and for most of us, that started with AD&D. One little game had a huge, long-lasting, extremely positive impact on my life.

Friday I played part of a module from Dark City Games with my kids, and another part of it with them today. They loved it, and so did I.

Some say that tabletop RPGs are on their way out. I sure hope not. I’m a little too tired to wax too philosophical about it, but I sure hope not. Here at the southern outpost of Black Gate, on the shores of the Sea of Terror, we’ll be playng for many a year to come.

Here are two more links I wanted to share. The first is to a nice RPG celebration my good friend Eric Knight put up over the weekend.

The other is a nice cartoon from Order of the Stick.

Next time I post I’ll finally put up that small Black Gate 12 sneak preview I mentioned.

Howard

Well…. Damn. My cat’s dead.

I’m not really a cat person: I like medium to large-sized dogs that you can play frisbee with or hike with or wrestle with… but this little yellow longhair  tabby has been part of the family for 18 years and when I came home and found her lying there all still I got a lump in my throat.

Damn, she could be annoying as hell. But she liked to sit next to me while I was working at my desk, and she greeted me every morning (and sometimes in the night for no good reason) with that meow that sounded increasingly like a rusty hinge these last few years. She was a good mouser, and she liked my kids. She was the queen of the house, a grumpy old lady who liked sleeping in the sunbeams and grew increasingly brazen the last few years — standing on the table top while we were clearing it off after dinner, for instance. Maybe we all get more stubborn and determined when we’re older.

I’m going to miss little Camilla. Hell, she’s been our cat since before we were married, back when we had a dive apartment and a sequence of crummy first jobs. Even though mostly she’s been sleeping for the last three years, in retrospect it was nice knowing she was somewhere around. The house will seem a lot more lonely without her.

Now I’ve got to tell the kids, and pick out a nice spot in the yard to bury her. Near a tree, maybe, where the sunbeams will fall in the afternoon.

Howard

Some people light a candle or two in the house of imagination; Gary Gygax fired an immense bonfire, and one which has sparked countless other fires as well.

I know I’m not the only one who called up old gamer friends yesterday to mourn the passing of an age. Even if you haven’t played the game in a dog’s age, or a couple of dog’s ages, if you’ve gamed, you’ve been influenced by Gygax. And I don’t mean just pencil and paper gaming — the mindset behind D&D permeated electronic fantasy games and the newer online worlds. I haven’t used D&D mechanics for years (mostly because I, as the game master, can’t keep all those numbers and charts straight) — but D&D was the first role-playing game I ever played. Like countless others, if I hadn’t played THAT one, and if it had never existed, I would never have played the others. Countless hours of entertainment and inspiration can be traced back to the game Gygax helped create.

Lest we forget, Gygax also introduced gamers  to fantasy literature. Those of you who had that first hardback Dungeon Master’s Guide may well remember the suggested reading list, mentioning such names as Howard and Leiber and Moorcock and Vance and so on. I remember heading to the library with that list. Gygax led me to Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Death, which has remained one of my all-time favorite fantasy collections. I was talking with Black Gate‘s Ryan Harvey just last night, and he told me that list had introduced him to one of his very favorite writers, Clark Ashton Smith.

I never had the opportunity to meet the man, but his friends and family are in my thoughts. E. Gary Gygax  was an opener of the ways. He will be missed.

An especially thoughtful remembrance can be found here at the Paizo blog.

Howard Andrew Jones

I mostly blame this blog on Harry Connolly, who had once suggested to John that a Black Gate blog would be of interest. John and I discussed a blog as I was first coming on board the magazine, and I decided to put one together once I’d made deeper inroads into the slush. Here it is, for better or worse.

I set it up as “bg_editor” so that either John or myself could post, but John has his hands quite full with sundry Black Gate duties, so I’ve finally just realized I’m stuck with this thing and decided to fill out the profile or user info or whatever it’s called with my interests and my bio. In an odd way, it feels like I’ve finally acknowledged that yes, I do have a blog. Mostly it’s about Black Gate, but I’ve let other stuff that’s of interest to me creep in. I’d get bored if all I did was report on slush status and what not.

Coming soon — a sneak peek at the contents of issue 12.

Howard

A friend e-mailed today wondering why I’ve been laying so low on live journal. I’d been contemplating an entry on that very subject for days. That sound you don’t hear is me working, or trying to work, on way too many things.

Black Gate 12 is being readied for the printer, but not by me — layout remains John’s job. Here I’m trying to round up the final reviews and hurriedly finish reading up some last minute additions for our book reviews section. The gaming articles have been in and completed and edited for weeks now thanks to a big push right after Christmas. I’m also making some editorial suggestions to the long-delayed Todd McCaulty reprise. We still get fan letters for Todd’s earlier stories from people wanting more, and they’re finally going to get it.

In other news I’ve been grading papers for the day job, trying to find the time to teach my children piano, or just be a good dad and husband, struggling to fit in time to get to the karate studio to work out, and, because I’m also a writer, wrestling in time for fiction. Some weeks I just run from fire to fire. The things getting the shortest shrift are karate and piano teaching, although I’m doing better with the latter. I actually had a dream last night that I was all dressed up in my karate gear for sparring and couldn’t find the room where the karate class was being held. I manage to attend a few times a month, but it’s been a long time since I’ve learned enough to advance, and the goal of second degree black belt isn’t getting any closer.

Writing has been progressing steadily but not well. I reached chapter 4, or about 16,000 words, of my mist novel sequel and I’ve been trying to tackle it for most of the month. I’d write a thousand words, scrap them, then write again, and scrap those. Sometimes I’d make it as far as two thousand words into the chapter before tossing those and starting over. The odd thing is that my rough outline never changed much — even now, today, when I finally got through the chapter and got the thing roughly presentable, the events within match the outline. I’m trying to figure out what I’ve learned from this rough draft experience, and I think it may be that when I’m too scattered it’s hard to focus and be in touch with what I’m writing. And that’s bad news, because I’m likely to continue to be scattered for, well, a really long time.

Anyway, that’s what’s happening here. I hope soon to talk about what you’ll actually see in Black Gate 12, and I’d intended to discuss rejections — both the giving of them and the receiving of them, because I’ve been on both ends of the equation lately, but I’ll save those for another post, which I’ll try to get loaded sooner rather than later.

Best,
Howard

I want to thank everyone who wrote in to comment on the question about whether or not they were interested in seeing a PDF version of Black Gate as well as a print version. John and I are now talking seriously about making an issue available as a free PDF so that people could see what the magazine looks like, possibly even the upcoming issue 12.

Has anyone out there heard of another magazine trying this, or been involved with that kind of effort? If so, we’d like to hear about it.

Howard

Black Gate Update

I have almost all of the book reviews in now for issue 12, and almost all of the game reviews as well. The cover is excellent, one of my favorites. I need to get John to post it. Need it be said, then, that issue 12 should soon be ready? If it weren’t for the required delay between layout and printer, I think we’d have a version ready by the end of this month. John’s been working at it for a while now.

Which brings up an interesting point — is anyone out there interested in a PDF version of Black Gate (in addition to the printed version, of course)?

Writing Thoughts

In the past I would stick with the writing of a scene as I’d planned it, doggedly persisting even if it felt like it wasn’t going well. I suppose I used to do this because, well, NOT writing is easier than writing, as any writer can tell you, and this writer at least has to be constantly on guard about making excuses to NOT write.. I realized the other day, though, after I was about 1000 words into a new chapter, that the scene was boring me. I polished it up and re-read it and walked away, thinking I was being lazy for not writing on… But I’m glad I walked off. I realized that I needed to ditch the scene and write one that was interesting to write — after all, if I’m not enjoying writing the scene, how much fun will it be to read?

So my tip to myself for the day was to learn to trust my instincts. If there’sa reason I don’t feel like writing the scene, maybe the answer isn’t laziness, but that the scene isn’t working. The odd thing about this tip, though, is that I couldn’t have told this to young Howard and have had any affect on him. It’s all fine and well to trust your instincts, but my epiphany this time was that I should learn when I’ve developed the instincts to trust.

Howard

Those familiar with Conan only from the pastiche, or the movies, or the comic books, don’t know the real article, who has far greater range of emotion and zest for life — and is at the same time more primal. Those acquainted with the character from other incarnations likewise have no idea of Robert E. Howard’s power as a writer. He is an able plotter with a splendid imagination, but it is in his narrative that Howard truly excels, and that can’t translate into another medium. His scenes are drawn swiftly, skillfully, with a few sharp brush strokes. A movie version isn’t necessary because his prose is so cinematic to begin with.

But, so long as there is going to be a movie version, I sure hope that those who’re putting it together keep in mind what Eric Knight said recently on his blog.

Howard