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Dark Muse News: Horrific Art – Interviewing Tim Waggoner

Dark Muse News: Horrific Art – Interviewing Tim Waggoner

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This Dark Muse News column continues its coverage of Beauty in Weird Fiction/Art via interviews (a series that began in 2014 on my author blog and was taken up by Black Gate in 2018). We’ve hosted authors such as Carol Berg, Anna Smith Spark, Darrell Schweitzer, CSE Cooney, Scott Oden, CS Friedman,  Bryn Hammond…. and many more… the latest being  Waclaw Traier.

Now we corner author Tim Waggoner, who has published over sixty novels and eight collections of short stories. He’s a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, a two-time winner of the Scribe Award, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Splatterpunk Award. He’s also a full-time tenured professor who teaches creative writing and composition at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio.

Waggoner has been getting a lot of press, and an award, for his novelization of the Terrifier movies that feature the serial killer named Art. You’ll learn more about that in this interview. Check out the juxtaposition of Art (the Terrifier on the Left, for clarity) and Tim Waggoner (innocent author on the Right). What wonderful hats they have!

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Portrait of an Artist: A Chat With Nghi Vo

Portrait of an Artist: A Chat With Nghi Vo

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Siren Queen (Tor.com, May 2022). Cover design by Julianna Lee

Nghi Vo isn’t your typical award-winning writer of speculative fiction. Don’t take my word for it. Flip threw her oeuvre and select a story around at random: your bound to wind up reading something that will leave you spellbound. That’s exactly what happened to me when I first read Siren Queen over a year ago and most recently with the short story “Stitched To Skin Like Family Is” (which can be read for free on Uncanny Magazine‘s website).

Her rise has been steady, some might even say as subtle as the plots and characters that have attracted readers to Vo over the years. I had the privilege of interviewing the author about her career, craft, and so much more.

First things first, where did your journey as a writer start?

My journey as a writer basically started when I was a kid and my teacher showed me my very first dictionary. It was like one of those old, enormous blocks of paper and she told me that every word in English was in there and everyone that came out used words from that dictionary. I was tiny and thought, “that’s all a book is, I just need to get the words in the right order and that is all the material I need.”

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Dark Muse News: Saluting Goth Chick and Interviewing Waclaw Traier of War Claw Games

Dark Muse News: Saluting Goth Chick and Interviewing Waclaw Traier of War Claw Games

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Happy New year!

This emerging blog salutes Sue Granquist, who contributed every Thursday championing Goth Chick News in this very time slot. Sue Granquist contributed 741 articles over 16 years here on Black Gate with a special focus on horror movies and conventions (the longest-running column in Black Gate history). Sadly, she passed away in November 2025. John O’Neill penned a moving tribute: Goth Chick, January 13, 1966 – November 18, 2025. The outpouring of comments there is a testament to her influence.

In short, 2025 was a sad year for Black Gate champions, marked also by the passing of Howard Andrew Jones last January and Rodger Turner in June. I imagine them bolstering Black Gate (especially John O’Neill) from beyond, as force ghosts and role models. Peace to those who fell before us.

Going forward, as a tribute to Sue’s moniker “Goth Chick News” and the need to report on dark fantasy, I’ll be bringing you “Dark Muse News.”

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The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

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Having returned the Eye of Rhynn and the Hand of Kwll to their rightful (quite frightening) owners, Sean CW Korsgaard and I sat down to conclude our Sword & Sorcery chat, and to focus once more on his upcoming magazine Battleborn. Thanks to a successful Indiegogo campaign, Issues One and Two are now fully funded, both digital and print.

Read Part One of the interview here, and Part Two here.

Battleborn is positioning itself as a sword & sorcery outlet. Speaking both as editor and fan, how is that different from epic or high fantasy? What elements or touches make a story S&S?

What makes the sword-and-sorcery subgenre are a combination of five factors. First up, the Protagonist. Unlike, for example, epic fantasy, which have large casts or changing points of view, a work of S&S typically follows a single protagonist, or the odd duo. I say protagonist instead of hero for a reason –– many of these characters are rogues, mercenaries, rebels, savages, and scoundrels, if not antiheroes or outright villainous. They are often underdogs or outsiders, and often on the road or far from home, akin to lone gunslingers of American westerns and the wandering samurai of Japanese folklore.

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The Battleborn Interview: Part Two

The Battleborn Interview: Part Two

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Having beaten back the kobolds (see Part One of this interview, here at Black Gate), Sean CW Korsgaard sat down again to talk Sword & Sorcery, and his editorial vision for Battleborn, his upcoming magazine.

With your editor hat firmly on, what’s something you nearly always respond to positively? Heroic animal companions? A romantic sub-plot? A surfeit of halberds? 

Given Battleborn‘s approach to sword-and-sorcery, it should surprise nobody that memorable characters and authentic, hard-hitting action scenes are right above home plate for me.

For characters, you follow in the traditions of heroes like Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, Kane, Hanuvar, and more. So, even as you plot out your story, every detail you give your lead character matters. Are they distinctive in your mind’s eye? Do they have a few details that make them stand out, not only in the story, but as they stand beside a century of sword-and-sorcery heroes? Do you have an arc for them planned? Do you have some ideas for sequel stories where we follow that arc?

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Launching Battleborn: An Interview with Editor Sean C.W. Korsgaard, Part One

Launching Battleborn: An Interview with Editor Sean C.W. Korsgaard, Part One

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Deep in the underground tunnels of Black Gate’s vast Indiana Annex, I sat down with Sean CW Korsgaard and we embarked on a lively chat about his upcoming S&S magazine, Battleborn – what it is, where it’s headed, and how S&S fits into our contemporary literary landscape. The Indiegogo to jump-start Battleborn closes on September 30th, so read on to see if you’d like to join in on the action. 

Why start a new Sword & Sorcery magazine in 2025? Are you worried about competition from other S&S magazines? And what sets Battleborn apart?

First, we are very fortunate that after decades of being in the doldrums, sword-and-sorcery is seeing a genuine renaissance. We have the biggest group of talented writers the genre has seen since the 1970s. There’s an entire market starved for heroic, action focused fantasy, and we are building Battleborn on that! …

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Blazing New Trails: The What Rough Beast? Campaign, and an Interview with Author Bryn Hammond

Blazing New Trails: The What Rough Beast? Campaign, and an Interview with Author Bryn Hammond

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Waste Flowers and What Rough Beast? A Tale of Goatskin, written by Bryn Hammond, both with cover art from Goran Gligović

Black Gate has been tracking the inception and growth of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, starting with Micheal Harrington’s 2022 interview with Oliver Brackenbury (champion and editor of NESS), through 2023 with NESS’s first two magazine releases (also Greg Mele’s review of #1), and then into 2024 with NESS’s first book “Beating Heart and Battle Axes and its two-novella combo book Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, and (deep breath)… most recently… NESS‘s publication of a NEW Jirel of Joiry tale! (2025).

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Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part II

Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part II

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Betsy Wollheim at Worldcon 75

This interview was transcribed from a Zoom meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society on June 14, 2024, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer and hosted by Miriam Seidel.

Read Part I here.

Darrell Schweitzer: The other factor that must go into accepting a book for publication is that the editor has to see how the company can make money off the book. I have heard of books being turned down with a response, “This is perfectly charming, but I don’t see how we can publish it profitably.”

Betsy Wollheim: Usually a publisher has a few really big authors, so they can afford to publish a book that is brilliant, but may not be commercial. That was really my father’s attitude toward the Gor books. Ironically, John Norman enabled him to publish Suzette Haden Elgin, a feminist author. Patrick Rothfuss sells a lot of books — he’s an outstanding writer and his sales enable us to publish books that might not sell that well, which is lovely.

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Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part I

Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part I

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Betsy Wollheim

This interview was transcribed from a Zoom meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society on June 14, 2024, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer and hosted by Miriam Seidel.

Miriam Seidel: Betsy Wollheim has been a leading figure in SF and fantasy publishing for many decades, beginning as an editor at DAW Books in 1975, and taking over the company as president of DAW Books in 1985 from her father Donald A. Wollheim. She ran DAW with co-publisher Sheila E. Gilbert until Gilbert’s retirement recently. During her career she has worked with such noted authors as C.J. Cherryh, Tad Williams, Patrick Rothfuss, Nnedi Okorafor, Kristen Britain, Saladin Ahmed, David Gerrold, Tanith Lee, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Wole Talabi, among others.

In 2012 she became the first female long-form editor to win the Hugo Award during her lifetime. [In 1986, Judy-Lynn del Rey won, but posthumously, and the Hugo was refused by her husband, Lester del Rey. –DS] In 2018 Betsy was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from World Fantasy. In 2022 DAW was purchased by Thinkingdom Media Group of Beijing to be the SF/F publishing line of Astra Publishing House. Betsy continues to lead her list as publisher of DAW with her former employees and authors on behalf of Astra.

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Interviewing the Champion of Heroes, Jason M Waltz of Rogue Blades Entertainment and Foundation

Interviewing the Champion of Heroes, Jason M Waltz of Rogue Blades Entertainment and Foundation

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Jason M. Waltz has published 16 Books under Rogue Blades Entertainment (RBE), another 3 under Rogue Blades Foundation (RBF), having lured in authors Such as Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, C.L. Werner, Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, Ian C. Esslemont, William King, Andy Offutt, and spurred the writing careers of dozens. Not all are Sword and Sorcery (S&S), with weird western and pirate anthologies appearing, but most are.  Two of my favorite introductions to anthologies cap the ends of the RBE series: Return of the Sword (2008) and Neither Beg Nor Yield (2024 BG reviewed by Vredenburgh and Mele), the latter JMW refers to as his Swan Song marking a shift toward focusing on his own writing. Coincident with that, he has recently sunsetted the related RBF.  We’ll discuss some of his works to date, but note that he has three stories seeing publication in July 2025!

He’s mingled with the Black Gate crew in many ways over the years, invited John O’Neill to pen the introductions, published many contributors here, and now he is interviewing them. Yes, you will be glad to know that even as he steers from publishing to writing more, he is still actively building the community through his 24 in 42 podcast [broadcasted via the Rogue Blades Presents YouTube channel]. Heck he is even hand in the game by guest editing Raconteur Press’ first Sword & Sorcery anthology.  He never tires.

As we salute his heroic efforts, let’s learn more about his journey!

“Heroes are those who continue to do the ordinary in extraordinary times, and to do the extraordinary in ordinary times.” –  JMW 2008

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