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Fictional Frontiers Interviews Howard Andrew Jones

Fictional Frontiers Interviews Howard Andrew Jones

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the-desert-of-soulsSohaib Awan at Fictional Frontiers interviews Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones on his first novel The Desert of Souls, non-Western fantasy, juggling modern expectations in historical fiction, and much more:

Fictional Frontiers: I’m spouting hyperbole here, but I think it’s so well earned…. give us an overview of The Desert of Souls.

Howard: Like a lot of adventure fiction, it starts with the discovery of a body. Of course, it’s the body of a dead parrot. The parrot’s beloved by Jaffar — I guess it’s a little Disney joke, because you know, Jaffar and the parrot. But of course Jaffar was a real character… arguably the most famous vizier in Arabian history. Anyway… his guard captain Asim suggests an adventure into the market. So he and Jaffar and the scholar Dabir go out into the city in disguise, and a dying man presents them with a strange and beautiful artifact, a golden door pull, and he asks them to keep it safe.  And that’s where things really take off. Dabir and Asim are tasked by Jaffar with learning the pull’s origin and purpose. Naturally they’re not the only ones after the thing, and they soon learn it may open a gateway to an unearthly realm, accessed in the ruins of the lost city of Ubar, which is sort of like an Atlantis of the sands.

The complete podcast runs 22 minutes, and is available here.

The Unqualified Unique: The Daily Mail Interviews Me for Clark Ashton Smith’s 50th Morbid Anniversary

The Unqualified Unique: The Daily Mail Interviews Me for Clark Ashton Smith’s 50th Morbid Anniversary

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young-clark-ashton-smith-1912Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Clark Ashton Smith. We morbid fans of a writer with a delectable taste for morbidity love to celebrate death anniversaries as much as birth ones, and the seduction of the half-century mark is too great to dismiss.

My own celebration ended up in the hands of others, however. Two weeks ago, Jim Planck, an editor for The Daily Mail, a New York State newspaper, contacted me about doing an interview to commemorate Clark Ashton Smith’s death for a Sunday feature. He had come across my articles on Smith on Black Gate (here, here, here, and here) as well as on my website, and thought I could contribute to the article.

It’s flattering to realize that others have started to view you as an expert on one of your favorite authors. I dream that one day a publisher will ask me to edit and/or write an introduction to a collection of the works of either Clark Ashton Smith or Cornell Woolrich.

The Daily Mail Sunday edition does appear on-line, but the C-1 section of the paper doesn’t. (And unless you live in the Catskills and have access to the Daily Mail or its sister paper out of Hudson, NY, The Register-Star, you won’t be able to see it in print.) I’ve brought the full text of the interview over to Black Gate so you can hear me heap more praise on CAS.

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Art of the Genre: An Interview with Stephen Hickman

Art of the Genre: An Interview with Stephen Hickman

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lemurian-princess-254You know, life in LA is never easy, we all just make it look that way. I guess that’s why a few months back I got a rather rude awakening from none other than John Hocking. I’d just gotten back in from completing the Michael Whelan assignment, and considering everything that went into that, I was feeling pretty stoked.

The interview finally goes to press, I pop open the Champaign, and then what happens? Hocking rings me and asks when I’m doing a Stephen Hickman interview. Hmmmm, at that moment I felt like an NFL quarterback who just won the Super Bowl, goes off the field to the locker room to celebrate and has the owner pull him aside and ask, ‘what are you going to do next season that will get us back here?’

I mean come on! Can a guy get a moment to bask in the glory? Well, the answer is no, not here at BG L.A… The next thing I know O’Neill is calling, Kandline sits crying at the reception desk over a failed casting call, and Ryan Harvey won’t stop pestering me that he’s a published fiction writer so he should have the bigger oceanfront office. Yep, business as usual…

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If All Their Sand Were Pearl: An Interview with Jewelry Artist Ashley Full Stop Brown

If All Their Sand Were Pearl: An Interview with Jewelry Artist Ashley Full Stop Brown

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"Her Uncatchable Orbit
"Her Uncatchable Orbit" (Title from the Rhysling-nominated poem, "Red Engines," by Catherynne M. Valente.)

…And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.

William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

Now, I’m not saying that you all have to leap up and go right now to Ashley Full Stop Brown’s new Etsy site, Woodvine, but, you know, if there’s an anniversary or birthday or milestone to be celebrated (either your own or another’s), and you’re a fantastical sort of person (would you be reading this if you WEREN’T???), and you want a gift that is by its nature gorgeously handcrafted, thoughtful, and full of literary significance, travel no further than your browser!

bgissue24_largeI met Ashley… Let’s see… At WisCon. This year. At Cat Valente’s Fairyland Launch Party. Yes, that’s right.

If I recall aright (I should never write memoir, never), Ashley was wrapping keys in wire and jewels, which were later raffled off as pendants. And we all drooled for those jeweled keys. Oh, didn’t we just? (I did NOT win one, by the way. Alas.) We were having a little open mic that night, right after S.J. Tucker and the Traveling Fates gave us a faboosh concert. (Isn’t the word FABOOSH excellent? I have recently adopted it into my jargon.)

…You remember S.J. Tucker, don’t you? I did this whole long interview thingy with her, back in the Olden Days, before I was Black Gate’s FELL AND REVERED Blog Editrix.

I don’t precisely remember how I asked Ashley if she’d give me an interview for Black Gate Magazine. If people do cool things that have a fantasy bent, I immediately POUNCE! For your benefit, of course, DEAR READERS! Ahem. And ’cause I’m awful curious about PROCESS, you see.

It was at that party-cum-open mic I heard Elizabeth McClellan read her poem, “The Walking Man Goes Looking for the Sons of John: Six Cantos,” this amazing bluesy ghost poem in full Southern twang, recently published in Apex Magazine, Issue 24. Later, in the flurry of emails between Ashley and me, I learned that Ashley had created several pieces in honor of this poem.

It’s as if she takes the goosebumps we all get when reading or listening to something really extraordinary, and then transforms them into wearable art.

So. Without further ado, I give you…

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Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

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cseBroadly Speaking, the podcast about the adventures of women writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, has interviewed Black Gate website editor C.S.E. Cooney.

For their July episode Broadly Speaking host Julia Rios interviewed C.S.E. Cooney, Gwynne Garfinkle, and Mary Robinette Kowal (sort of) on the ins and outs of writing humor.

Here’s C.S.E. on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

The thing is, I love Jane Austen… I found it delightful to have Elizabeth Bennet wanting to cut off people’s heads when they threatened her honor. I liked the whole thing between samurais and ninjas. I liked that the Bennet sisters fought back-to-back at the Netherfield ball… I do think that there is something exquisitely funny in having girls in dresses with swords. It speaks to my inner She-ra, Princess of Power.

C.S.E. Cooney is the author of Jack o’ the Hills and The Big Bah-Ha. Her poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride” won the Rhysling award for long form poetry. Gwynne Garfinkle’s short stories and poems have appeared in The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 4, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teens Talk Growing Up, and No Body’s Perfect. Mary Robinette Kowal won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008, her latest fantasy novel is Shades of Milk and Honey.

The complete podcast is roughly 39 minutes; you can find it here. And you can find C.S.E. Cooney’s behind-the-scenes article on the interview (including how she managed to channel Mary Robinette Kowal) right here at Black Gate.

Black Gate Interviews Dave Gross, Part Two

Black Gate Interviews Dave Gross, Part Two

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the-hobbit-tolkien-ballantineLast week in part one of our interview Black Gate sat down with Forgotten Realms and Pathfinder author Dave Gross to talk about writing, gaming, and his latest Pathfinder novel, Master of Devils. This week Dave tells us more about his early influences and his transition from gamer to game fiction writer.

Chicken or egg time: what came first for you — gaming or storytelling?

Definitely storytelling. I was learning to read around the time I was learning to walk.

My first geekdom was ghost and horror stories, collections of which I’d order every time the Scholastic Books flyer came around our grade school. I can’t remember when I was first writing stories, but I’m sure it was in homeroom with a half pint of milk nearby. Later I burned through all the SF at our city library, and one day my cousin Francis handed me a copy of The Hobbit, and fantasy became my favorite. After burning through the Tolkien trilogy I devoured everything I could find by R.E. Howard and his clan. It was around that time that a classmate and his elder brother introduced me to D&D. They taught me the game from the original saddle-stitched books. Once the boxed game came out, I began DMing. Which, of course, is its own sort of storytelling.

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Black Gate Interviews Dave Gross, Part One

Black Gate Interviews Dave Gross, Part One

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dg-photoAuthor Dave Gross is perhaps best known for his Forgotten Realms novels such as Black Wolf and Lord of Stormweather. He has also worked as an editor of several gaming publications, including the one-and-only Dragon Magazine, and has most recently become one of the core authors for Paizo’s new Pathfinder Tales line of fiction. I recently had a chance to talk to Dave about his writing, and about his newest Pathfinder novel, Master of Devils.

A Conversation with Dave Gross

Before things get too tangential, Dave, I’d like to ask you about your latest Radovan and Jeggare novel for Pathfinder, Master of Devils. For readers perhaps unfamiliar with Pathfinder, how would you describe the world of Golarion, and the story of Master of Devils in particular?

Golarion is a big, varied world. While many of its countries are intentional reflections of real-world places (Ustalav draws on Eastern Europe, while Osirion is a fantasy version of Egypt), others are complete fantasy inventions with little or no connection to historical sources (The Worldwound, Numeria, or Nex). That combination of the familiar and strange is one of the things that draws me to the setting. It lets you pull details out of real-world cultures and history while allowing plenty of freedom for invention and extrapolation from other fantasy tropes.

The protagonists I introduced in Prince of Wolves come from an area of Golarion’s Inner Sea region that is roughly analogous to Earth’s Southern Europe. Master of Devils takes place in Tian Xia, Golarion’s equivalent of East Asia. Since the journey takes Radovan and the Count completely out of their element, they must learn how to survive in this unfamiliar land at the same time as the readers discover it. Count Jeggare is a scholarly sort who’s read and heard much about the place, but he’s never actually experienced it. Radovan is a complete fish out of water, having left the country of his birth for the first time only a few months earlier. The third progatonist … well, let’s just say the third POV character has a completely different perspective than the others. My hope is that readers who might not otherwise snap up an Asian-based sword & sorcery novel will find Master of Devils an easy and fun journey into the distant lands of Tian Xia.

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Goth Chick News: 13 Questions for Robert Browne, Author of The Paradise Prophecy

Goth Chick News: 13 Questions for Robert Browne, Author of The Paradise Prophecy

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image0022In spite of it being a gorgeous, sunny couple of weeks in Chicago, I remain unnaturally pasty.

No, that’s not normal for me, but thanks for asking.

Even I occasionally venture out of the subterranean offices of the Black Gate headquarters for a little fresh air, some more salt for the margaritas, or to affix sticky notes with snarky comments on the paint-ball equipment posters of the boys in the upstairs staff room.

But for the last few days I have remained glued to my comfy chair and Robert Browne is to blame.

One of the joys of this job is the occasional pre-publication copy of a soon-to-be-released book. Even more joyful are those that turn out to be a decent read. But the pinnacle and rarest of joys is the book that is one-of-a-kind special.

The Paradise Prophecy is one of those.

Not that I wasn’t prepared to be skeptical (because frankly when am I not?). But almost literally from the first page I was hooked. And so there I sat in my comfy chair; bereft of vitamin D and not even bothering to reach over to press “crush” on the blender controls, totally enslaved by one of the most uniquely told tales I’ve come across in a very long time.

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Art of the Genre: An Interview with Matthew D. Wilson

Art of the Genre: An Interview with Matthew D. Wilson

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iron-kingdoms-254Once again I get a chance show you all the inner workings of the Black Gate LA offices. Yep, it’s always about living the dream, so I hope you enjoy the view.

After having finally convinced my secretary, Kandline, that cosplaying an elf wasn’t required when she challenged me to afternoon games of Conquest of Nerath, I sat back in my chair and watched a trio of surfers try to catch some rather pathetic waves rolling in along our bit of the Redondo beachfront. From across the hall I could hear Ryan Harvey spouting copious amounts of venom toward Peter Jackson and his newest release of dwarf images for the upcoming Hobbit adaptation, something along the lines of ‘Rankin and Bass will be rolling over in their graves about now!’ a consistent theme.

Enter the dreaded buzz from the front desk. Yep, John O’Neill was at it again, this time his rather brief list of demands of the west coast offices ending in my traveling up the 405 to Santa Monica for an interview with Privateer Press Creative Director Matt Wilson.

Now if you know one certain fact about Matt, it’s that he’s a kind of workaholic. I dig that about him, and while he’s no longer in the Pacific Northwest exclusively doing Privateer work, his mind is ever pushing for bigger and better things at that gaming company.

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Goth Chick (International) News: Iranian Ghost Stories For Real

Goth Chick (International) News: Iranian Ghost Stories For Real

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image003As I mention whenever given the opportunity, I have some exceedingly cool friends. I don’t tell you this to brag, but rather to ensure I am able to soak up some of their residual coolness in the telling.

As you are well aware, I am a total movie-quoting, comic-reading, gamer geek who was often taken in by hoopy froods** (<– Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference. See? Can’t help myself) for their entertainment and social balancing. Still, the result has been pretty consistent. I get to hang out with people who really know where their towels are.

That being said, let me tell you about my friend “M.”

“M” is Iranian and I met him at my small, mid-Western alma mater where his very affluent, liberal but politically active family had tucked him away due to credible kidnapping threats. And yes, if you’re doing the math, I was an undergrad in a school that was the last ever place for the son of an affluent, liberal, politically active Iranian family to ever be located. In fact, it was so off the map that only those of us who went there could consistently point it out on one.

Following the standard number of years of undergraduate shenanigans, “M” went into public service in Canada of all places, eventually landing a highly visible gig in a Canadian embassy in a country I have sworn not to name. As you can see, I’ve sworn not to say a lot about “M,” for reasons that would make very interesting posts some time in the future when “M” is no longer in public life.

But that time is not now.

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