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Category: Interviews

Gabbing with a Girl of Spirit: Black Gate Interviews Ysabeau Wilce

Gabbing with a Girl of Spirit: Black Gate Interviews Ysabeau Wilce

yspicA few years ago, I lived and worked in Edgewater, a northerly Chicago neighborhood  just blocks from fantasy writer Ysabeau Wilce’s house. She once confessed to having walked her dog past my bookstore on Broadway and Bryn Mawr. The unutterable excitement!

I didn’t know then that the anonymous, red-haired, dog-walking passerby was the very same woman who wrote “Metal More Attractive,” the story in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that made me write my first ever fan letter as an adult.

Not to mention, she’s also the author of Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog.The fact that I get to interview her today? Just tickles me!

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Harry Connolly and the Black Gate Interview

Harry Connolly and the Black Gate Interview

childoffireWhen people tell us about their favorite Black Gate authors and stories, one name that inevitably turns up in both staff and fan discussions is Harry James Connolly, whose tales have appeared three times now in our pages, with more on the way. You may not have seen much of him lately over at Black Gate, but he’s been very busy writing some best selling novels. You can find all about that over here, and a little bit more about Harry and his writing if you just keep reading.

A Conversation with Harry Connolly

Conducted and transcribed by Howard Andrew Jones October 3 – Oct 10 2010

BG: First tell us how long you’ve wanted to be a writer, and how long you were mulling over the novel that launched your career before you finally sat down to draft it.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was very small.  I was an early reader — like, age 3 — and when my parents explained that people made a living writing books like the one in my hands, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

Not that I had any idea what that meant.  I do have a distinct memory of sitting in kindergarten learning to write the letter “M” and thinking  this is totally going to come in handy! (to paraphrase my young self).

As for Child of Fire, it’s a setting that I’ve written in before (some short fiction and a pair of novels–but with different characters), butI knew I wanted to do something very specific with it.  I spent several weeks working out the story and, more importantly, the tone before I dug into the writing.

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Mongoose Traveller: A Bright Future for Science Fiction Role-Playing

Mongoose Traveller: A Bright Future for Science Fiction Role-Playing

The Traveller Tripwire campaign.
The Traveller Tripwire campaign.

I’ve never been especially quiet about my love for sword-and-sorcery, heroic fiction, and historical swashbucklers, so it may come as a surprise to some that one of my very favorite diversions is that most famous of science fiction role-playing games, Traveller.  It is literally worlds away from the rest of my interests, and perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to it. Traveller‘s Third Imperium setting is rife with adventure, intrigue, and fascinating places to visit.

I’ve been reviewing Traveller products in Black Gate‘s game column for years, and it’s been a real pleasure to see a whole new generation of rule books, adventures, and supplements released by Mongoose Publishing. I’ve been reading a number of them for our upcoming winter issue, and as I started work on the reviews, I decided to contact the publisher of Mongoose Traveller, Matthew Sprange, to see if he had time to answer a few questions. He kindly obliged me, and here’s what he had to say.

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Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

chainmail_3rd_editionI’m an old TSR module fan, and as such I’ve always been intrigued by how the concept of such media came into existence. For the most part they fall in series, kind of like writers follow Tolkien with the concept of connected books and characters in a trilogy. It makes perfect sense, especially if you’re trying to create an extended campaign with a gaming group that meets on a regular basis. Series modules facilitate that, and recently I had the opportunity to chat with one of the original designers of a TSR foundation adventure path, the L Series ‘Lendore Isles.’

The author, Lenard ‘Len’ Lakofka is probably so ‘old school’ he’s beyond the term. His inclusion into the realm of RPGs predates the genre entirely, as he was a member of the International Federation of Wargaming. This institution came about in the sixties before the creation of Gygax’s Chainmail and was the original organizer of the first Lake Geneva Convention, i.e. GenCon in 1968.

At that first convention, people were playing Avalon Hill board games and Diplomacy during the Saturday only gathering, but that first year a chosen few were invited by Gygax to try Chainmail on the following Sunday after the convention was over. Lakofka was one of these founding fathers of the game.

From those humble beginnings, Chainmail would evolve into Dungeons & Dragons and Lakofka would continue to play the game with verve for the next forty years.

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Goth Chick News – Shadowland Part Deux: Thirteen Questions for Actor Jason Contini

Goth Chick News – Shadowland Part Deux: Thirteen Questions for Actor Jason Contini

legacies-endIn case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m pretty sure you did, the Black Gate webmaster got a little worked up by my last post. Though I was telling you about my latest indy-horror obsession, Shadowland, one might have gathered from the choices of accompanying pictures, that I was instead bringing you a story about lead actress Caitlin McIntosh and her former life as a beauty queen. Somewhere, wedged between those images was my interview with Wyatt Weed, Shadowland’s writer and director; but good luck finding it.

This is what happens when there are too many boys on the staff and they are left unattended for too long.

So this week I’m personally bringing you the second installment of my Shadowland coverage; an interview with lead actor Jason Contini and co-creator of the new comic series Legacies End.

I can assure you there will be no further shenanigans involving staff members who forget their professionalism and get carried away by lust.

Now where was I…?

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A Review of The House of Dead Maids

A Review of The House of Dead Maids

house-dead-maidsLast week I was contacted by Barbara Fisch at Blue Slip Media, who’s been recommending and sending review copies to me for nearly fifteen years. Barbara had flagged The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle (author of the Hollow Kingdom trilogy), just released in hardcover from Holt, as of possible interest to Black Gate readers. And from her description, it sounded like she could be right:

The House of Dead Maids is billed as a prelude to Wuthering Heights, as it features a character who will come to be known as Healthcliff. The novel is a scary blending of Yorkshire lore and Bronte family history. The child (Heathcliff) is already a savage little creature when Tabby Aykroyd arrives at Seldom House as his nursemaid. The ghost of the last maid will not leave Tabby in peace, and her spirit is only one of many. As she struggles against the evil forces that surround the house, Tabby tries to befriend her uncouth young charge, but her kindness can’t alter his fate.

The real task, as always, was matching the ideal reviewer with the book… a bit more of a challenge for a 151-page book with an eleven year-old narrator, I grant you.

As luck would have it, I happened to have an eleven-year old reader in the house, who innocently picked up the book the day it arrived.  I know when the stars have aligned, and sat down with a notepad and pen to interview her minutes after she finished reading The House of Dead Maids.

We’ll call this young reader “Tabitha,” because of what happened when her mother found out I was going to use her picture and real name on the Internet.

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Mortals, meet Demon Lovers: A review of Goblin Fruit Magazine, Part II

Mortals, meet Demon Lovers: A review of Goblin Fruit Magazine, Part II

goblin-fruit-autumn2Okay, this is the Age of the Internet, so you’ve probably had this experience.

Say you’ve met a couple of like-minded ladies at a few writing conventions (as described in Part I). Say these conventions were World Fantasy 2007 and WisCon 2008 respectively. Say you’ve set about exchanging a million emails with these ladies, the occasional phone call, friending them on LiveJournal and Facebook, and rediscovering, happily, the merits of snail mail. These ladies just happen to be the two editors of Goblin Fruit Magazine.

Fantastic! You send them your really long rhyme-y poems nobody else wants, and sometimes they even take them, and even when they don’t, they seem to like you anyway. Life is totally Utopian.

You all read fantasy, right? What happens after Utopia?

DOOM!

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Thirteen Questions for Wyatt Weed – Writer and Director of Shadowland

Thirteen Questions for Wyatt Weed – Writer and Director of Shadowland

poster3A few weeks back at the Chicago Comic Con, I had the pleasure of meeting the cast of Shadowland, a new indie horror movie written and directed by Wyatt Weed.

Forget the stars were beyond hot and that lead actress Caitlin McIntosh was a beauty queen. Forget my photographer Mr. Disney nearly put a perma-fog on his zoom lens trying to shoot through a crowd that was about six people deep; because in spite of the fact that all normal indicators point toward me having a thorough dislike for this whole crew, I couldn’t help it. I love indie film makers and the passion they have for making something different and “outside the system.”

And since being anti-establishment is part of the whole angst-y persona I’m trying hard to cultivate, I couldn’t wait to interview this lot and find out what drives such an all-consuming level of creativity.

So, since Wyatt soon realized I’d just keep stalking him until he relented (see past Goth Chick entries for proof), here it is.

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Mortals, Meet Goblins: A Review of Goblin Fruit Magazine (Part I)

Mortals, Meet Goblins: A Review of Goblin Fruit Magazine (Part I)

gobspr08cropIt was a cool November night in 2007. It was, in fact, All Souls Night.

Two friends and I had driven all day from Chicago, Illinois to Saratoga Springs, New York for the World Fantasy Convention. The Open Mic Poetry Reading I wanted to attend started at 10 PM, so there was barely enough time to dump our things in our room and slide into Broadway 1, all bedraggled and a bit unnerved.

The room was crowded, the poets plenteous and eager. I’d planned to recite “Sedna,” which is one doozy of a story-poem, but as the moderator was looking slightly harassed at her list of readers, I assured her I’d go at the end, and only if there was time. The mood I was in, I’d probably have been happy just to tuck tail and run.

Then the poetry began.

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Goth Chick News: Best In Show; The Chicago Comic Con

Goth Chick News: Best In Show; The Chicago Comic Con

wizardworldHave you ever woken up in an extremely good mood, found you were left enough hot water for a skin-peeling shower, stepped on the scale and found it down two pounds in spite of the bacchanalia of the night before? Have you ever leapt out of bed feeling euphoric and thought, “I really love my life?”

For me, the sun rose over the Chicago skyline last Saturday and found me gleefully clutching my press pass to the Chicago Comic Con.

It was about to be one of those days.

Last weekend, Wizard World made the Chicago stop on its nationwide tour, bring pop culture, comic books, toys and general weirdness to the Windy City. I brought my good friend and photographer Mr. Disney along, not only to help capture every precious moment on film, but to assist in with the non-stop stream of snarky commentary that was unavoidable at an event such as this.

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