So life has been busy. I guess it usually is for most of us. I’ve hunkered down with the rest of the e-subs and a few things I’ve been handed in person, and I’m gearing up for more book and game reviews. Outside the Black Gate world I’ve been applying for adjunct positions with my new Master’s degree in hand and steaming ahead on the rewrite of my fantasy novel. And look at that — I got a good review in Locus, which made my day, and it was for one of my Dabir and Asim stories, no less.
Things are a little bittersweet, though, because Flashing Swords is re-launching. I came from Flashing Swords, of course. Daniel Blackston asked me to run a mag for his company, and I did so, and I poured my heart and soul into the thing to build it up and keep it running. I was very proud of my work, but it drained me, and there were certain attendant difficulties that made the project more challenging than it might have been in ideal circumstances. I reluctantly handed it over to Daniel when I joined the Black Gate staff after the sixth issue of FS. Daniel’s publishing company dissolved shortly thereafter, alas, and Flashing Swords folded along with it.
Now Flashing Swords has risen, again, under new management, and they were kind enough to ask if I wanted to be involved in any way. I wish I could be, I want to be, but I’m here, now, with Black Gate, and it’s more important to me than jumping back into something I’ve left, and so I had to reluctantly decline. And so I must reconcile myself to the fact that Flashing Swords wasn’t ever really mine to begin with, and that it will go on in a different way — the important choices are no longer mine to make. But it will live. The authors and contributors and my fellow editors and I did not work in vain.
I’m pleased that the zine must have meant something to somebody if they’re wanting to pick up the torch. May they fly further and higher. I wish them all the best. I’m honored that they credit me on the home page as a founder, and I’m even more honored, as strange as it seems, that they’re continuing to use the little quote I invented at the top of their pages. It’s a tiny little element in the bigger picture, I know, but I don’t think they know it came from me, which means they must just have liked the sound of it. Sometimes it’s the little things that mean the most.
Read David Soyka’s 2006 review of a recent issue of Flashing Swords, with stories by James Enge, Steve Goble, Paul Jessup, Howard Lamb, Trey Causey, S. C. Bryce, and Robert Burke Richardson.
Black Gate‘s David Soyka examines two new offerings from Apex SF & Horror Digest and Subterranean Magazine, in the process delineating the modern boundaries of horror. In tales by notables with names like Shepard, Creasey, Tuttle, Priest, Bisson, Tidhar, and Ford, there’s a wide swath cut between subtle creeping dread and rank gratuitous gore. Which is more effective in a literary sense? Or as pure visceral terror? Come inside to find out…if you dare.
