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Compiling The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure

Compiling The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure

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The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure-smallGreetings, Black Gate readers! You may be familiar with my work as the game designer Lawrence Schick – possibly from role-playing material like the White Plume Mountain D&D scenario, video games such as Sword of the Samurai, or my recent work as Loremaster for The Elder Scrolls Online.

But I also write, edit, and translate historical fiction as Lawrence Ellsworth, and in that capacity I have a new title coming out from Pegasus Books, an anthology called The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. Our friends at Black Gate asked me to write an article about compiling that anthology, and here it is.

I’ve been reading and collecting swashbuckling adventure fiction for many years – my whole life, really. A couple years ago, while in the middle of a long (and still uncompleted) translation project, it occurred to me that I probably knew enough about the subject to be able to compile a pretty interesting anthology. The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked it, so I sat down and starting making notes.

I decided the anthology had to meet four criteria. First, it would need to catch the attention of contemporary readers, which meant including recognizable, marquee names, of both characters and authors. Second, it would have to be attractive to mainstream publishers, which meant inexpensive to produce (works in the public domain), and couched in a familiar, saleable format – in this case, a “Big Book,” a fat collection of at least 200,000 words. Third, for variety I wanted a good mix of pirates, cavaliers, and outlaws – and they all had to be cracking good stories that would hold the attention of modern readers. Fourth, not just any stories would do – I wanted carefully hand-picked works that weren’t overly familiar and would re-introduce some of my favorite forgotten authors to the 21st century.

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Meet You In The Bar

Meet You In The Bar

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talesLast week I introduced the topic of the bar story and I saw from the comments that I struck a popular chord.

As I mentioned, the bar story is an example of a framing device, a literary tool which enables a writer to link a series of stories, in this case by having them told by people who have gathered together in a bar. The question of whether the “club story” qualified as a “bar story” came up, and on thinking it over, I realized that it did. For purposes of tale-telling – to say nothing of drinking – one’s club is essentially the same as one’s local.

This week, I’d like to talk in a little more depth about the anthologies edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, Tales From The Spaceport Bar (1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (1989).

As they tell us in the preface to Tales,  the editors were inspired to collect these stories by what they call “that magnificent old cliché with chairs” the spaceport bar – as depicted in the scene from Star Wars (Episode IV, for those of you who weren’t around at the time). The preface also gives us a more detailed history of the sub-genre of “bar story” than I gave you last week.

I think we can all agree, however, that the important contents here are the 22 stories, not the preface. Many, if not most, of the stories are examples of framework “bar stories”, like Larry Niven’s “The Green Marauder” from his Draco’s Tavern series, “Elephas Frumenti” from the Gavagan’s Bar series of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, “Strategy at the Billiards Club” from Lord Dunsany’s Joseph Jorkin series, or Spider Robinson’s “The Centipede’s Dilemna” from Callahan’s Bar.

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The Joy of Outlining

The Joy of Outlining

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Final Cover-255
My name is M Harold Page, and I’m an outliner!

My name is M Harold Page and I’m an outliner!

Some creative writing forums greet this kind of statement with all the dismay of children being reminded there’s homework to do:

Only writing in flow — “pantsing” — is creative! Outlining is dull, hard work and mechanistic! Etc. Etc. (Oh the angst! I am blocked again…)

The “hard work” whinge just tells me people don’t know how to type. Writers type. If you can’t touch type, go learn.  Touch typing liberates you to treat your text as disposable — to casually “murder your darlings” — takes the physical grind out of writing — which has to be one of the real causes of the dreaded “Resistance” — and enables you to use outlining tools without begrudging every keystroke.

As for the creativity. Let me show not tell.

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How Much Backstory Do We Really Need?

How Much Backstory Do We Really Need?

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Writing backstoryNovels can depict events that take place over a span of generations or just a couple hours. Yet no matter how long a time period your story covers, there is always something that came before it. Those events that impact the storyline are called backstory.

Many aspects of backstory can be inferred by the reader. For example, if your main character is a cop, most readers will understand that she knows police procedure, the laws of her jurisdiction, and how to handle a firearm. You don’t need to walk us through every day of her academy training to tell us this (although writers will happily do so). However, the more of a character’s past that you tell your readers, the more they can identify with her.

Backstory is one of those things that, when done right, is almost seamless. You don’t even notice it. But when it’s done with a clumsy hand… well, it can be obnoxious.

The flow of information from the writer to the reader is like a dance. A striptease, actually. Of course, the reader wants to see the goods right away, but on some level they also want to be teased, to have it parceled out in little bits that leave them wanting more.

So how do we accomplish this? If you’ve spent any time around writers, writing courses, or online writing forums, you’ve no doubt heard of the dreaded information dump. Or infodump, for short. Big lumps of raw backstory dumped into the narrative are no longer in style (if they ever truly were). They bog down the narrative and distract from the main story. Today’s author must disguise the backstory within other techniques.

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An Age of Alternate Worlds Where Vampires and Zombies Prowl: Salman Rushdie on Fantasy

An Age of Alternate Worlds Where Vampires and Zombies Prowl: Salman Rushdie on Fantasy

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One Hundred Year of Solitude-smallI was reading Salman Rushdie’s cover article in the Sunday issue of The New York Times Book Review yesterday when I stumbled on a fascinating quote.

Rushdie’s article, “Magic in Service of Truth,” isn’t really about fantasy — not directly, anyway. It’s a tribute to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, and especially the setting of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, died on April 17th, and Rushdie’s article is a thoughtful look back at the career of the man whom the President of Colombia recently called “the greatest Colombian who ever lived.”

But Rushdie’s article is fascinating for other reasons as well. He is one of the most respected writers of the 21st Century — indeed, for several months after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, and the fatwā issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, he was perhaps the most famous author on the planet — and in the midst of his tribute to Márquez, he casually admits we are living in a literary Age of Fantasy.

We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of The Hunger Games, the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.

Rushdie has written a fantasy or two of his own, including his first novel Grimus (1975) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). He was knighted in 2007.

I read the article in in the newsprint edition, but you can read it online here.

So We Were In This Bar . . .

So We Were In This Bar . . .

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White HartThere’s a long tradition in western literature of the “framing device” – think Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales … or the Thousand Nights and a Night if we want something more obviously in our genre. Or Asimov and his Black Widower Mysteries.

My personal favourite among short story framing devices, however, is the bar story -– and I don’t mean the kind that starts, “We were in this bar…” Though, come to think of it, that’s how all my vacation stories start. Hmmm.

The device itself is fairly straightforward. The bar is a gathering place of disparate, but like-minded, people who exchange stories and anecdotes, usually involving people not present at the time. Sometimes the patrons of the bar take turns telling tales and sometimes, as with PG Wodehouse’s collections Meet Mr. Mulliner and Mr. Mulliner Speaks, one person in particular is the storyteller.

Undoubtedly because the storytellers are in a bar, the stories themselves can get a bit far-fetched, leading to such well-known formats as the Shaggy Dog Story and even the Tall Tale itself.

Which seems tailor-made for SF and Fantasy stories, don’t you think?

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The Thrill of Writing, the Agony of Revision

The Thrill of Writing, the Agony of Revision

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Revising cartoon-smallComposing a new story, especially a novel, is a thrilling experience filled with highs and lows, slow days and fast ones, sweat and tears (and occasionally a little blood). In a lot of ways, the writing is the “fun part” of being an author. However, that wonderful time is always followed by the worst part of being a writer.

Revision.

All right, I’m being a little hyperbolic. Revision isn’t all bad. It’s certainly a challenge to take a pile of words and try to shape them into something that sort of resembles art, or at least an interesting story. But it’s also a lot of work. And, for me, the worst part is getting started.

Right after I finish the first draft of a manuscript, I put it away for a couple weeks. The goal is to forget what I wrote as much as possible so that when I sit down with it again, I can attempt to see it with fresh eyes. But here’s the problem. There is an immutable law of writing that first drafts always suck. Always. There was a time when I didn’t think so, when I thought my first drafts were pretty damned good. Yeah, I was too stupid to know better.

Now that my blissful ignorance has worn off, I approach these “first re-reads” of a manuscript with equal parts of excitement and dread. And the excitement part evaporates quickly after reading the first few pages, leaving me with only dread, growing over my head like a cloud of impenetrable darkness as I wade deeper and deeper in to the morass which I’d like to think has the potential to be a decent novel.

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The Serious Novel isn’t Dead, It Won

The Serious Novel isn’t Dead, It Won

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Click to see source (and more cartoons, and a book)

This week Will Self, one of the UK’s stars of Literary Fiction, told everybody that the “novel is dead.”  Just seeing the title of his piece was enough to make me bring up Amazon and check… but no, the books hadn’t gone, replaced by app downloads and cheap white goods. So, what did he actually mean?

Reading the actual article, I discovered he meant “the literary novel is dead”, plus — as far as I can tell from what’s a rather long piece that seems to have been savaged by a feral Thesaurus — difficult Art in general:

the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism.

You might guess that my gut reaction is, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF THE WAR TRUMPETS HANG ON LET ME PUT DOWN MY AXE OMG WATCH OUT! ORK! GOT HIM! Now what were you saying Mr Self?”

What I mean is:

Just as authors have artistic integrity, readers have audience integrity. Sure, you wrote something you think is smart. However, that doesn’t give you a right to other people’s time and brainspace.

The sense of grant-grubbing entitlement from LitFic authors would be distasteful — nay, comic — if it came from any other sector, say, from typewriter manufacturers: “Wah wah, nobody wants typewriters anymore but they’re culturally vital where’s my grant and my tenure teaching typewriter engineering to young people?”

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Los Caballeros Templares

Los Caballeros Templares

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Bld Tower itselfThere’s something about the history – and the legends – of the Templar Knights that catches at the imaginations of historical and fantasy writers alike. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser had his Red Cross Knight, Michael Jecks, write the Knights Templar Books, a mystery series, and, just to give one example from our genre, there’s the fantasy anthology, Tales of the Knights Templar.

Everyone knows something about the Templars, but not everyone knows about their presence in Spain.

The history of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem begins around 1119, when nine Christian knights, settled in the Holy Land after the first Crusade, took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, like any other monks. But unlike ordinary monks, they also vowed to protect the pilgrims who now flocked to visit the area.

Sort of like holy policemen.

Their approach was a popular one, their numbers started growing, and the group received official recognition and papal approval around 1129. Like other official religious orders – the Benedictines, the Dominicans – the Templars started receiving donations of money and land. One of the early kings of Aragon, for example, part of modern day Spain, left the Templars almost one third of his kingdom.

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Baen Announces 2014 Fantasy Adventure Award

Baen Announces 2014 Fantasy Adventure Award

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Baen Books logoAll right, all you aspiring fantasy writers. Here’s your chance to make a splash.

Baen Books has announced a new short story contest for the best original fantasy adventure tale under 8,000 words. They’re accepting entries in all categories of fantasy, including sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, heroic fantasy, urban fantasy, etc. Here’s the official announcement:

Baen Books is proud to announce the inaugural Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, to be given at this year’s Gen Con to the best piece of original short fiction that captures the spirit and tradition of such great storytellers as Larry Correia, Robert E. Howard, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, David Weber and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

There’s no entry fee, but you’re limited to one entry per person. The story has to be original and not a reprint.

Only entries in English will be considered. Poetry or licensed fiction set in some else’s sandbox (such as Pathfinder, Star Wars, Doctor Who, or Twilight fanfic) will not be considered.

All submissions must be by e-mail. The contest is now open and entries must be submitted by June 30, 2014. A single winner will be announced at this year’s Gen Con.

Complete submission instructions are at the Baen website. Read them carefully, as they include very specific instructions.

Good luck!