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Adventure on Film: The Duellists

Adventure on Film: The Duellists

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duellists2One of the oddest, most esoteric regrets in my life is that I long ago gave away my collection of the now defunct American Film magazine. Most of these, purchased primarily from sidewalk vendors in Manhattan, I do not care to recover; but I would give a great deal to have again the October issue from 1986. It contains a dialogue with film producer David Puttnam, and one small paragraph in that interview taught me more about collaboration than any other single event I know.

More on that in a moment. In the meantime, let me introduce one of Hollywood’s really fine on-screen adventures, The Duellists.

Now, I admit up front that as with The Horseman On the Roof, a title I explored a few weeks back, The Duellists contains no overt fantasy element; but what it lacks in sorcery, it more than makes up for in swords. Right out of the gate, Lieutenant D’Hubert (Keith Carradine, one of my very favorite actors) is ordered by a busy general to round up fellow cavalry man Feraud (Harvey Keitel) and escort him to the brig; it seems that Feraud has been dueling, illegally, with the mayor’s nephew. Feraud takes offense first to D’Hubert’s assignment and then to D’Hubert himself; he challenges him on the spot to a duel, an event D’Hubert, a reasonable man, ultimately cannot prevent.

Thus the wheel of this most simple of plots grinds into implacable motion: D’Hubert cannot ever contrive to avoid Feraud, and neither, in repeated duels, each instigated by Feraud, can ever quite kill off the other. Over the course of the Napoleonic wars, these two clash again and again in a battle both particular and symbolic. D’Hubert’s enlightened rationalism must stave off Feraud’s chivalric single-mindedness, and both, to D’Hubert’s dismay, must contend with the expectations of the times: that their differences constitute a “point of honor” (indeed, such was the title of the story on its U.S. publication), and that to settle this point, one of them must die.

But wait, you cry! What about David Puttnam and all those moldering magazines?

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Genre 2012: The Trouble With (no, not Tribbles) Pace

Genre 2012: The Trouble With (no, not Tribbles) Pace

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tangent5summer1976

One should never read one’s own notices, as many a British actor, most of them knighted, have said. Does it then follow that a writer should never read reviews of his or her work? Or, for that matter, the fine print of incoming rejections?

Tangent Online was kind enough, just recently, to give my Black Gate story “The Trade” a really glowing review, but while that review made me very happy, it also gave me pause. It forced me to reflect both on my own writing and on writing in general. Why? Because of one line, short and sweet: “The pace is fast.”

And so it is, I suppose. But consider the email I got ten days after “The Trade” debuted, a note penned by David M. Armstrong, fiction editor for Witness, a literary magazine into which I’ve been trying to jam my work for about a decade. At last, a Witness acceptance, and for their upcoming spring 2013 issue! Can you guess what Mr. Armstrong said he appreciated in my story? The pace. “This,” he wrote, “was a layered and often impressively restrained narrative.”

Let’s translate, shall we, to the realm of fantasy adventure fiction. What Mr. Armstrong just said is that my Witness story, “The Last Horse in Skopje,” exhibits a pace so glacial and plodding that it would put a charging sabre-tooth to sleep at thirty paces.

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Book Launch Week (Plus Giveaway)

Book Launch Week (Plus Giveaway)

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bones-of-the-old-ones-contest-win11First, I want to point everyone to a book giveaway at Reddit. Until the end of the week, you can drop by, write what your favorite fantasy setting, world, or culture is (and why) and be entered in a drawing to win a signed copy of both The Bones of the Old Ones and its standalone predecessor, The Desert of Souls.

Second, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about what a book launch week is like. Long time visitors to Black Gate may remember that I promised to take you with me  as I crossed over from regular bloke side of the street to man with a book contract side.

If you peruse the articles I wrote about signing my book deal with the St. Martin’s Thomas Dunne Books imprint, my glee practically drips off the screen (1. How to Get a Book Deal. 2. Signing the Contract. 3.  After the Book Deal). Finally, after decades of trying, my words were going to be in a real live (well, dead tree) book, in bookstores nationwide. I felt like Charlie at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when Willy Wonka asks him what happened to the boy who got everything he wanted. “He lived happily ever after,” says Willy with a smile.

It turns out that when you actually get through that door, what you’re doing is becoming an artist who is also a small business owner, for one of the things you absolutely must do is promote your work, er, product. There is a lot of work, and not so much chocolate. I got pretty busy, and I forgot to tell everyone here at Black Gate what was going on.

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Publishing Nightmares

Publishing Nightmares

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nightmareOnce upon a time, I had the crazy idea that if a book was good, it would stay in print. I also figured that a “best-of” volume would probably have all the good stories from an author, and I was actually naive enough to think that if a work by a favorite author was out of print, it probably wasn’t as good as the work that was still on shelves.

I had a lot to learn.

Sure, it’s true that a lot of the classics never go out of print. And in my own experience, Sturgeon’s Law seems to hold pretty true — at least 90% of all art is pretty bad, which partly explains why things go out of print. That’s why, when I used to wander through a used bookstore past ranks of shelves holding books with titles and authors I’ve never heard of, I was pretty sure I wasn’t missing much.

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A Weird Fiction Kindle Story Giveaway

A Weird Fiction Kindle Story Giveaway

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She Who RunsSleepless, Burning LifeStolen Souls

Hello, Black Gate denizens. Mike Allen here of the Monstrous Posts on Monsters and the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies.

John O’Neill has asked me to write you folks a follow up on how the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter I told you about earlier this year turned out (SPOILER ALERT: it was a smashing success) and share tips on some of the tricks I learned. I’ve got something laden with all sorts of graphics that I’ll post for you later in the week.

However, this is not that post!

John has also given me permission to plug the Kindle story promotion that I’m in the midst of. (John is a generous guy. Charming, too!) There is some topical relevance, as there’s an excerpt from my weird fantasy novel The Black Fire Concerto slated to appear in the Black Gate online fiction lineup in the not-too-distant future, so here’s a way to get a sample of what I do.

So here’s how it goes: through Tuesday night, I’m offering my weird science fiction novelette “Stolen Souls,” my weird fantasy story “She Who Runs” and my even weirder clockpunk novelette “Sleepless, Burning Life” free to all through Amazon Kindle. Just click on the story titles or the cover art above to nab them. (And if you’re interested but don’t have a Kindle, e-mail me and we’ll work something out.)

And if you’re an aspiring author curious what insights I might have on the freebie Kindle experience, I have an entry sharing my thoughts so far. But feel free to ask me questions, too.

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Hefting the Dramatist’s Toolkit

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Hefting the Dramatist’s Toolkit

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the-dramatiste28099s-toolkit-smallHere’s a silly but common way to organize a creative writing program: The absolute prerequisite for any class that specializes by genre–and in this context, genre means the big divisions into fiction, poetry, and drama–is a general creative writing class that purports to introduce students to the the basics of all three genres in a fourteen-week semester. Assume your first class meeting is lost to administrivia, your last class meeting is a wash because students are packing out for their winter or summer holidays, and you’ll lose one or two others to snow days or the flu. You have to give thirty–yes, thirty–undergrads a grounding in all the technique they may ever get in fiction in four weeks. All they may ever get of poetry, all they may ever get of drama–four weeks each.

Moreover, odds are that you’re not a generalist yourself, any more than your students are. At least one of those mega-genres is going to be your weak spot, and now you have to prioritize all the technique you don’t know in that weak genre to figure out what’s most important to introduce your students to in the four weeks they’ll spend trying to be, say, playwrights.

Fortunately for me, I knew a Real Live Playwright who helped me figure out what the most important basics were in her genre. She pointed me to Jeffrey Sweet’s book, The Dramatist’s Toolkit: The Craft of the Working Playwright. Sweet’s book didn’t make a dramatist of me, but it did illuminate what Joss Whedon and his writers were up to in all that crackling dialogue on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As I studied the more uneven shows I loved, like Babylon 5 and The X Files, what separated the glorious episodes from the episodes that fell flat was much easier for me to pinpoint. When I turned my hand to fiction again after a decade as a poet and scholar, most of what I got right was the result of using Sweet to dissect Whedon.

So, what are the tools in that toolkit? And which are the ones we need?

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A Dark and Glorious World: The New Midgard Campaign Setting

A Dark and Glorious World: The New Midgard Campaign Setting

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midgard-smallI confess that I have a problem with a lot of RPG campaign settings on the market. Some of them are simply tired and played out. Some are designed to lock customers into purchasing adventures and sourcebooks, leaving little room for customization. Some take a “kitchen sink” approach, avoiding anything too distinctive in an effort to support every type of campaign.

As the lead designer and publisher at Kobold Press, I decided it was time to launch a project that would reinvent a few fantasy traditions, and restore all that I think is great and good in classic fantasy RPGs. It would be based on time-tested elements of my own homebrew campaign, not on market research, potential licensing opportunities, or maximizing shareholder value. It was time to let slip the drakes of war, sharpen up the great ax, and split some skulls with a new setting!

With that in mind, I worked with my talented colleagues Jeff Grubb and Brandon Hodge, and the Open Design community, to create the Midgard Campaign Setting. It’s made for conflict, plunder, deep magic, and horrific secrets. That’s reflected in the design choice to provide clear adventure hooks for every place described in the book, for instance, and in the decision to provide a system of ley line magic. Better yet, much original material for Midgard is written by newcomers, so it’s a place where everyone can sharpen their game design chops (more on that in a minute!).

When you’re in Midgard, you’ve got big missions, mythic adventures, and lots of options — but the setting is designed to be compact and easy to pick up. There’s also the part that’s harder to explain, the getting-fantasy-right part. To quote a new fan TwistedGamer

Not since I was a teenager and first peeled back the plastic that had been wrapped around my first Forgotten Realms campaign boxed set have I felt the giddiness that I feel right now…

The masks of the gods, the blending of myth and pure invention, the shadow roads and some new, lighter elements like the beer goddess and the school of clockwork magic all make Midgard sing.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Sometimes the Magic Works

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Sometimes the Magic Works

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sometimes-the-magic-worksAfter last week’s post on John Gardner’s curmudgeonly classic The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, it seemed important to look at a writer’s handbook by an unrepentant writer of genre fiction — commercial fiction, even. I wanted a book that was humble where Gardner’s was imperious, practical about the business of publishing where Gardner’s was aloof from it.

Gardner suggests that the young writer read all of Faulkner, and then all of Hemingway to clear Faulkner’s excesses out of her mind. So I turned to Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life by Terry Brooks to recover from all that is magisterial in The Art of Fiction.

A confession: Terry Brooks’s novels are not my thing. That is not a judgment on him, just an observation that so far I haven’t really connected with his work. For the record, in the Grand Taxonomy and Hierarchy of Books That Aren’t My Thing, The Sword of Shannara gave me far more reading enjoyment than did James Joyce’s Ulysses.

A lot of people — critics, teachers, readers, other writers — have judged Brooks harshly for one reason and another. But I will go to school on anybody, absolutely anybody, who seems to know something I don’t. Am I on the bestseller lists yet? No? Then Brooks knows something I don’t. I’m hoping that readers who do connect with his books will stop by the comment thread and share their perspectives.

The Brooks manual has two main areas of insight to offer that balance what’s missing in Gardner, and those two areas couldn’t be more different.

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Adventure On Film: The Color of Magic

Adventure On Film: The Color of Magic

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posterOnce upon a very suspect time, a human being by the name of Terry Pratchett conjured up a space-traveling sea turtle by the name of A’tuin, and proceeded to make a sizable fortune from the disc-shaped world he emplaced upon her. In Pratchett’s Discworld novels, magic of the most unpredictable kind is the norm, and so it should come as no surprise that, eventually, somebody had to commit his unique brand of literary lunacy to celluloid.

And so they did. The Color of Magic appeared in 2008, destined for British TV and comprised of two longish episodes.

Now, having admittedly come rather late to the Discworld table –– I read a short called “Troll Bridge” years ago, but didn’t realize it was part of a larger cycle –– my somewhat limited exposure was nonetheless sufficient to convince me that Pratchett’s novels were congenitally unfilmable.

Despite that dire opinion, I am happy to report that Sean Astin is delightfully droll as Twoflower, the Discworld’s first tourist, and David Jason is about as Rincewind as anyone could possibly be. As a murderous and ambitious wizard, Tim Curry simpers and smirks as only Tim Curry can, (although he doesn’t appear to be having nearly as much fun as he did as “Arthur King” in Spamalot). On an ankle-biting budget, the cinematography is generally first rate, as are most, though not quite all, of the props. Death –– a nuisance, and constantly in pursuit of Rincewind –– is lovingly voiced by Christopher Lee, but disappoints the eye. Bearing a cheap-looking sickle, Death appears to have just wandered in from a middling haul of Trick-or-Treats.

Physically, then, in real-world terms, The Color of Magic is of course filmable –– as is just about everything these days, including massive sand worms and infinitesimal specks of pollen. I even recall seeing, on Nova, an attempt to demonstrate string theory’s ten dimensions on the two-dimensional plane of a television screen –– an abject failure, yes, but I blame myself. My limited powers of imagination and whatnot. Me and my four-dimensional mindset.

So let me amend my question: can The Color of Magic be adapted to film successfully?

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Making the Clock Your Friend

Making the Clock Your Friend

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Howard's haunted clockI’m busy.

I know, I know, a lot of us are busy, and I’ve been busy for a long time. But I mean I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

So busy that if I don’t figure out a way to manage the busy-ness I’m mortified that I’m putting my dream job at risk. It took me decades of hard work to make it to the point where writing is actually my day job, so I’m fighting like tooth and nail to keep it that way.

In brief, here’s what’s been happening over the last months, in the order that the events began to impact the household.

  1. I’m promoting the second Dabir and Asim novel, The Bones of the Old Ones, which will appear in print on December 11;
  2. I’m writing my next Paizo Pathfinder novel, and the deadline’s creeping ever closer;
  3. We’re undergoing a big bathroom/master bedroom remodel — we’ve been saving up for it for years, and there are constant interruptions and some consulting that has to take place;
  4. My mother had a heart attack followed by a triple bypass and is moving into my office until she’s well enough to move into the basement;
  5. The basement is currently unfinished, and I have to organize, clean, and trash what doesn’t need saving prior to it being turned into a small apartment for my mother; and
  6. Mom’s house has to cleared out and readied for sale.

Now I’m not complaining that we’re in a good enough financial position that we can afford to do some remodeling, and I’m not complaining that I have two separate series to work on, and I’m not sharing any of that because I need extra hugs. I’m just explaining what I mean by busy. I’ve got to take care of my mom, who was wonderful and supportive my whole life long, and I’ve got to keep my job going.

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