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Black Gate‘s Vaughn Heppner reaches #1 at Amazon with Star Soldier

Black Gate‘s Vaughn Heppner reaches #1 at Amazon with Star Soldier

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star-soldierStar Soldier by Vaughn Heppner, Book #1 of the Doom Star Series, has reached the Top of Amazon’s bestseller list for Series Science Fiction in its Kindle edition.

Number 2 on the list is the second volume in the series, Bio-Weapon — outselling Dune, Foundation, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, among many others. In the general Science Fiction Bestsellers list for Kindle editions, Star Soldier reached #2, second only to the brand new Zero History by William Gibson.

Star Soldier is a full novel, 82,000 words in length, and is available for download for just 99 cents.  Here’s the description:

It’s survival of the fittest in a brutal war of extinction! Created in the gene labs as super soldiers, the Highborn decide to replace the obsolete Homo sapiens. They pirate the Doom Stars and capture the Sun Works Ring around Mercury. Now they rain asteroids, orbital fighters and nine-foot drop troops onto Earth in a relentless tide of conquest. Marten Kluge is on the receiving end. Hounded by Thought Police, he lives like an ant in a kilometer-deep city. The invasion frees him from a re-education camp but lands him in the military, fighting for the wrong side. Star Solider is the story of techno hell in a merciless war, with too many surprises for any grunt’s sanity.

Vaughn has sold three really terrific linked Sword and Sorcery tales to Black Gate, the first of which, “The Oracle of Gog,” will appear in our next issue.  I asked him to tell us a little bit about the novels:

In many ways Star Soldier is based from my years of reading about the Eastern Front during WWII. Social Unity is like the Soviets. The genetic super-soldiers think like Nazis. Marten Kluge, the hero, just wants to be free. But there is precious little freedom in the Inner Planets of the Solar System in 2350… I’m writing hard these days. I’m working on the third book of the Doom Star Series, Battle Pod.

Congratulations Vaughn!

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Maps and the Fantasy Writer

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Maps and the Fantasy Writer

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The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark.
— Barry Lopez, “The Mappist”

Just because you can travel to a place doesn’t mean you can know it.
—Alan DeNiro, “Salting the Map”

Like most things with us fantasy readers and writers, it started with Tolkien.

Map of the Wilderlands, from THE HOBBIT

I saw the map at the beginning of my now-battered Ballantine version of The Hobbit all those years ago. The book had two maps in it, for crying out loud — my eleven-year-old self had never seen such a thing. I wondered if there’d be some sort of quiz at the end of the book — was Mount Gundabad at the northern or southern tip of the Misty Mountains? (No fair peeking!)

I can’t tell you how many times I drew and re-drew that map. I think I even tried to recreate it on an old Apple II computer, using BASIC (ouch, just aged myself, big-time). I studied it, wondered about those Woodmen living on the western border of Mirkwood, and of course traced the path taken by Bilbo and the dwarves on the way to their final meeting with Smaug the dragon.

And then I got a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and saw how that little slice of the world from The Hobbit fit into the much bigger world of Middle-Earth, and I was hooked. Forget sketching the map of the land — I wanted to live there! (Orcs and wargs and all.)

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Toy Story 3: Genre fiction writers take heed

Toy Story 3: Genre fiction writers take heed

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toy-story-3-lotso-huggin-bearWarning: This essay contains some spoilers.

If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.

–J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf

I don’t get to the theatre too often these days, and with two young daughters in tow more often than not it’s to see a children’s film. But I’m not lamenting this fact, especially when the movies are of the quality of Toy Story 3.

Hey, I love Robert E. Howard, Bernard Cornwell, and the Viking novels of Poul Anderson as much as the next battle-mad fantasy fan, but I’m man enough to admit liking (most) Pixar films as well. And Toy Story 3 might be the best one I’ve seen. Critical consensus is not necessarily a hallmark of a good film (see Blade Runner, panned on its initial release by most critics, recognized as genius years later), but I think it’s telling that Toy Story 3 currently has a 99% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In this case, the critics are spot-on.

Toy Story 3 is a near-perfect children’s film. Like all children’s films, it possesses straightforward story lines, engaging visuals, and brisk action in order to keep young attention spans focused. (If these qualities sound like less than appealing, well, genre films can’t be all things to all people). So why sing its praises on Black Gate? Toy Story 3 serves as an instructive example of how to tell a great story within the confines of a given genre. Just like you can’t get too bogged down in dialogue or non-linear narrative techniques in a movie for kids, that story you submit to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly better contain some elements of sword play and sweeping action if you want to stand a chance of getting it published. If you disregard your audience you’re destined to fail.

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Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

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Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
— William Faulkner

CHINA TOWN, NAGASAKI, JAPAN by June OkaBecause this series about riding about the dragon called Publishing is geared at writers just starting out writing fantasy stories and novels, I thought I’d pull together another list (I love lists!) that include all the helpful stuff I wish I’d known back in 1995, when I was just starting out.

Ten Things I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known When I First Started

YOUR FAVORITE STORY OR NOVEL THAT YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN SHOULD BE THE ONE YOU’RE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW.  Enthusiasm for your current project is priceless, in my opinion, and you should never rest on your laurels.  Always try to improve yourself as a writer, just like an athlete or musician always works to get better for the next big game or performance.

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ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

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My wizard story "The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria" appears in THE WAY OF THE WIZARD, coming from Prime Books in November.

“A character is not a simulation of a living being.
It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.”
— Milan Kundera

“Each character is a piece of the writer and
the writer’s experience of other human beings, and also a piece of the reader and
the reader’s parallel experience.”
— William Sloane

 “The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth
about what you see.”
— Stephen King

What a character!

This fourth installment of an ongoing series covers the role of “Character” in Fantasy Fiction. (Previous installments covered Originality, Style, and Plot.)

The heart and soul of any story are its characters. Every story, no matter what style or genre, is basically about PEOPLE. Even if these people are aliens, monsters, robots, or talking fish, they still have human personalities. Why? Because the people who write them are human. Therefore, all stories are stories about people, i.e. characters. If you don’t have believable, memorable characters, you’re not going to have a very good story.

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Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

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bglgSixteen of your US dollars. That’s what the latest (monster) issue of Black Gate has cost you in these days of fear and crumbling factories. It’s strange, isn’t it? You’ll spend all that money on a collection of fiction and game reviews when the internet is bursting with so much free content. If you go looking right now, you can find a million Sword & Sorcery stories out there that you wouldn’t even need to pirate: the authors, overcome in a delirium of generosity, are only too thrilled to supply them for free.

And it doesn’t stop with short-stories! There are more novels waiting for you online than any dozen people could read in a lifetime, along with plays, movie scripts, poetry…

Oh God. The poetry.

So, what’s stopping you? I’ll tell you what’s stopping me: I don’t want to be a slush reader. It is mind-rotting, eye-burning work that actually becomes worse the more of it you do. Like some sort of cumulative poison. And for every great story we read in the pages of Black Gate, there have been several hundred at least that would have had any sane person thinking more and more about drinking that bottle of bleach under the sink. Oh yes.

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Gen Con 2010 Reflections

Gen Con 2010 Reflections

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Kung Fu Fighting gameNow that Gen Con is done, it’s time to offer up some final thoughts, experiences, and, of course, games.

Art Show

One of the best areas to walk around at Gen Con is the art show. This is always fun for me, because I honestly don’t follow artists that much, so sometimes I stumble upon someone really famous whose work I’ve never seen before or who I’ve never heard of. Unfortunately, since the artwork is the artist’s main product, I really can’t reproduce it here without getting into all kinds of messy copyright issues. Fortunately, what I can do is link to the websites of some that I found most enjoyable:

Still More Games

While I covered some fun pulp roleplaying games in yesterday’s post, I didn’t get around to talking some fun games of other types. One publisher that I’d like to discuss is Slugfest Games, which has a wide assortment of card and board games which have a pulp feel to them. The one that I demoed this year was Kung Fu Fighting, a card game in which you play a series of karate moves.

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ON WRITING FANTASY: The Plot Thickens

ON WRITING FANTASY: The Plot Thickens

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elric-storm1“Plot is what the characters do
to deal with the situation they are in.”
     — Elizabeth George

“The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.”
     — Christopher Charles Herbert Lehmann-Haupt

“Character is plot, plot is character.”
     — F. Scott Fitzgerald

What happens next?!?

In this third installment of an ongoing series I’d like to talk about the role of “Plot” in Fantasy Fiction. (Previous installments covered Originality and Style.)

On the surface, Plot sounds extremely simple. And it can be. But what is it exactly? Basically, it’s nothing more than What Happens. Plot is a series of events that follow one another in a logical order. Although sometimes that order can be intentionally mixed up to create more dramatic tension (ala Tarantino’s PULP FICTION). There is an art to writing a good plot, to being original, to rising above the recycling of “stock plots” and tired formula.

So what is the secret of writing a great plot? One word: CHARACTER.

Fitzgerald said it best: “Character is plot, plot is character.” This is a sentiment Alan Moore also echoed in his writings about the craft of writing. Another way of saying this is that Characters Will Follow Their Desires. When you have a well-imagined setting all you have to do is drop some well-imagined characters into it and let ’em go. Like scientists dropping mice into a little maze. What do the mice want? The cheese at the end. So they run and run and run until…Voila!…they solve the maze and get the cheese. (Or run themselves to death, if the story is a tragedy.)

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Borderlands Press announces 8th Annual Writers Boot Camp

Borderlands Press announces 8th Annual Writers Boot Camp

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Borderlands Press, who’ve been publishing specialty books for collectors since 1989, announced their 8th Annual Writers Boot Camp, January 28th – 30th , 2011 in Towson, Maryland.

They call it “Boot Camp” for a reason. You won’t wandering through lonely forests, wondering what it means to be a writer for countless hours. This from the website:

You will be expected to log in many hours of intensive analysis and criticism from your peers and the four guest instructors who will be guiding you through all the major elements of writing fiction. You will be required to read (in advance) the submissions of your fellow workshop participants. (ALL OF THEM)

The weekend-long boot camp consists of lectures, round table critiques, readings of your work, Q&A panel discussion, and analysis of your work by the instructors. Instructors this year include Gary Braunbeck, Mort Castle, Ginjer Buchanan, Richard Chizmar, Douglas Clegg, Jack Ketchum, Elizabeth Massie, David Morrell, Thomas F. Monteleone, F. Paul Wilson, and Douglas E. Winter.

There will be two Sessions, Novel and Short Fiction, and each accepts only 16 to 20 participants, so be sure to get your application in early. Any and all genres are accepted; fee is $995.

Complete details are on the Borderlands Press website.

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Battles Inside and Out

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Battles Inside and Out

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I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
— James Michener

So you’re ready to embark on writing your new fantasy story, hopefully one that the folks at Black Gate will want to snatch up as soon as you type the words “The End” on it.

You’ve got your story idea, sitting there like a lump of Play-Doh that still conforms to the shape of the plastic container you just shook it out of.  You know, that perfect cylinder shape that is exciting to absolutely no one.

Time to start squishing and pulling and twisting. But where to begin, you ask? It all starts, of course, with your main character.

As we discussed earlier, most people tend to start a story with a person, in some sort of situation. But let’s just say you haven’t even gotten that far. You just have an average person, sitting in a white room. Nothing’s happening.

Let’s start by getting inside that character’s head. Which you can do most effectively by asking questions:

  • What is the one thing he or she (or it — this is speculative fiction, you know) wants the most out of life?
  • What’s the one thing your protagonist will do nearly anything for?
  • Is it an object? Another person? A goal? An idea?

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