Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

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Ye olde trusty notebook.
Ye olde trusty notebook.

From the time I was in grade school all the way up until after I graduated from college I wrote in notebooks. It seemed such a natural process that I wonder now how I got away from it, and why it was such a revelation when I took up writing in notebooks again.

In my school days I used to carefully comb through available notebooks  and select one with multiple subjects, college-ruled. Usually it would be a spiral-bound Mead, 8 1/2 by 11, but sometimes I’d experiment with slightly smaller sizes. When I was older and wandering through the Kansas City Renaissance Festival with my wife, I purchased a lovely Celtic leather notebook cover with an unlined sketchbook, and I filled a succession of replacement sketchbooks between those covers with my scribbles for years after.

As striking as that notebook was, though, I eventually fell out of using the thing. It became impractical to drag it wherever I went: my student days were over so I no longer had a backpack over one shoulder, and I didn’t have the kind of job where I always toted a briefcase. In those rare instances where I DID have a briefcase, it was already so loaded down that something weighing as much as a hardback book was a nuisance. I never used a notebook for writing unless I was at home, at which point I might as well have been writing on the computer. I thought that I had “outgrown” the use of a notebook.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part IV)

Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part IV)

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This is the fourth in a series of posts investigating the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy (you can find the first part here, the second here, and the third here). By ‘otherworld fantasy’ I mean a story set entirely in another world, with no framing device to connect it to reality. Traditionally, the credit for inventing otherworld fantasy has been given to William Morris. I have another figure in mind.

You can see her there on the right.

In 1837, Sara Coleridge, the daughter of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published a book called Phantasmion, which was received, and reviewed, as a fairy tale novel. And, at first glance, it certainly seems similar to the German and French fairy tales that were popular at around that time. But I don’t think it reads like a fairy tale, certainly not once it gets going.

It reads very like a high fantasy. In fact, like an otherworld fantasy.

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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

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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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Adventures in Pulp Awesomeness, Part Deux: Planetoids of Peril

Adventures in Pulp Awesomeness, Part Deux: Planetoids of Peril

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clayton-astounding1Back in April we told you about the first volume of this excellent new Clayton Astounding reprint series, compiled by Dark Worlds editor G.W. Thomas: Vagabonds of Space.

Vagabonds collected the best Space Opera from the Clayton years, the first three years of the most honored science fiction magazine in history: January 1930 – March 1933, when it was briefly owned by Clayton Magazines. This was the era before the pulp magazine was renamed Analog in 1960; even before the name was changed to Astounding Science Fiction — when it bore its original title, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, and was edited by Harry Bates, a skilled writer and editor whose landmark 1940 Astounding story “Farewell to the Master” was adapted as the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The Clayton years preceded the so-called Golden Age of Astounding when, under legendary editor John W Campbell, it discovered and promoted the work of young new writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Hal Clement. The fiction in the Clayton Astounding was raw, undiluted Buck Rogers stuff; the tales that first established the genre and defined for the American public what science fiction was all about.

G.W. Thomas followed Vagabonds with Out of the Dreadful Depths, pulp tales of undersea adventure, and now comes the third volume, Planetoids of Peril:

Not the Golden Age Astounding of John W. Campbell but the fun, Bug-Eyed-Monster-filled pulp of SF adventure. This volume is filled with tales of planets and moons covered with alien monsters and terrible chills. Featuring work by Anthony Pelcher, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Edmond Hamilton, Charles W. Diffin, Paul Ernst and Robert H. Wilson. With introductions and commentary by G. W. Thomas.

The Clayton Astounding: Planetoids of Peril is available from Lulu, priced at$13.99 for 218 pages. It’s also available in electronic format for just $4.99.

A Look at The Night Life of the Gods (1931)

A Look at The Night Life of the Gods (1931)

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night-life

THE NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS
by Thorne Smith
Published by Dodo Press, Copyright 1931
Reviewed by Mark Rigney

In searching for the earliest inspirations for sword and sorcery, one perfectly reasonable starting point would be Ancient Greece. The Grecian stories, after all, have survived in marked detail, and the adventures themselves are epic in scope, bloody to a fault, and literally crawling with terrifying beasties. Adapting those tales has been the work of many a writer, including (James) Thorne Smith, a massively successful fantasist now largely forgotten, who posed himself the question, “What if someone could turn the various Olympian statues in the Big Apple’s museums into flesh and blood?” Smith’s answer was The Night Life Of the Gods (1931), a cheerful Shaggy Dog of the New York variety, and a fine example of a book that no modern publishing house would touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole.

If Thorne Smith’s name is sounding suspiciously familiar, perhaps it should, as he is the earnest scribbler behind Topper (1926), the very same Topper in which Cary Grant later starred (as a ghost), and which eventually became a staple of early television, featuring Leo G. Carroll and sponsored by Jell-O. (Night Life Of the Gods also found its way to the silver screen; the 1935 production, starring Alan Mowbray, is said to be (deservedly) buried in a vault at UCLA.) As a book, Night Life, like virtually all of Smith’s fantastical, debauched novels, was wildly popular. That it has not remained so is perhaps a testament to the complete inability of post-modern Homo sapiens to imbibe anywhere close to the quantity of alcohol consumed by Smith’s louche, soused-to-the-gills characters.

Let me put it more bluntly: a truly astounding amount of liquor gets dispatched in the course of this book. Given that the action takes place smack in the midst of Prohibition, an era when American breweries were busily hawking malt syrup just to say alive, the book’s blood alcohol content becomes all the more astounding.

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Birthdays and Funerals

Birthdays and Funerals

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sh_headStrange Horizons not only pioneered the notion of an on-line “magazine” devoted to speculative fiction, but is still around today to talk about it.  In fact, Strange Horizons is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which also happens to coincide to its annual fund drive. The magazine is somewhat unique in that it operates on a “PBS-like” donation model (without the nature and cooking shows coupled with pop concerts from performers whose better days date back to the 1970s that  your financial support of  somehow makes you a last bastion of “high culture”).  It seems to have worked.  Take a look at its very first issue.

On a more somber note, this just in on the continuing decline of the physical bookstore, albeit the big box model that a few years ago everyone was lamenting was killing off neighborhood independent bookstores.

Whatever the fate of the physical book, the future looks like it might be in the hands of the little guy who can figure out a niche to, if not thrive in, at least be comfortable in. Not such a bad thing,

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

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games-of-cagesThe most interesting title waiting for me when I returned from our adventures at Dragon*Con was Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages, the latest in his Twenty Palaces series and the sequel to his first novel, Child of Fire.

We’ve been big fans of Harry since his first story appeared in Black Gate 2, and his “Soldiers of a Dying God” (BG 10) is one of the finest short pieces we’ve ever published. It’s been great to finally see him get some well-deserved recognition.  Child of Fire received some excellent notices, and Jim Butcher said it contained “Excellent reading… delicious tension and suspense.” Here’s the cover copy to Game of Cages:

As a wealthy few gather to bid on a predator capable of destroying all life on earth, the sorcerers of the Twenty Palace Society mobilize to stop them. Caught up in the scramble is Ray Lilly, the lowest of the low in the society — an ex-­car thief and the expendable assistant of a powerful sorcerer. Ray possesses exactly one spell to his name, along with a strong left hook. But when he arrives in the small town in the North Cascades where the bidding is to take place, the predator has escaped and the society’s most powerful enemies are desperate to recapture it.

We tracked down Harry at the exclusive club where he now writes, between eating oysters and sipping Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Before we were thrown out by the bankers at the next table, Harry did say a few words about his new novel, which Howard Jones managed to transcribe in the hidden notebook he always carries in his pocket:

Ray Lilly is an ex-con, an ex-car-thief, and current minion in the Twenty Palace Society, a secret organization that protects our world from deadly, magical “predators.” Ray may only be a driver — and a decoy — but he’s the only operative close enough to deal with an emergency situation: An auction has gone terribly wrong releasing a predator into a small town, and the bidders — murderous, wealthy bastards all — tear the town apart looking for it. Ray just has to hold out until his sorcerer bosses arrive, but it may already be too late.

Howard had a few choice words of his own about “wealthy bastards” as we dusted ourselves off, but at least we got an exclusive quote.  After his third novel, we’ll probably have to bribe his bodyguards just to get close to Harry. Don’t be one of the last ones to catch on. Check out Game of Cages today — the first three chapters are available online, and the book can be found at better bookstores near you.

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Monsters of Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Monsters of Mongo”

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200px-blbmonstersofmongo“Monsters of Mongo” was the second installment of Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between April 15 and November 18, 1934, “Monsters of Mongo” picked up the storyline where the first installment, “Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo” left off with an unconscious Flash being rescued from Princess Aura by the Lion Men.

Alex Raymond really begins to hit his stride in portraying the diversity of life on Mongo in this second installment. Prince Thun and Dale Arden are prisoners of Ming’s soldiers. Thun’s father, King Jugrid has retaliated by destroying the kingdom of the Shark Men. Ming’s soldiers have, in turn, annihilated much of the Lion Men’s fleet.

monsters-of-mongoJugrid orders Aura’s execution. Flash fights to save her life and the two are rescued by Prince Barin. It is in Barin’s kingdom that Flash is at last reunited with Dr. Zarkov. Flash and Zarkov soon form an alliance with Barin and Aura as the unlikely quartet determine to overthrow Emperor Ming.

Of course, Aura being Ming’s daughter quickly betrays our heroes. The sequence culminates in one of the strip’s iconic images as Barin and Flash power the Electric Mole to burrow their way underground and crash through the floor of Ming’s palace just before he can wed Dale.

The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ AT THE EARTH’S CORE is heavily felt in the Electric Mole sequence, but it is Burroughs’ JOHN CARTER stories that have the greater influence in Raymond’s sophisticated approach in revealing Mongo’s green god, Tao as a hoax.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Season One Recap

Supernatural Spotlight – Season One Recap

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supernatural-season1If you haven’t been watching Supernatural, then I can completely sympathize. I actually didn’t start watching the show until halfway through season two, mainly because I didn’t care to watch a series that was nothing more than a mindless monster hunting show.

What I didn’t realize was that this was actually one of the deepest monster hunting shows ever on television. (Yes, that includes Buffy and Angel.)

I imagine that the people involved with the show didn’t necessarily always know how deep the show was going to become. The series was probably fairly easy to pitch:

Two brothers, who are demon hunters, travel on a roadtrip, dropping into a different horror movie plot each week.

I wouldn’t think that it would be hard to sell that premise, do you?

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Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

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dickey-deliveranceI lay with the flashlight still in one hand, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was not habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.

–James Dickey, Deliverance

So you’ve read yourself out of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, closed the cover on the latest Bernard Cornwell and Joe Abercrombie, and you’re looking for something new in heroic fiction. But you can’t seem to find what you’re looking for. Rather than slumming around in the dregs of the genre or reaching for The Sword of Shannara (with apologies to fans of Terry Brooks), my suggestion is to take a look at modern realistic adventure fiction and non-fiction.

I read heroic fiction for the action, the adventure, the storytelling, and the sense of palpable danger that real life (typically) doesn’t provide. Likewise, I find that works like The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf by Jack London, Alive by Piers Paul Read, and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer satisfy the same primal needs as the stories of an Edgar Rice Burroughs or David Gemmell. The best modern adventure fiction/non-fiction stories are bedfellows with heroic fiction: While they may not contain magic or monstrous beasts, they allow us to experience savagery and survival in the wild and walk the line of life and death.

My favorite work in this genre is Deliverance by James Dickey, and it’s to this book that I’d like to devote the remainder of this post.

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