Black Gate

John and I are making big strides into the submission pile. John still has some older physical subs to get to before he can get to the (relatively) newer e-subs I set aside for him. I think, however, that things will soon be under control. When I came on board we split the subs down the middle, with me taking the e-subs and John taking the physical subs. The one was a lot easier to send me than the other.

I’m almost to the end of the e-subs, and have begun to send forth responses. I have about a dozen left to read, and one or two I’m considering as I sort through these rest. A few of those left to read are longish and well-written, so they alone will take several hours.

Lest you think that you’re alone out there with your rejection pile, I’ve been accumulating some rejects lately myself. A while back I fashioned a new protagonist and a new setting, but despite my own sense that I’m making new strides and charting new ground — and despite an excellent reception from one of my most trusted first readers — the market has not been interested. Frustrated genius? Bitter hack? I’m more puzzled than bitter. I hope I’m not a hack; I’m danged sure I’m not a genius. Anyway. As I did with Dabir and Asim, I will continue to write these stories from time to time, just because they please me. Maybe a market will open up. My focus right now, though, is on novel writing.

I think I mentioned that I was working on a polishing pass of my mist world novel, which is sitting now at about 93 thousand words. I was shooting for between 90 and 95k, so I’m pretty happy with that. I’m trying something new with this pass, which is to focus on getting ten pages revised a day. Some days I’m doing more, but most days I’m just combing back and forth over the ten pages, slowly. I think the prose is getting stronger for it. I’m currently about a third of the way in, and should be done around the first of next month. And here my goal was to get it done by mid summer! Ah well. Better a late strong draft than a cruddy one on time.

Two other folks I regularly direct vistors to have posted some interesting writing tips lately. Eric Knight has one on a Jackie Collins novel he stumbled across — rather than rolling his eyes he points out some strengths to learn from, and James Van Pelt is teaching some creative writing to high schoolers. I think it’s important to go back and revisit basics — they’re far too easy to forget.

Howard

I mentioned taverns in the last post, particularly stories that start in them. I want to expand on that. It’s not that BG has solemnly declared that a good fantasy story can’t start in a tavern. I’m no fan of those kind of absolute declarations, as though we or anyone else speaks from on high, so I thought I should make myself clear. I spoke to John Hocking about this tavern issue the other day and he summarized my ramblings into some succinct statements; together we managed a coherence I’ll do my best to paraphrase.

In many, many hands, the character type and location are a shorthand way to describe a thing without bothering to fashion any originality. When John O’Neill and I complain about stories starting in taverns, what we mean is a tavern that’s just a cardboard movie set. Here’s the tavern. Here’s the ranger. Here’s the elf. Here’s the wizard. There’s no real invention going on here, no innovation. The tavern and the characers from central casting who’ve walked inside are just ciphers for original work.

Can you start a story in a tavern? Sure! One of the greatest of all sword-and-sorcery stories begins with a scene in a tavern. Well, truthfully it begins with a cinematic overview of what’s going on in the area outside the tavern; the action, though, begins within a tavern… hey, I’ll shut up and let Robert E. Howard work his magic:

Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night. In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarters, and watchmen, well paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport. Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring. Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings. Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.

In one of these dens merriment thundered to the low smoke-stained roof, where rascals gathered in every stage of rags and tatters — furtive cutpurses, leering kidnappers, quick-fingered thieves, swaggering bravoes with their wenches, strident-voiced women clad in tawdry finery. Native rogues were the dominant element — dark-skinned, dark-eyed Zamorians, with daggers at their girdles and guile in their hearts. But there were wolves of half a dozen outland nations there as well. There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame — for men wore steel openly in the Maul. There was a Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard. There was a bold-eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunderman — a wandering mercenary soldier, a deserter from some defeated arm. And the fat gross rogue whose bawdy jestes were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper come up from distant Koth to teach woman-stealing to Zamorians who were born with more knowledge of the art than he could ever attain.

That’s “Tower of the Elephant,” in case you didn’t recognize it, text courtesy of the Del Rey The Coming of Conan collection.

See, all you have to do is create cinematic imagery in an original setting with brilliant prose. Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. Here’s how Lin Carter advised his friend Poke Runyon to bring a tavern scene to life:

The scene in the inn: low rafters, a-dangle with hams and dried onions; roaring fire in huge stone fireplace with roast moofobar turning on creaking spit; sailors with bristling beards and told rings in ears sprawling on low benches wrapped in black cloaks stiff with dry salt; roar of son, scuffle of argument, rich smells of hot steaming meat and spilled grog, etc; wavering orange light splashing over everything, casting huge black flapping shadows on the walls.

(from a letter of Lin Carter to Poke Runyon, published in Poke Runyon’s novel Drell Master.)

This seems excellent advice to me. In short, if you’re going to take your readers somewhere, take them somewhere interesting. Bring the place to life. Even some place as ordinary as a tavern.

Black Gate 11 and Back Issues

Black Gate 11 continues to find its way to mailboxes and bookstores scattered across the globe. If you folks like what you’re seeing, I sure hope you’ll spread the word and tell your friends to subscribe. Send ’em to the Black Gate site. We’re growing in strength, but we still need your support!  Right now Black Gate is running a HUGE back issue sale with ridiculous discounts, so now’s your time to catch up on any issues you’ve missed. The zombies are getting tired of tripping over the boxes of old issues, so we’re clearing the warehouse. Follow the link for details!

Submissions

John and I are back to reading submissions. Interesting peculiarities pop up while you’re working your way through — John encountered a knot of almost a dozen stories that ALL began either IN a tavern or with characters on their way TO a tavern. I think at this point for either one of us to like a story that starts like that it’s going to have to be written by REH, Leiber, Moore, Vance, or some new lass or bloke with those kinds of chops. Odds are that if you’re submitting your first or second story and it starts in a tavern, you don’t yet have those kinds of chops…

My submission peculiarity popped up yesterday as I suddenly realized the next half dozen stories were all more than 9k words long, and that each of them seemed well enough written that I’d probably be reading my way to the end. It’s probably not fair to the authors, but I think, for my own sanity and for the sake of some feeling of progress, I’ll have to intersperse these long stories with shorter ones that were sent in a little later.

Writing

Some months ago I mentioned I was back to the drawing board as to novel revising. Well, on August the 33rd (so declared by my wife, so that I might hit my goal of revising before the end of August) I hammered out a final new 2000 words and completed the new draft. Out with 20 thousand bad, horrible, evil words, and in with 9 thousand completely wonderful brilliant words. Sure. 

Anyway, in the process of writing I tried out a new technique. Regular visitors may recall that one of the things I was on about the last time I brought up my writing was POV threads — because I’d started from a less-than-thorough outline I ended up with a number of issues that have been dogging every revision. One of those was ending up with POVs that started with promise and then… poof! went nowhere. I found myself inventing scenes to justfy the previous POV choices, which led to novel bloat and, well, boring scenes. So I ruthlessly killed entire plot threads, and as  a result ended up revising in a way I’d never done before. For instance, I finished a new pass of the novel’s final scenes long before August 33rd. What I’d been doing since was strengthening a worthwile point of view thread that needed some added scenes. Rather than revising A to Z, start to finish, this time I’ve been thinking more about plucking out threads, be they POV threads, plot or character development revealed by dialogue, or unfolding dialogue, and working on these as they progressed, shifting from thread to thread as needed — one day I’d be working on one of the mysteries that gets slowly unveiled, the next time I’d be working on a character’s voice and backstory that comes out slowly through dialogue over the course of the book. Every writer’s different, but I think that this method really helped me. Maybe it will help you. Heck, maybe you were already using that method and didn’t mention it to me. Shame on you.

Next I’m going to make another pass that will hopefully be more about honing the language, then pass the thing again to a circle of trusted readers and then, fingers crossed, back out to the wider world. I am eager to get started on a number of other writing projects, including penning some more Dabir and Asim stories, writing some more stories featuring some other characters, drafting another book in a different setting, but most importantly revising and then finding a home for a sword-and-sandal piece I wrote with one of my best friends.

That’s all for now!

Howard Andrew Jones

Black Gate 11 is back from the printer and will shortly be on its way to subscribers and quality bookstores. I know the majority of you were delighted with issue 10; well, issue 11 has even MORE heroic fiction than issue 10. It holds more adventure per square inch than Ben Hur (the story, I mean, not Charlton H in a toga). It’s turned up to ELEVEN.

If you’ve been curious about Black Gate there’s no better time to add your name to our list of subscribers. A single issue (like, say, issue ELEVEN) will run you a mere $10.00. No other fantasy magazine is so densely packed, for our issues clock in at a whopping 224 pages, which is an awful lot of content for your dollar. First time visitors to Black Gate are pretty much astonished — it looks more like an anthology than a magazine. A year’s subscription for four issues runs a mere $29.95, which gets you four issues for the price of three.

This time around Martha Wells, James Enge, Iain Rowan, and Mark Sumner all return with big new installments building on the action in Black Gate 10. Join us for the first meeting of Giliead & Ilias, as Morlock the Maker assists a small fraternity of warriors in desperate battle against the dreaded Boneless One, Dao Shi the exorcist comes face to face with an unkillable demon deep in the Underworld, and the Naturalist returns to civilization to warn of the approach of the terror from the interior.

That’s not all — Maria V. Snyder, Peadar Ó Guilín, William I. Lengeman III and many others offer exciting new stories. A dead wizard hires a thief to break into his tower and uncover a deadly secret, a man fights to save his son from a woman whose charms are literally irresistible, and a modern father is inducted into Valhalla after a particularly challenging roller coaster ride. All that plus four pages of Knights of the Dinner Table. It’s 224 pages of the best in modern adventure fantasy!

Follow this link to a sneak peek of Black Gate 11, with story excerpts, artwork, and even a look at “Neglected Stories from the SF Magazines” from Rich Horton.

Hey, it’s good stuff, or I wouldn’t be hawking it! If you’re already a fan, we hope that you’ll spread the word. 

I was just posting about supporting magazines the other day on the SFReader forum. Black Gate writer Peadar Ó Guilín discovered that Adventures of Sword and Sorcery may be rejoining the print world. At this news there was much excitement among writers, who promptly sent off a number of stories to the editor of AS&S. I don’t know whether or not they also sent off subscriptions, though, which is why I posted. Maybe they did — I hope they did. Authors (and I’m in that group myself) tend to look at magazines as PLACES THAT WILL GIVE ME MONEY FOR MY WORDS but they also oughta’ look at them — like the fans of the genres most of them are.

John and I and all our contributors are in this because we love what we do, and we want to keep doing it. I think of Black Gate as a community, and I hope you do as well. We maintain this silly blog and no less than two discussion sites. We provide free web content every week at the Black Gate home (uploaded Sunday) so there’s always plenty to talk about.

It may be that I’ve drifted off topic a bit, or ranted: my point was that if you want a market to live, you ought to support it, be it Black Gate, The Effete Troll, or Golf Digest. Whatever magazine it is that ticks your clock needs your lovin’. Many of them, like Black Gate, have a warm community of folks who are always interested in talking about the kinds of things that bring you to the magazine in the first place.

While I’m on the topic, here are the links to both discussion groups:

Here’s the familiar newsgroup on Sff.Net.

And here’s the new one, with an interface I find easier to navigate, at SFReader. There’s not as much material in our folder here, because it’s new. It  can grow with your support. SFReader is one of the friendliest forums I’ve ever belonged to, and there are plenty of interesting discussions going on in other folders all the time.

Submissions Updates

E-submitters should shortly be finding some responses in their e-mail as I continue to work through the last e-batch of stories I received prior to us closing to submissions.

I had some writing stuff I was going to blather on about, but I’ll save that for another post.

Howard