Black Gate

I put on my official professor disguise and headed in for the start of the semester today. I had a long list of goals I wanted to get done between the end of last semester and start of this one. I hit some of them and made good progress on almost everything.

1. Spend some quality time with the wife and kids — I definitely did that. We had a lot of fun just being together, reading together, playing together, talking together. It was nice.

2. Get back into teaching piano to the kids — here’s where I dropped the ball the worst, for I only managed one piano lesson for one kid between Christmas and now. Whoops!

3. Finish the rough of three chapters of my sequel novel — almost. I have two and 3/4 of a chapter. With luck I should be able to finish chapter 3 this week.

4. Write all my game reviews for Black Gate 12. Almost — at the last minute I added the immense Castle Whiterock to the list of products to review, and I just finished reading it a few days ago. I wrote all the reviews I’d intended to write when I planned out my wish list, but I technically didn’t get everything done.

5. Start prepping two of the three new Harold Lamb collections. Yes — most of the material for Swords From the East is off to the author, Scott Oden, who’ll be writing the introduction. I prepped all of the front and back matter for Swords From the West, and, thanks to some timely assistance from fellow Adventure and Lamb fans got my hands on another copy of a misplaced letter. I should be able to steal enough time Tuesday to make a final proof pass and send the text for Swords From the West off to Bison Books.

6. Revise my syllabus and get it ready for the new semester — yes. My printer died, which made things a little hectic, but I’m here now on campus as the office printer is blasting the thing out.

Bonus activities — I’d hoped to spend some more time teaching my kids some role-playing, courtesy of some Dark City Games adventures, but their spring semester started on January 3. Their vacation was too short, to my mind. I did, though, get in a full day of gaming with most of my rpg friends, and have joined the Halo collective courtesy of E. E. Knight, who’s been teaching me how to blast evil aliens.

Howard

My i key keeps sticking, which results in interesting typos in almost every post…

But on to horses. As someone who is very new to this whole horsecare thing, I never realized before that a stall is a lot like a really big litterbox. When it rains, the horse stands in that litterbox all the time, unless you want to ruin your pasture. This means that the litter box must be cleaned. Frequently.

One of the steps to this stall cleaning involves the laying down of that stall version of kitty litter, sawdust. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of sawdust to fill a stall, or, in my case, three stalls, and the sawdust has to be added to frequently. Here in our watchtower on the Thorncrest peninsula on the hilly ground sloping down to the Sea of Terror, we have five stalls, one of which is given over to holding sawdust. We were running low, so I paid a fellow to dump some more from a small dump truck. It took yours truly some three and a half hours to shovel it into the stall. I’m in decent shape, but the muscles one uses for shovelling aren’t ones I normally use and I’m a bit sore today as a result.

I was talking with John about the irony of these horses at Black Gate’s southern outpost. Here, now, I finally have hands-on, eyewitness experience working with horses every single day, and there isn’t a single horse in the novel series I’m working on, nor will there be, since the whole thing is a sword-and-planet seafaring thing. I used to write pieces with horses all the time. When I next do that, I’ll be able to write of them far more convincingly. Maybe I’ll have Dabir and Asim solve the mystery of a murdered horse. Hah.

Howard

The new year rolls on. I can’t say that it’s started with a successful charge, exactly. My van was damaged in a head-on collision in which I escaped any injury whatsoever. The other driver is sore but okay, but his car is a mess, whereas mine has superficial but expensive damage. His insurance is paying, fortunately for me. In an odd moment of synchronicity one of my sisters had a car accident on the very same day within an hour or two of mine. She, too, is okay, but her car is totalled.

All in all, though, things here in Black Gate’s southern outpost overlooking the Sea of Terror are pretty good. John is working hard on BG 12 and making some very tough decisions on a final handful of subs (we really will get back to all of you, soon!). I am working on reviews for said issue, which includes the onerous task of reading through a big stack of really amazing new gaming products. Man, the material produced these days is just really good. It’ll be hard to find much bad to say about anything I’m seeing this time around, but then I come from the school of review where I just tell it like I see it. If all the products get a big thumbs up it doesn’t mean I’m going soft, it just means that they’re all pretty danged cool.

Speaking of danged cool, I just got Haffner Press’s second Brackett collection (or third, if you count the collection that also reprinted some Edmund Hamilton). It’s glorious. Soon all of Brackett’s short science adventure stories will be in lovely hardbacks, courtesy of Haffner Press. Paizo’s gearing up for some paperback reprints of some of Brackett’s Eric John Stark adventures, which will be a great way to introduce a new generation of readers as to why having hardback sets from the Queen of Space Opera is a must. The borders between sword-and-sorcery, science fiction, and fantasy all blur when you plop down with a Brackett story. All that really matters is how good the stories are.

Howard

 

Black Gate News

The New Year has dawned, bright with promise. Here at Black Gate we have lots of plans we hope to carry to fruition over the course of the year, starting with issue 12 come February. 

All old submissions should be answered at this point. If not, please drop us a line! The caveat is that a few authors who’ve been previously accepted have some things they turned over in the last few months — we’ll be getting to those shortly.

I know there are many of you who are curious about when we’re going to re-open. Well, our first priority was finishing off the submission pile. The next priority is Black Gate 12. We don’t need any distractions from that. So it may be a few months yet before we open to unsolicited subs, and when we do, we will definitely be using reading periods. We’ll keep you posted. 

The Old Year

I’ve been pretty busy and I know I missed out on all kinds of great reading this year. I’d be curious to hear what you all thought were some of the best novel reads of ’07. Most of my favorites were unpublished (or soon to be) manuscripts, but I really enjoyed the historical by Scott Oden, Men of Bronze, and Jack Vance’s The Demon Princes (vol 1), and Arundel. I read the last Harry Potter and I liked it, but I doubt I’ll ever revisit it. Aside from Potter, all of my reading choices were at least a couple of years old, and, in the case of Arundel, multiple decades. About the only modern stuff I read is by friends or Black Gate submitters and writers. I need to branch out more. Hopefully this year I’ll have a wee bit more time.

What were your favorites?

Howard

One thousand words on sequel novel today. I am trying not to be a word count guy on this manuscript so much as a “time put in and making headway” guy (I have discovered that when I write to a set word count it’s easier for me to produce wretched prose than it is when I write to finish a scene), but I’ve been feeling like a lazy slug re: writing for the last week or two and this much progress feels pretty darned good. I keep thinking I’ll reach the end of the chapter, but I’m working with a bunch of sail jargon and inventing conditions my mist sailors have to deal with and I still haven’t reached the chapter climax. Maybe if I could just write all day long…

Howard 

Hands down, my favorite modern sitcom is Scrubs. I enjoy My Name is Earl — though I never seem to catch it anymore — and there are others in previous years I’ve enjoyed, but Scrubs is the family favorite in these parts. It’s absurd and wonderful and cartoony and moving, sometimes all in the same episode. I do think that the last two seasons haven’t hit it out of the park as often, but it’s still a long way from jumping the shark.

I just spent WAY too much time searching YouTube for some of my favorite moments from the series, so the least you can do is waste some time and watch them.

The core of the show is the relationship between best friends J. D. (Zach Braff) and Turk (Donald Faison). Here’s a typical clip of the two of them.

It’s an ensemble show, though, and I really can’t imagine the show without the rest of the players, all of whom make the show. Here’s a few more of them, this time auditioning Turk for an air band. Donald Faison is pretty amazing, and reportedly pulled this off in only two takes.

Here’s another funny ensemble scene with Carla (Judy Reyes) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) and Molly (Heather Graham).

There are frequent bizarre dream sequences or outright lies played out onscreen. Here are two of my favorites.

J. D.’s date with Turk and Carla’s hot nanny.

One of the best moments from any season is when Turk is trying to curry favor by retrieving the chief surgeons briefcase, assisted by “The Todd” (Robert Maschio).

Lastly, what would a clip celebration be without an appearance from Turk and J. D.’s stuffed dog, Rowdy?

Howard

John’s nearly through with all the physical slush, and has a few stories left to look over that I’ve forwarded on to him. With the New Year will come an end to the great slush pile.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, once we re-open, we’re going to use reading periods.

Meanwhile, work has begun on the non-fiction portions of Black Gate 12 and copies of various things we’ll be reviewing are going out to our, well, our reviewers.

I hope all of you are remembering that Black Gate website editor Leo Grin publishes articles on our web site every single Sunday… although there may be a hiatus for a week or two for the holidays. In any case, we’ve readied some good stuff for your reading pleasure in the last few weeks over at www.blackgate.com and hope you’ve been visiting.

Here I’ve just finished my first semester of teaching English composition at one of the local universities. Ironically,  I’d put off getting my masters for years with many excuses, one of them being that I never wanted to teach English comp. That’s ironic because I ended up enjoying myself — by semester’s end I felt like I’d really made a difference and helped the students to grow into better writers. With what I’ve learned this semester, next semester should be even better.

Howard