Black Gate – Page 934 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Economics of Short Fiction Writing

Saturday, June 14, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 4 comments

I am a writer, and have been for some time, although I live on a busy full-time job and I only started getting paid for writing in 2006. I feel like I had a long training wheel stage, although maybe because I’m only comparing myself to my expectations. My dreams of writing as a living, like those of many, started when I was a teenager.

There’s a lot of talk out in the world about making it as a writer, whether through traditional publishing, self-publishing, large press, or small press: how much marketing is needed, how much it costs, and whether it has any effect. It becomes a bit dizzying and pretty much bereft of data.

One bright light of hard data is Jim Hines’s yearly “Writing Income” on his blog. Hines is a fantasy writer and he’s blogged very frankly about his income since 2008, partly inspired by a John Scalzi post at that time. Scalzi admits he’s an outlier, but many of the financial points he makes are very good for anyone, including me.

The yearly Hines blog posts are also very instructive for anyone hoping to make a living as a writer. If you’re thinking (or dreaming) of making a living as a writer through the traditional publishing route, these kinds of posts are super-important for you to read. Here they are by year:

Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence Wins the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Award

Saturday, June 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Mark Lawrence’s Emperor of Thorns, the final volume of The Broken Empire trilogy, has won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2013.

The David Gemmell Legend Award (DGLA) is a fan-voted award administered by the DGLA. This is its sixth year; it was first granted in 2009.

The DGLA also recognizes the top debut fantasy of the year and best cover art. This year, the Morningstar Award for Best Debut Novel went to Brian McLellan for Promise of Blood and Jason Chan received the Ravenheart Award for Best Cover Art for his cover for Emperor of Thorns.

The nominees for the 2014 Legend award also included The Daylight War by Peter V Brett, The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch, A Memory of Light by Brandon Sanderson & Robert Jordan, and War Master’s Gate by Adrian Tchaikovsky. See the complete list here.

The previous winners of the award were:

Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves (2009)
Graham McNeill’s Empire: The Legend of Sigmar (2010)
Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings (2011)
Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear (2012)
Brent Weeks’s The Blinding Knife (2013)

Complete details are available at the DGLA website.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Future Treasures: Path of Smoke by Bailey Cunningham

Saturday, June 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Bailey Cunningham’s Pile of Bones, the first novel of Parallel Parks, came out in July of last year and introduced us to Wascana Park, which transforms into the magical kingdom of Anfractus after midnight, and the group of ordinary university students who step inside and become a company of heroes — warriors, bards, and archers in a real-life role-playing game. (See our write-up from last August here.)

Now in the second volume, the stakes are raised and the team must learn to function without one of their most important members. Path of Smoke will be released late next month, which gives you plenty of time to get caught up with the first volume!

The company of heroes has thwarted the plan of the power-hungry basilissa to conquer Anfractus, but not without a cost. Andrew’s character, Roldan, died, leaving him cut off from the mystical realm without any memory of its existence. If the others reveal the park’s magical nature to Andrew, his banishment will become permanent. So they must hide their nighttime adventures — and hope that his memory returns.

Pursued by the basilissa’s forces, the rest of the group keeps a low profile in Anfractus until they uncover an unholy alliance between their enemy and the silenoi, satyrlike creatures who hunt humans — an alliance that threatens to cross the barrier into the real world.

And while his friends struggle to prevent an invasion in both worlds, Andrew receives a visitor determined to restore his memory of Anfractus by leading him down a very dark path…

Path of Smoke will be published by Ace Books on July 29, 2014. It is 304 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $5.99 for the digital version.

Doug Draa on Weird Tales and Keeping the Brand Alive: The Paperback Years

Friday, June 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Long before Doug Draa became an occasional blogger for Black Gate, I was a reader of his blog, Uncle Doug’s Bunker of Horror, which we’ve celebrated before. I especially enjoyed his habit of using any excuse whatsoever — and I do mean any excuse — to post luscious high-res images of countless beautiful old paperbacks. Reading Uncle Doug’s Bunker was like browsing a superb used bookstore (without any money).

As Doug has become busier with other projects, including becoming an Online Editor for Weird Tales, he’s been less and less able to keep up his blog. So I was delighted to see that he’s now started to post at the Weird Tales site. His recent articles include “The 15 most entertaining Horror Films from the 1980s,” “Four Decades of the Lovecraftian Aesthetic in Paperback,” “Lin Carter’s Weird Tales” and more fun stuff like that (see a complete archive here.)

On May 25, Doug posted one of his best recent articles, continuing his series on 90 Years of Weird: Keeping the Brand Alive: The Paperback Years. Doug surveys three decades of paperback anthologies reprinting WT fiction, from the death of the pulp magazine in September 1954 through its rebirth in 1988, generously illustrated with nearly three-dozen high-res scans. Here’s a quick snippet:

Lin Carter has a special place among the ranks of Weird Tales preservationists and revivalists. During the late 1960s and early 70s he edited and reprinted many H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith collections as part of his Adult Fantasy Series published by Ballantine. Mr. Carter never failed to sing praises to Weird Tales from the roof tops in his numerous introductions to the collections in this series. At the beginning of the 1980s Mr. Carter even went as far as to revive Weird Tales in paperback format for four issues. This incarnation wasn’t a darling of the critics, but I found it to be enjoyable and true to the original vision of the magazine… Thank you Mr. Carter, I drink to your Shade!

See the complete article here.

Kirkus Looks at Andre Norton’s Young Adult Novels

Friday, June 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Andrew Liptak has written a fine series of pulp and classic SF retrospectives SF at Kirkus Reviews over the last few months. In his latest, which he introduces at his website, he looks at the often-neglected YA novels of the great Andre Norton:

Norton wrote largely for what we now call the YA audience: teenagers, with fantastical adventures throughout numerous worlds and times. She was also largely ignored or dismissed for writing ‘children’s literature’, which is a shame, because it’s likely that she had as great an influence on the shape of the modern genre as Robert Heinlein, [whose] Juvenile novels attracted millions of fans to new worlds. Norton was the same, and influenced countless readers and writers for decades. It’s fitting that the major SF award for YA fiction is titled The Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Go read the entire article here. Or have a look at some of Andrew’s previous articles, including:

Astounding Science Fiction
Galaxy Science Fiction
Donald A. Wollheim and the Ace Double
The Meteoric Rise and Fall of Gnome Press

Digging further, I note that Andrew has also published blog posts on Leigh Brackett, Heinlein and Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Francis Stevens, C.L. Moore, Judith Merril, Margaret St. Clair, Katherine MacLean, and Anne McCaffrey, all at the Kirkus site. How did I miss all that? Clearly, I have some catching up to do!

New Treasures: Trail of Cthulhu: Eternal Lies

Friday, June 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I haven’t played Call of Cthulhu or its sister game Trail of Cthulhu in a long, long time. But that’s okay, because I still enjoy reading the fabulously creative adventures.

One of the best — and certainly one of the most elaborate and ambitious — I’ve come across in some years is Eternal Lies from Pelgrane Press. A massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, Eternal Lies is packed full of surprises and adventure.

I originally covered it here when it was first released last year (see my original post for more details), but this week I finally got my hands on a copy. I was not disappointed, even after the lengthy wait.

Trail of Cthulhu is a standalone game of Lovecraftian horror, and one of Pelgrane Press’s most successful and acclaimed products. Set in the 1930s, it uses Robin D. Laws’s GUMSHOE system, which is also the basis for several other successful games, including The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, and Mutant City Blues. Now in its third print run, Trail of Cthulhu won two Ennie awards for Best Rules and Best Writing, as well as an honorable mention for Product of the Year.

It is superbly supported, with some of my favorite recent RPG releases, including Rough Magicks, Bookhounds of London, Arkham Detective Tales, The Armitage Files, and two omnibus adventure collections: Out of Space and Out of Time.

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Review: They Say the Sirens Left the Seas

Friday, June 13, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 1 comment

The very talented darkly-humored poet James Hutchings returns with his third collection, They Say the Sirens Left the Seas. I previously reviewed his first offering, The New Death and Others, back in 2011. This new collection offers readers more of what they have come to expect from this eccentric and highly original voice.

Hutchings is just as much at home spinning fables as he is dishing up Gothic treats or plunging into the ridiculous with no consideration of social conventions. All three of his excellent collections are available at Amazon as eBooks or direct from the Smashwords website for download for less than a dollar apiece.

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Dawn Duellist Society: 20 Years of an Urban Fantasy

Thursday, June 12, 2014 Comments 3 comments

DDS — …an international Historical European Martial Arts movement.

Twenty years ago this week, an odd assortment of young men gathered in — I kid you not — a pagan temple beneath a crystal and incense shop on Edinburgh’s Morningside Road.

Though the walls were covered in murals of gods and goddesses, these fellows weren’t here to worship; this was just the kind of venue you end up with if you’re plugged into the local Bohemian scene. No, they were here to found the Dawn Duellists Society, devoted to studying the Historical European Martial Arts.

And fighting. And drinking. And, before the world got twitchy and trigger happy, sneaking into the park to fight duels at dawn (hence the name). A couple of years later, the club got its venue in a Gothic church hall (which is when I joined ostensibly for a year so I could write good fight scenes… that was about seventeen years ago) and has been meeting there ever since.

Believe it or not, even then the Dawn Duellists were actually part of an international Historical European Martial Arts movement.

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In Praise of Paperbacks

Thursday, June 12, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 17 comments

First, a disclaimer. The Luddite rant that follows is my personal view only. I acknowledge the many benefits and advantages of electronic reading devices and to all of the people (many of them dear friends of mine) who would never think of parting with their Kindle, iPad, Nook, or whatever, this is in no way a judgment or condemnation of you or your reading preferences. It is simply about me and my preferences. Now, let the rant begin.

I teach elementary school, and when I began that job, ten years ago, I was faced with the “problem” of what to do with my summers. Yardwork? Get the garage in order? Any of the thousand other home projects that clamor for attention during the working week and never get done for lack of time or energy? Attractive as these options are, I quickly hit upon the happy idea of passing my summers in the same way I did as an adolescent, in reading through as many SF/fantasy paperbacks as I possibly could in the allotted time. Though age does take its toll, and gone are the days when I had the stamina to read The Chessmen of Mars or Have Spacesuit, Will Travel through in a single sitting, as I did when I was thirteen, I still manage to do all right. The choice to spend my extended vacations reliving those great days of blissful, carefree reading is one of best I’ve ever made.

A couple of summers ago, having just finished one book (I think it was one of E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra novels), I looked around for my next read. There on the shelf was a paperback copy of The Stars Are Ours by Andre Norton. My copy is a 40 cent paperback, published by Ace in 1954. The book is great fun and I quickly zipped through it.

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Future Treasures: Grudgebearer by J.L. Lewis

Thursday, June 12, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

J.F. Lewis is the author of the Void City novels, about a vampire who runs a strip club and suffers from short-term memory problems.

With Grudgebearer, the first volume of the Grudgebearer trilogy, Lewis turns to more classic second-world fantasy with a setting full of action, adventure, and carnivorous elves…

Kholster is the first born of the practically immortal Aern, a race created by the Eldrennai as warrior-slaves to defend them from the magic-resistant reptilian Zaur. Unable to break an oath without breaking their connection with each other, the Aern served the Eldrennai faithfully for thousands of years until the Sundering. Now, the Aern, Vael, and Eldrennai meet every hundred years for a Grand Conjunction to renew their tenuous peace.

While the tortures of slavery remain fresh in Kholster’s mind, most of the rest of the world has moved on. Almost six hundred years after the Sundering, an Eldrennai prince carelessly breaks the truce by setting up a surprise museum exhibit containing sentient suits of Aernese armor left behind, never to be touched, lest Kholster kill every last Eldrennai. Through their still-existing connection with their ancient armor, the Aern know instantly, and Kholster must find a way to keep his oaths, even those made in haste and anger. While Kholster travels to the Grand Conjunction with his Freeborn daughter and chosen successor Rae’en, his troops travel by sea, heading for war.

Grudgebearer will be published on September 2 by Pyr Books. It is 400 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent articles on upcoming books here.