Yearly Archives: 2013

Writer’s Desk

Here at Jones central I spent a long weekend putting my study into complete order. It had been converted into my mother’s convalescent room while she was staying with us for about five months, and between that and all the paperwork from her hospital stay AND the usual clutter, it took a couple of days for me to get it working again.

Now, though, I have everything filed, and I’ve culled my bookshelves. The desk itself is clean of all clutter that doesn’t need something done with it, pronto. Chief among that pile of “stuff to be done with” are the reviews for some excellent products I received for review at GenCon. I sent a number of nifty looking books on to John O’Neill, but beside me are four books that I’m particularly fond of and which I’ll be mentioning both here and at Black Gate in more detail in the coming weeks.

Home Repair Man

That’s been me the last week or more. Today I have to drive in and get some new tires for the truck. Still, despite all this I’m getting some good writing work done. A new short story has been green-lighted for Paizo, and it looks more and more like the stretch goals of Kaiju Rising will be unlocked… which means that as long as people keep pledging support, I should be included on the table of contents for the anthology! (Which FURTHER means I really need to finish this new Dabir and Asim story!)

I have a handful of reviews to write and I should finally be taking those live over on the Black Gate site this week.

For now, though, I must away!

 

Spoiled by Water

There’s nothing like going without running water in the house to remind a person how much we modern humans take for granted. Or to remind me, at least. The water line to our house busted over the weekend, so much of the last few days has involved me digging a really big hole (to access the water pipes) and then filling said hole when the job was completed. I was assisted by another neighbor who wandered over with a small back hoe, and a kind city utility guy who advised us about how best to line things up. If not for the digging and the reassurance from the other gentleman so that we continued digging, I would have been at it for far longer. My faith in humanity went up several notches, because neither man was under any obligation to donate so much time.

The actual repair took our plumber just a little over an hour, but if he’d had to dig that hole the cost would have been over a thousand dollars… and the job would have been delayed, because he didn’t have time in his schedule to dig such a hole, but had time to swing in and replace pipe.

Out here in the country we aren’t in easy walking distance of other water sources (except, of course, for the Sea of Monsters, and there’s always the danger of getting dragged in by a tentacle if you get too close). Our nearest neighbor was away, but fortunately some old friends live only a ten minute drive off. We took over a couple of big coolers (and they loaned us another) and the buckets our horses drink out of, and filled ’em all up. We ate out rather than cooking and getting more dishes dirty. We washed from basins that we filled via recycled two liter bottles filled from those coolers.

To the Rescue

We’ve been dealing with some pretty depressing family health news around here over the last year. As I was driving away from one of our visits to see my mom in the hospital my teenaged son decided to lift my spirits with a music track so ludicrous I was soon crying with laughter.

I now bequeath this track to you, to lift your spirits when YOU are feeling low.

Here, then, is the theme to the Wonder Woman TV show. Ah, how many ways do I love thee, Wonder Woman show theme?

1. You begin with an explosion, and grow less subtle going forward.

2. You have a splendidly catchy, driving bass line.

3. How about your blaring brass section that knows just when to over-emphasize something dramatic?

a. And how about the great tuba part between the second and third verse?

b. Then there’s the melodic motif that adorns every verse. Fabulous.

Link Day

It’s Link Day again here at Jones central, as I’m hard at work battling mountains of prose.

First, a fascinating but grisly look at some skeletons dripping with jewels found in catacombs and churches in Europe. Seriously, if you’re creeped out by skeletons and tombs, don’t follow the link. As an added bonus, the captions are perhaps among the worst ever written, but not quite so bad as to be actually amusing. They just repeat, word-for-word, what is said in the accompanying text.

Second, some ruined cities, as revealed at I09. Some are more mysterious than others, but it is worth a read.

Third, and completely unrelated to the theme I have going with Indiana Jones-like stuff, a great post from author Chuck Wendig on 25 ways to revise your work.

My work here is done. Link Man, away!

Writer’s Festival

If any of you are in the Southern Indiana region, I’ll be part of a nifty little Writer’s Festival held at the Knox County Public Library on Saturday, November 2nd. Margaret McMullan, National Author Winner of the 2011 Glick Indiana Authors Award, is giving the keynote address and leading a workshop on “Writing What you Think You Know But Should Know Better” from 9-11.

She’s followed by James Alexander Thom, National Author Winner of the 2009 Glick Indiana Authors Award, who will be making a round table presentation on “The Art & Craft of Writing Historical Fiction” from 11-12.

Sarah Alderfer, Professor of English at Vincennes University, leads another panel from 1-2 on “Your Dreams of Becoming a Writer: Making it a Reality.”

And then I wrap things up with a presentation on “Becoming a Published Author” from 1-2.

The schedule’s a little tentative now — there may be gatherings for coffee, and there will be opportunities for book signing — but registration will open soon. It’s $30.00 for the day, and details will go live soon at the Knox County Public Library site.

 

A Good Rest

I haven’t felt this good in years. I feel so healthy that I want to leap in the air and kick my heels. Heck, I’m so well rested I can even do it. And there’s the key phrase: well-rested.

I’ve been suffering from sleep apnea. I don’t believe I’ve ever talked about it on the blog before because as medical conditions go, it beats the heck out of most of them. Who am I to complain when some of my friends and relatives have diabetes, or are struggling with Alzheimer’s… or are dying of cancer? Annoying as it is to be hooked up to a machine each night, at least I have something manageable that isn’t killing me. As long as it’s treated, sleep apnea isn’t dangerous.

Except that for a good long while it hasn’t been as treatable as it should have been. Around the month I got my book contract for The Desert of Souls I remember being thankful not just for the contract but for the timing of the moment, because I didn’t think I had the energy to write in my spare time any more. Over the last years if I’d had to write in my spare time, I wouldn’t have had the strength. I was convinced that my waning reserve in the evenings was a result of me simply getting older, and that the sleep apena regimen had improved my life as much as it could.

Kaiju Rising

Shh. So I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I’m one of the authors who will be unlocked if funding is met and exceeded in a new Kickstarter. There’s at least three of us mysterious contributors (I won’t tell you the identity of the others) who will be revealed if Kaiju Rising meets its stretch goals.

As it’s an anthology for monster stories, you can darned well bet that I’m drafting a new Dabir and Asim story for the collection. I’m pretty busy with other stories right now, but it was such a great looking assembly that I couldn’t stand to pass up the opportunity.

The project is being published by J.M. Martin, Tim Marquitz and Nick Sharps (the latter two serving double-shift as editors), illustrated by Dan Howard, and will feature stories by Larry Correia, Peter Clines, James Lovegrove, Erin Hoffman, James Maxey, Jaym Gates, Timothy W. Long, Mike MacLean, Natania Barron, Joshua Reynolds, David Annandale, Clint Lee Werner, Jonathan Wood,  Gini Koch, Paul Genesse, Edward M. Erdelac, Samuel Sattin, Bonnie Jo Stufflebean, and Peter Rawlik.

The first stretch goal will include additional internal art from Robert Elrod and Chuck Lukacs, and the next three stretch goals are authors. I’m not sure which of those three I am, but I’m hoping you’ll join in the Kickstarter and unlock my story. The full details can be found here.

 

Conan and The Fan Fic Writers of Doom

If I didn’t love the writing of Robert E. Howard I would probably never have bothered with any Conan pastiche. As a matter of fact, those Conan novels on store shelves in the ’70s and ’80s made me so skeptical of Conan that I didn’t try Robert E. Howard’s fiction until years later. I wrongly assumed that because the series looked cheap and mass produced that Howard’s writing would sound that way. (Robert E. Howard, of course, had NOTHING to do with the mass marketing of his character, having been dead for decades before that marketing was carried out by other hands.)

You can fit the sum total of all the Conan that Howard wrote (including some fragments and rejected stories) into one large hardback. That’s not a lot of fiction about such a great character, and so for decades people have been trying to create new tales of adventure starring Conan, mostly because they wanted MORE!

What makes those stories pastiche instead of fan fic, I suppose, is that many of these writers were paid to write it and the result was distributed widely. You would assume that meant that the work was well-edited and had some kind of consistency, but a lot of people, me among them, would tell you you’re wrong.

Conan and the Emerald Lotus

THIS is one of my favorite Conan books. You’ll note that it is not by Robert E. Howard. Howard himself actually wrote only one full-length Conan novel, as Conan was aimed at Weird Tales, a short story market. (If you’re THAT curious, you can go read up on REH at various sites.) I will add that it is my favorite pastiche Conan, ever, much as I greatly enjoy some of the John Maddox Roberts Conan novels. And it’s better than Karl Edward Wagner’s Conan novel The Road of Kings (often the default “best pastiche” answer) and ANY Conan novel by Robert Jordan.

Conan and the Emerald Lotus was written by John Chris Hocking about twenty years ago. A big fan of Robert E. Howard, noir, and Weird Tales, Hocking wrote Emerald Lotus and sent it in, unagented… and because it was so danged good the publisher snapped it up and printed it. (In case you’re wondering, that NEVER happens.) The second Conan novel by Hocking, as it turns out, is even better, and L. Sprague de Camp relayed to Hocking that de Camp and his wife were so eager to see how it unfolded that they sat together on the floor of their study turning the pages. Conan and the Living Plague, unfortunately, never saw the light of day even though it was intended to re-launch the Conan line, because the purchasers of the line seemed uninterested in anything that had come before.