Monthly Archives: February 2014

Day of Discovery

As most of my regular visitors probably know, I released an e-book that collected many of my Dabir and Asim stories a couple of years ago. E-books don’t generally receive the same level of interest, promotion, or reviews as printed books (unless lightning strikes) so I was surprised and pleased when I discovered a new review of The Waters of Eternity had gone up over at Dear Author.

I’ve been hard at work on other books and other tales, but Dabir and Asim are near and dear to my heart, as you could probably guess. It’s been a real pleasure to see a new story about them become available in Kaiju Rising, and between that and this new review (and the fact that I’m often thinking about their further adventures even while in the midst of some other writing), I was inspired to dig through my Dabir and Asim folder this morning and look at a few odds and ends.

Link Day

I’m hard at work on several not-so-secret writing things, so I will use today to simply point you to some other cool stuff on the Internet.

Fellow original Star Trek fans should see what Alex Bledsoe has to say after re-watching the first season.

Fellow writers ought to see some words of wisdom the aforementioned Alex has about writing action scenes.

Lastly, I have just placed an order for a book written by an old friend, Marta Pelrine-Bacon. I can hardly wait to see what she’s concocted!

 

Welcome

Judging by the numbers, I’m getting a big influx of new visitors here. My blog’s been running for a number of years at this point, and it might be a challenge to get the lay of the land without a whole lot of poking around. Even frequent visitors might not have dug deep enough to find some of my favorite posts.

That’s why I thought I’d take most of today’s post space to show you around.

Fafhrd in the Mail

It’s been a busy, productive week, with some nice surprises.

First, I wanted to point everyone to the new contest on my site to win a free copy of one of my books, and, potentially, a free copy of books by many other authors. Go take a look!

Next, I wanted to share a surprise that appeared in my mail the other day. I think I mentioned that I have been greedily reading through a long list of hardboiled fiction recommended by my friend John Chris Hocking. I sold off a parcel of comics and books via e-bay and my friend Wayne of Wayne’s Books to fund my hard boiled exploration. (A lot of this stuff can’t be found in libraries, and has been out of print since the ’40s or ’50s. It’s hard to come by except through used book sites like AddAll).

So I wasn’t startled Tuesday when I had packages in the mail. I opened each one, eager to see what lay lie within, and lo and behold, out of the blue Scott Lynch had sent me a stack of DC Fafhrd and  Gray Mouser comics. For those of you not in the know, DC had a brief run of these in the early ’70s. Being the huge Lankhmar fan that I am, I have been curious about them for ages, but never thought to see one, much less hold or own one. Now, thanks to Scott’s generous gift, I’ve got almost the whole series. Have I mentioned he’s just a cool cat and one of my favorite people?

Fargo Returns

Or, at least, continues to receive some of the attention he deserves courtesy of a new line of e-reprints. A new review went live the other day at The Post Modern Pulp Blog (maintained by the talented Jack Badelaire, who uses his film degree about as well as I use mine).

I’ve talked about Fargo several times on my own blog, probably most prominently in this post, if you want the lowdown on why I hold the character in such high regard. But if you don’t have time for a long essay or for link hopping, I’ll give you the summary. Ben Haas, writing as John Benteen, created a men’s adventure series in the ’70s about a globe-trotting mercenary, earning his trade in the days before the Great War. It’s high octane, lean and muscular, and packs more power than you’d think formula fiction ever capable of. And it IS formula, but as my friend Chris Hocking says re: Haas,  there’s cheeseburgers, and then there’s cheeseburgers whipped up by a master chef.

Kaiju, Dabir and Asim

The anthology Kaiju Rising is now available as an e-book (for $4.99), with physical copies to be made available soon. It’s chock full of stories about giant monsters drafted by some talented writers, many of whom are my friends. But even if you’re not typically interested in giant monsters, this anthology features the newest Dabir and Asim story, “The Serpent’s Heart.” I hope you’ll try it out, and spread the word!

Link Day!

While I am proud to have earned a black belt in karate, my first real schooling in manly fight moves came from Captain James T. Kirk. Most of his best are cataloged here. Get thee over there and soak up some storied wisdom.

Have you heard about Viking sunstones, and how they might have been used to navigate across vast distances even when the sun wasn’t visible? Well, I hadn’t. Check out this cool link.

Notwithstanding that a fox broke into our hen house a couple of years ago and killed almost two dozen chickens, I still think this fox video is adorable.

Primeval Thule

I haven’t signed up for as many kickstarters in the last few months, primarily because I haven’t had any big book checks in the last few months. (That’s the nature of publishing — feast or famine, usually with emphasis on the latter.) But one of the ones I DID sign on for was Primeval Thule, and I drop by the web site every now and then to see how it’s coming along.

It sounds like exactly the kind of campaign world I’d want to set a game in or write a story about. This morning I visited the work-in-progress to see if there were any new updates and discovered the tentative TOC. Check out the titles of the cities alone, which just breathes of evocative world building: “Kal-Zinan, City of the Iron Gate” or “Lands of the Long Shadow.” That’s the stuff. I’m really looking forward to this one.

February Update

February’s been pretty good to us here at the Jones homestead. I’m finishing up the drafting of the longest book I’ve ever written, and, as I think I’ve mentioned, with it divided into different parts some of them are finely polished and some are still in “stage play” format. (That means that I’ve got dialogue and a couple of  descriptive tags dropped in to key scenes.) This new method sure does seem to be working well. I think I’ll use the same method on my Paizo Pathfinder books when I start on them next week.