Monthly Archives: August 2014

Strange Days

…or, possibly, strange careers. Like writing. I realized the other day that while I’ve been writing like a madman for at least twelve months, the three books I’ve been working on won’t be seen by readers for at least another twelve months.

Any fan who’s not visiting my blog to check up on my activities will likely assume I’ve given it up or am out of ideas. And yet I’ve written two books in the last year and am nearly through with a third. After it gets a polish I’ll start work on the next one, which will mean I’ll have been working on four separate books over the course of a year. Not too shabby, really, when it took me a year and a half to write The Bones of the Old Ones. Remember that one? No? It got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and made the Best of 2012 Barnes and Noble fantasy releases list, and had heaps of good reviews, I swear. Alas, it doesn’t seem like anyone apart from the reviewers and some loyal fans ever picked it up, at least judging from the small number of Amazon reviews. Sniff.

The Mighty Ki-Gor, Tarzan’s Forgotten Rival

In graduate school one of my guilty pleasures was reading some pretty mindless escapist adventure. From the middle to the end of semesters things could get more than a little hectic, what with all the projects and research papers, and it was nice to be able to just pick up a story and be entertained for a while by my old friend Ki-Gor. But who’s Ki-Gor? A Tarzan clone? And how on Earth (and why?) did I get interested in reading about him?

Some years back, at Pulpcon, I was wandering around the dealer room with writer John C. Hocking and sword-and-sorcery scholar Morgan Holmes. I stopped to chuckle at a ridiculous-looking pulp cover on display at one of the booths. Jungle Stories was emblazoned upon the masthead. Below, a beautiful and clearly evil dark-haired woman loomed over a bronzed jungle-man bound to an altar. Morgan said, “That’s actually a pretty good story.”