Copyright Darian Jones
I’m still working madly behind the scenes here, so I’ll keep things simple today. Link Man returns with some creepy suggestions today.
First, 10 Famous “Unsolved Mysteries” that are completely explainable. The one about ghosts and the area of the brain was completely new to me — check it out.
Second, and NOT for the faint of heart because this is pretty grisly, 6 Creepy Places.
And this led me to an even creepier rabbit hole.
I spend an awful lot of time talking about Resistance on this site, at least as Steven Pressfield defines it in The War of Art.
Here’s another look at something important Pressfield had to say on the passion artists bring to their work; a little peek into the kind of stuff we may have to deal with.
In other news, I’m deep in draft mode with many irons in fires, so there may not be any lengthy posts for a while. That recent review took a couple of hours to write, hours that need to be spent drafting. Eventually I hope to get some info up the great hard boiled writing of Wade Miller, but that’s going to have to wait until I have a LITTLE bit of time.
As frequent visitors to my site know, I’m a pretty big fan of Robert E. Howard’s writing. I’m not any kind of a boxing aficionado, but some years back I decided to pick up a copy of The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan, a Zebra paperback with a bevy of Howard’s tales about an American sailor named, wait for it, Dennis Dorgan. We see very little of Dorgan at sea, however, unless he’s just getting off his boat, because all of the tales involve him battling in one kind of boxing ring or another. I never finished the book, so I can’t tell you exactly why I went ahead and invested in the first two books of the complete boxing stories of Robert E. Howard.
Come to think of it, maybe I can.
Half of my paperbacks, just east of my desk.
While on the way back and forth to the Virgin Islands I spent several hours on airplanes and even more hours in layover airports. What better time to whittle down my to-be-read stack? Not owning a Nook or a Kindle, I usually don’t take big modern fantasy books, but slim paperbacks, which slide in and out of the carry-on case a lot more simply. And I have to confess that I feel like I’m making more progress if I knock through a series of shorter books. I DO have a large TBR list, after all.
On the way down I read Dan Marlowe’s The Name of the Game is Death, a riveting noir novel about a guy who’s not quite as much of a sociopath as he seems, set in some semi-tropical places. A haunting and powerful crime drama and character study. Then I tried another Wade Miller, Dead Fall. So far the team of Wade & Miller (two guys under one pseudonym) haven’t let me down. Even their standalones, like this one, are pretty riveting. The mystery was excellent and kept me guessing. Unfortunately, this one had the most “slap you in the face with its ’50s sexism” ending I’ve yet found in their work. Wade & Miller frequently featured strong women, so this was actually a departure for them. I’ll write up a longer article about their work some time soon, because they wrote some overlooked gems.
I woke this morning to discover that someone had posted a long screed railing against something I rather liked right here on one of my recent updates.
I deleted the screed immediately. Not because I disagreed with it, but because of its venomous tone.
Its author is clearly a newcomer to the site and is unlikely to revisit. In case he returns, or that other axe-grinders start showing up, the rules about interacting here are pretty simple.
I’m pleased — nay, super excited — to announce that the first two Dabir and Asim novels, The Desert of Souls and The Bones of the Old Ones, are now available as audio books!
I hope you’ll help spread the word. Both are narrated by the talented Peter Ganim, and you can find them here and here at Audible, or through the other familiar places that distribute Audible books. I’ve only listened to brief excerpts, and I really like how he’s handled Captain Asim. Some day I’ll probably listen to more… but, as an actor often hates to watch his or her performance, I’m not sure how well I can listen to my own words being read aloud. Perhaps if I had a bigger head.
Trunk Bay, on St. John.
Two weeks ago I set a couple of essays to automatically go live on the web site while I was on a tropical adventure with the family. My wife, son, daughter, and I flew down to the American Virgin Islands and met up with my wife’s side of the family, who’d been several times before. They showed us around St. John and St. Thomas and I tried snorkeling for the first time.
Seeing as how I’m writing two Paizo novels set in tropical lands (and waters) the trip couldn’t have come at a better time. I was taking notes every day (relying on my wife to snap the pictures). I’d actually SHARE some of those pictures except that most of them have the family in them, and as regular visitors know, I keep that stuff private.
Normally, it being April first, I’d be pulling some sort of April Fool’s nonsense, but I’m overdue with some announcements so I’m just going to keep this post short and true.
I’d like to announce the winners of my Crossing the Streams contest. The grand prize winner will be announced soon, and some lucky individual will be receiving a free copy of a book from EVERY author in the contest.
Here’s how I described what I wanted to see from my contest entries: “In the body of the e-mail, all you have to do is name your favorite sword-and-sorcery/heroic fiction novel/story that has NOT been made into a movie, and explain why it should happen. You don’t have to go into great detail if you want.”
As promised, I chose one winner at random, and another winner who wrote the most interesting explanation. There were a number of entertaining stories, several interesting sounding books suggested to me that I’d never heard of before, and a number of entries to which I gave a mental fist pump in agreement.
Despite the fact we’ve just returned from a vacation to the Virgin Islands, here at Jones central my children are most excited by the local convention, EvilleCon, which they’ve been attending for the last two days, one dressed as Maes Hughes (from Full Metal Alchemist), and the other as Aloise (from Black Butler). Apart from hanging out with friends and others who love the industry, I think they’ve both been most excited to chat with Vic Mignogna, who they’ve found warm, personable, and passionate about artistic pursuits.
I happen to be a fan of Mignogna’s work myself — he gave voice to Edward Elric, my favorite character in the best anime I’ve yet watched, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, acquiring the American Anime Award for Best Actor in 2007 for his performance. But as if that wasn’t enough, he’s one of the guiding forces behind Star Trek Continues.
Regular readers of the blog may recall the last time I blogged about Star Trek Continues and how much I enjoyed seeing what felt very much like a lost episode from the original series of my favorite show. (I likewise blogged about it over at Black Gate.) Well, when my son returned from EvilleCon last night he told me he’d seen part of another Star Trek Continues episode, “Lolani,” which was released in February. Somehow I had missed the release!
It’s a lot easier for me to be generous about other genres than it used to be. I’m trying to decide if that has something to do with me mellowing with age, or if it’s because there’s a whole lot more sword-and-sorcery available than there was ten years ago … or if it’s simply that I don’t feel shut out anymore now that I’m writing sword-and-sorcery stories for a living.
Fantasy seems a lot more popular even among the mainstream readers than it used to be, although the dividing line between fantasy and sword-and-sorcery still seems pretty blurry. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to define the difference, but I often feel like I’m shouting in the wind. The common conception remains that if it’s got swords and magic, it must be sword-and-sorcery, regardless of pacing or the focus of the plot. But let’s set another discussion of sword-and-sorcery aside for the nonce and focus instead on genre prejudice.
I think a lot of science fiction and fantasy writers and readers feel like low faces on the totem pole because their favorite fiction is sneered at by people in the know. A while ago, I started to realize that MOST writers felt like their genre was being kicked to the curb. Horror writers have been going through a hard time now for a good long while. YA writers, well, they “only write YA,” and God help the urban fantasy people, whom are in fashion to be hated. As writers and readers, we all turn up our noses at all the things we find wrong with some one else’s genre. Really, that’s all that’s happening with the literary criticism of genre work. It’s easy for us genre people to detail the things we find annoying about literary fiction, but it turns out lit fic writers feel harried themselves.