Archives: Uncategorized

Opinions Wanted

I’m almost done moving into this new web theme. I’m fairly pleased with the decorating scheme of the new site, and the organization of the various pages. I’m always up for constructive feedback, though. Are there features you’d like to see on the site? Do you want better access to older articles, or the blog roll? Let me know.

Obviously this site is here in part to promote my writing, but I never want to sound like all I do is shrilly promote my work. I’d get pretty bored doing that, and I think that kind of thing is deadly dull to read. As a result,  in amongst news about what I’m working on and how it’s going, there will also be posts about ancient Arabia or other history topics, old adventure stories and writers, genre, pulp, sword-and-sorcery, the craft of writing, the publishing industry, and gaming. If my knee fully heals maybe I’ll finally get back to working toward my second degree black belt and start talking about karate.

Mindjammer

I wanted to give a shout out for the talented Sarah Newton, whose first novel, Mindjammer, has just been released. I stumbled on Sarah’s work as an RPG writer when she helped bring the Starblazer Adventures RPG to life and was blown away by the scope of her ideas and the easy and exciting way she articulated them. Here’s the official cover copy for her first novel:

Help Scott Lynch Help Steven Brust and Emma Bull

I just learned today that two industry treasures are involved in alarming medical procedures. Fortunately, another industry treasure is lending a hand.

The talented Scott Lynch is running a fund raiser right now for two industry veterans. Steven Brust is about to undergo surgery to implant a heart difibrilator on August 22nd, and Emma Bull underwent a thyroidectomy on August 8th.

I’d like to perpetuate the myth that all of us writers get a gold plated limo and a pirate chest of gold when we get our book deals, but the truth is that it’s not exactly an industry where most practitioners are rolling in cash. Scott is raising funds through a kickstarter project that features some pretty nifty prizes. I hope you’ll drop by his site and think seriously about lending a hand.

 

 

 

Under Construction

This week I’m going to be experimenting with a new blog look, so some of my sidebars and links may or may not be working for a while. Hopefully I’ll have everything working properly over the course of the week. It’s high time I updated my links and blog roll in any case!

I hope you’ll be patient…

My Query Letter

So here’s the point where I’m supposed to sit back and provide great advice about how to write a query letter to get your book into the hands of an editor or agent so that you can fulfill your lifelong dream.

Unfortunately for you, I skipped that step. I can’t tell you how to draft a query letter. I can tell you how to best craft an elevator pitch, and I’m getting a fair idea about how to sell a synopsis, but query letters — it just didn’t work out that way for me.

It was my friend Scott Oden, already a writer with St. Martin’s Thomas Dunne Books imprint, who introduced me directly to his editor, and then the manuscript got sent in. So my contract wasn’t the result of query letter at all.

The Best of Jungle Stories

Over at Black Gate today I waxed on about the peculiar glories of the adventures of Ki-Gor in old Jungle Stories magazine. My friend Charles Rutledge was posting about them a few months ago over at his web site, Singular Points. My main article on Ki-Gor and why he’s worth reading can be found at Black Gate. Here, though, is my list of the best of the run, in no particular order. See for yourself just how many lost civilization, priestesses, and beasts make an appearance!

In the Black Gate article I neglected to mention just how much fun even a list of Ki-Gor titles was, but then there’s also the delicious purple of the blurbs that introduce each story. Here are a couple of samples. First, from “The Monkey Men of Loba-Gola:”

Ki-Gor, White Lord of the Jungle, tracked a treachery spoor to the Forest of Treasure, challenging lovely, mad Zoanna and her evil Master. But a devil’s trap was waiting. Ki-Gor faced a battle no man might win… against Nihilla Ati, the Invisible Vampire of Death!

August Update and New Review

I was delighted to stumble across a glowing new review of The Desert of Souls earlier this week. You can find it here, over on a great looking site titled Podwits. The Desert of Souls got singled out as the starting entry in a new column about “great escapist literature.” I would pull out a few of the quotes talking about how awesome the book is, but, you know, I’m humble and all.

I’m super pleased that The Desert of Souls is still getting nice write-ups almost a year and a half after its initial printing. Here’s hoping the next one does as well!

In other news, I’m nearly at the two-thirds mark on the rough draft of the third Dabir and Asim novel, The Maiden’s Eye. It feels odd to be so far along with number three when number two is still five months from release, but it also feels pretty good. I don’t think there will be nearly as long a delay between the second and third book as there has been between the first and second.

Each book is a little different. Book three is a little longer and more intricate. I’ve often told writing students that there are many ways up the mountain, and that each project may require a slightly different route to the summit. And so I’m going to try something different this time because my gut tells me I should.

Celebrating the Work of Ben Haas

John C. Hocking introduces me to some of the best fiction I read, although in the case of Ben Haas westerns, it was via sword-and-sorcery scholar Morgan Holmes. I don’t believe anyone is more knowledgeable about sword-and-sorcery than Morgan Holmes. But not just sword-and-sorcery, heroic fiction in general. Hocking’s no slouch himself, though, and some years back when I was hanging out with those two at Pulpcon I had the chance to discover adventure westerns years before I got interested. I remember leaving the convention with Hocking and Holmes and Stephen Haffner (all these h’s in the last name of friends is coincidence, I swear) and dropping by a few great used bookstores. Holmes and Hocking eventually wandered over to the western section. Me, that stuff wasn’t of interest. Westerns?

I suppose I should be generous to myself. With so much sword-and-sorcery fiction still unread by me at that time I know I was trying to stay focused in my interest and research. But I also know that I had some prejudice against reading a western, even though I used to watch and enjoy westerns with my dad. I had about as much interest in reading cowboy stories as I had setting down with a stack of Harlequin romances. Anyway, during that trip I snagged a fine hardback copy of Earth Giant, one of my favorite historical adventure novels, and Hocking pointed me toward some paperbacks by some guy named Richard Meade and another one by Quinn Reade, ’70s sword-and-sorcery novels I’d never heard of. “They’re both by the same guy, Ben Haas,” Hocking informed me. He also explained that many westerns played with the same kind of themes I liked in sword-and-sorcery, although, as with any genre, the good authors are far outnumbered by the mediocre and bad.

It turns out that one of the very best of these western writers was Ben Haas, although good luck finding much written under his real name. The man drafted under a storm of pseudonyms: Ben Elliot, Richard Meade, John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, and maybe a few others. His prose is clean and sharp. He wastes no time on needless exposition, and his pace thunders forward. You never have to wade through the dull stuff, or sigh a little as you skim the sections where the author expounds his pet philosophy. No, Haas got right to the character and the story.

Contest Results Finalizing

Hello all — just a quick note today, as the morning’s waning and I have a lot of words left to write before day’s end.

I’m making a final pass through the best of the “name the Dabir and Asim series” entries this evening, and hope to announce a winner later in the week.

Now, though, I need to return to 8th century Baghdad.

Riding for the Range

I had a fairly pleasant weekend here at our tower on the shore of the Sea of Monsters. I had dinner Saturday with some old friends, and courtesy of an equipment loan from my brother-in-law have been transferring old family videos over to CD-ROM. It’s amusing how many vids we have of child 1. There are a lot fewer of them three years later with child 2, probably because we were already exhausted taking care of child 1. It’s a good exhaustion, mind, but two young children can keep a person busy, and child 1 didn’t sleep well when he was an infant and toddler. With my wife in school or training all through that period, that meant I was the one always getting up in the middle of the night, so it sometimes seems like those years are one long bleary blur.

Writing wise, I am deep in the middle parts of the third Dabir and Asim novel, still called, less and less tentatively, The Maiden’s Eye. At the end of August I’ll be switching gears to get back to  writing a new Paizo Pathfinder novel, a sequel to Plague of Shadows, and as a way of doing research, I’ve switched my reading material. You’d think that with the novel being set in the Pathfinder world that I’d be buried in fantasy texts, or at least Pathfinder gaming material. I’m sure I’ll be doing a little of the latter as I draw closer and closer to my start date, but no, what I’m reading are westerns.