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Mystery Box

About twenty years ago I was idly searching for Harold Lamb books in an online used book search service. I was well enough acquainted with Lamb’s work by that point to know the titles of all of his books, so I was a little mystified when two appeared that existed in no known database.

When I contacted the seller I learned that these were one-of-a-kind books. Dr. John Drury Clark had removed a handful of pulp stories from Adventure magazine and bound them in two small hardbacks. They were being sold off by his widow.

Updates

Seems like I’m just going to keep spinning those plates. Poor Bill Ward is still waiting on me to write the next comment on our long overdue Corum post. Chris Hocking may still be waiting for me to get back to writing up something for Wade Miller for our Hardboiled Monday posts, but that’s been so long forgotten that he may not remember.

Meanwhile the Kickstarter is going well and I’m busy behind the scenes working to promote it in various places. I’m also trying to revise one novel while trying to finish writing another. Also busy being that part time house/farm husband, including training a new puppy. None are impossible duties in the least, it’s just hard to do everything at once.

Since I have nothing really to report, I thought I’d fill the post today with shots of various parts of my office/library. Some of the books pictured belong to other members of the family.

And no, I haven’t read all of these, but I’ve sure read a lot of them. Some multiple times. Others are part of the TBR pile. It’s a great thing to look around the office and see all the cool stuff I’m looking forward to reading…

Monday Morning Madness

Lots of stuff is happening behind the scenes even if the site itself seems a little abandoned. The Kickstarter for Tales From the Magician’s Skull is nearly ready to launch — there will be an announcement in the next several days. Just this morning I was looking over a proposed membership card for the Legion of Skulls, the fan club for the mag.

Work continues on the novel revision. I’m getting closer all the time. I also saw the near final cover and I love it — I hope to share it with you soon.

And I’ve been reading something a little outside my wheelhouse and enjoying the heck out of it. That’s Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers, which posits a reality where mediums were real, and in World War I were used to communicate with dead soldiers to gather intelligence. That, at least, is where the story starts, and it quickly develops into a compelling mystery that’s well-plotted and surprising. I’m about two thirds through and I’m still not sure who’s behind it all. Additionally, as always with Mary Robinette Kowal’s work, there’s intelligence and kindness threaded through her prose, with none of the self-indulgences I see in too much modern fantasy. As any of my frequent visitors know, I’m tired of unrelieved darkness and naval gazing and destined greatness. It’s a pleasure to read of believable characters determined to do the right thing. 

Farm Life

One evening this spring while I was finishing up some yard work I spotted a fox slinking through our pasture. If you don’t keep chickens you might not know that foxes love chickens. When we first got started raising chickens we lost a number to clever foxes, who are in on the secret that chickens are delicious. Our birds are free range, but we keep a dog in part to protect the chickens, and we keep the birds inside a coop in the barn except when it’s full daylight.

As it happened, though, dusk was on the way and I hadn’t yet done anything with the chickens because I’d been trying to finish some work on the fence. The dog was inside because she hadn’t been keeping far enough away from the mower. My wife ran to get the dog and I sprinted to find the chickens, only to discover that our rooster was already rounding them up and herding them into the barn.

Roosters really only have one job, and that’s to watch over the chickens. Most roosters don’t manage even that. They just stand around crowing, constantly, and just as constantly mating with the hens. Big Red, though, actually took pride in his job. In my experience there’s not a whole lot of personality difference between chickens, and I haven’t really formed many attachments with them. Big Red was far and away my favorite. You can’t help but respect someone who’s good at their job, even if he’s a chicken. I saw him herd the chickens several times when stray dogs wandered onto our property.

Catching Up

Behind the scenes work on the first issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull continues, and continues to please me. I can hardly wait for the Kickstarter to launch, but there are a few pieces still sliding into place. I’ll keep you posted.

Work continues on the book, and I’ve seen the initial draft of the cover, and boy am I mightily pleased. It’s so good I will one day change my site header.

Bill Ward and I are finally starting work on our Corum re-read, so if any of you regular visitors want to get in on the read with us, I hope you’ve found your copies of Michael Moorcock’s first Corum trilogy. As busy as things are here I’m still not sure when we’ll start that read through, but it will be soon.

Also, watch out for sleestaks. Lately they’ve been sighted on the edge of my property. Sometimes they send spam offering to write articles for my site that will link back to theirs, but who wants to be involved with that, right? In the end they’ll just want my pylon crystals, or maybe they want to devour human flesh. I was never entirely clear on that.

And now, I must away. Those words aren’t going to write or edit themselves.

Revisiting Universe R

Many moons ago, back when I blogged as BG_Editor (that’s Black Gate editor), I took a little trip to Universe R. I talked about that trip in an article I wrote for Steven Silver, but I’ve never mentioned it on this blog, and I thought it time.

When it comes to the parallel universes we visit in speculative fiction, some of my personal favorites are the ones where Rome never fell, the one where Spock has a goatee, and Universe R.

I imagine a lot of you have thought about it. It’s that place where great artistic works were never lost. It’s the land where overlooked, forgotten, or under appreciated poets, playwrights, authors, and artists were encouraged and celebrated and lived on to craft more work. I don’t mean the egoverse where you’re the top of the charts or have written a chain of bestsellers – this universe is for the artists you wish had gotten a better deal. Universe R can’t be completely logical, of course. For instance, I’ve been lamenting the destruction of the Library of Alexandria since I first learned of it – and especially after I saw Carl Sagan walking through it in Cosmos – but if the Library of Alexandria had survived, we’d probably be further along with a lot of developments and some of the later artists who prospered in Universe R might not ever have been born. You can’t worry about Universe R making that kind of logical sense or the whole thing falls apart.

The Battle of Castle Itter

Hey, remember that time when a bunch of high ranking French prisoners of war allied with their friend, the SS officer, and asked for help from a Wehrmacht officer in command of a handful of men and the local Austrian Resistance? They knew THEY didn’t have enough manpower to hold off a couple hundred Waffen-SS troops, so they joined forces with 14 American GIs, and holed up in an old castle to keep the prisoners safe.

It’s the damnedest thing. And it actually happened. I can’t believe no one’s turned it into a film. Even the little details make for great reading, like the French tennis star who sneaked through enemy lines to get word to the Americans.

If you’ve never heard of it, you should check it out. And even if you HAVE heard of it, short of a book on the battle, this is the most in-depth account of it I’ve seen. You should read it.

I like tales about heroes, and this is a good one.

GenCon 2017

Early this afternoon I’m driving off to GenCon 2017. I’ve been looking forward to it all year. I’ll get to connect with writer friends I rarely see, interact with fans, and bask in the glow of all of my favorite forms of nerdery. I’ll get to wander the great hall of treasure, examining scores of wonderful products. Even if I don’t actually intend to buy any but a tiny percentage of what I see, it’s fun to look it all over.

And then there’s the section of artists and writers, which I’ll be visiting as well, both to say hello to some writer friends and to check out the work of the professional and semi-professional artists. You can find some amazing things.

I haven’t decided yet if I’ll do a daily blog of my adventures, as I’ve sometimes done in the past. I’ve never been able to gauge how interested people actually are in hearing about conventions they themselves don’t attend. I’ll be busy on a number of panels each day. (You can see most of my schedule here.)

But I can say this — come Saturday night I’ll finally reveal the secret sword-and-sorcery project I’ve been working on. I can hardly wait to share the news, but I will hold on for just a little longer…

Absence

Sometimes it’s difficult to believe my father’s been gone 17 years, and then I remember that the terrible hammer blow of his death is no longer the ache that it was, and hasn’t been for a long time. That’s fortunate, because I couldn’t have endured for long with that much daily pain. It faded, as it must, and now sometimes days and even weeks might pass without me thinking about him.

He was a good man. He wasn’t without his flaws, but few of us are. At one point, after I realized he wasn’t perfect, I felt a weird sense of betrayal and tended to downgrade him a little, for which I still feel ashamed. Then, much later than I should have, I realized his part in the world was much more than just “dad” to me and my sisters. And as I’ve aged and had teenagers of my own I’ve come to understand him a little better. Many’s been the time that I’ve wish I could have asked him for advice, although I’ve become so used to not having it now that I don’t think about it much any more.

Site Updates & Assorted Musing

I was thinking it would take just a few minutes to update my site this morning. Boy, was I wrong. Merely getting my GenCon schedule appropriately on the Appearances page took more than an hour! Much cross-indexing was involved, or it would have been faster. Anyway, if you’re planning to go to GenCon you now know where to find me. Mostly. I will probably be at the Paizo booth a little as well, and that’s not on the schedule yet. Of course you’ll also probably find me wandering around the hall of treasures trying not to buy things…

I still need to add Through the Gate in the Sea to the official book slider list at the top of the page. But at least my appearances are up to date. I’ll probably add more later in the year and early next year.

In other news, I’m a little closer to 50 years old now, which is pretty weird. I spent a lot of the last week driving all over Indiana on various errands, but I ate some great food, found some wonderful used books, and generally had a great time with the family (except my daughter, who I didn’t get to spend much time with — she couldn’t travel with us owing to her work schedule). I got less writing accomplished than I usually do over the course of a week, but I managed some anyway in some odd places. Remember, I’m the guy who outlined his last two Pathfinder novels while sitting in The Three Broomsticks restaurant in Harry Potter World or waiting for my daughter to get out of The Tower of Terror.