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Linking to Brackett

Matthew, this is a Gorn. Note opposable thumbs.

Hocking pointed me towards something of a celebration of Leigh Brackett the other day on a site titled Glorious Trash. Seems like it’s a pretty cool site to poke around at, too. Joe Kennedy sat down to read both versions of “The Secret of Sinharat,” which is something I always meant to do, and then compared them in an essay, which is something I always meant to do. And he loved them, which is something I’ve always done.

Even if you haven’t fallen in love with the work of Leigh Brackett, you can get a sense of what a great writer she was if you swing by for a visit. And poke around a while there, because there’s other cool stuff to be found as well.

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.

Editorial Sneak Peek

Today I thought I’d provide a sneak peek at the editorial I’m drafting for the first issue of Tales From The Magician’s Skull, which is a behind-the-scenes look at how it came together and what it’s all about.

First, though, is a video of all the cool stuff Joseph Goodman had at the Goodman Games GenCon booth. There were treasures galore, and not just for gamers. You should have seen all those old fantasy paperbacks! Joseph’s love for Appendix N fiction was behind Dungeon Crawl Classics from the start, and he’s trying to get that fiction much easier to find for all interested parties… and, as this magazine shows, devoted to trying to get more fiction in print inspired by similar sources.

Now, the editorial.

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…

Links and Sundry

The brief interchange here on the site (and the much longer one on Facebook) about the Michael Moorcock Corum books Wednesday has me thinking about a web site re-read of the series. I’m in the midst of too many projects, as usual, but I thought I’d gauge interest about joining me for a Chronicles of Corum read-along. I already know that there’s some interest on FB — what about from my site visitors?

Western Round-Up

I’ve continued to read outside of my usual genres, despite some great fantasy suggestions.

Last year I tracked down and read all of Merle Constiner’s westerns, all of which I liked and some of which I loved, and I’ll have to put a best-of list together. Here’s a write-up of one, although I’m not entirely sure the essayist appreciated it as much as it deserved.

And lately I’ve been reading a lot of Marvin Albert. Except that sometimes Albert wrote as Nick Quarry, and sometimes he wrote as Al Conroy and sometimes he wrote as Ian MacAlister, and sometimes as Tony Rome and sometimes he wrote as, you guessed it, Marvin Albert. And sometimes stuff he wrote under a pseudonym got reprinted under his Albert name. Anyway, I’ve yet to read something by him I didn’t like, and it’s all different. He had six hardboiled private eye novels (with a spicy flare to them, because the dames are always improbably gorgeous) with twisty plots and lots of good action, written as Nick Quarry. I’ve read two and enjoyed them, a lot. He had four series books about a gambler/gun-slick named Clayburn, written under his Al Conroy alias, and I’ve read two and enjoyed those, a lot, — and it’s a different style from his Quarry books. One of the Clayburn novels was made into a movie back in the day.

Martial Fitness

Every Saturday when my wife and I leave the karate dojo we head across the street to pick up horse grain or chicken feed or other necessities for our little farm. We wait to change until we get home, so I’m still wearing my gi pants and tee-shirt emblazoned with East-West Karate when I head into the store. I always stop, though, to remove my black belt before I leave the car. At first I removed it because I was embarrassed by my low color belt (and I shouldn’t have been) but now I do it because I don’t want to appear to be showing off.

I’m proud to have earned that belt, and the second stripe on it that means I have a second degree black belt, and I’m going to be proud when, a few years from now, I test for my third degree black belt. I recognize that being proud is not necessarily something to advertise in a public space, which is probably why I don’t talk about martial arts much here on the blog. In point of fact, though, martial arts are a huge part of my life. I spend far more time writing here about solitaire gaming, which I’ve only recently managed to get in once a week. Whereas I’m at the dojo at least twice a week working out and almost always three times, something I’ve been doing off and on for fifteen years.

Behind the Scenes

A few weeks ago Paizo’s James Sutter asked me to draft an essay about my newest Pathfinder novel, Through the Gate in the Sea. It ended up being a peek behind how I drafted the novel, with a little discussion about my own role-playing gaming. If that sounds of interest, you can find it here.

I think this novel, and its predecessor, Beyond the Pool of Stars, are stronger than their predecessor Pathfinder novels. In particular I love the characters, and would like to return to them someday. The famously hard-to-please reviewer known as Mrs. Giggles even seemed to like this one, although she couldn’t help sideswiping the previous novel a little as she talked it up. Ah well. I was pleased that she enjoyed the book as much as she did!

This week also brought a video review from Dungeon Master Mark, one which could only be described as glowing. So, good news all around, actually.

Link Day

Linkman! Copyright Darian Jones

Week 2 of my Spring Cleaning tour continues. I’ve repaired all the horse fence. I’ve still got to get all the weeds and weed trees and vines from off of the back horse fence, clean out the barn, organize the basement, clean a bunch of tile grout, and other mundane things that Asim would never bother telling you about.

I have just a handful of links to share. First, Dark City Games keeps developing their nifty little solo adventure games, and there’s a newish one in their science fiction one available now. It’s been years since I reviewed one (back when Black Gate was a print magazine) but I find them a lot of fun.

Second, over on James Reasoner’s site there was a lengthy discussion of Ki-Gor and Harold Lamb and all sorts of pulp goodness you might find of interest. As a matter of fact, Reasoner’s site is almost always of interest and I myself need to visit more often.

Speaking of interesting sites, my third link is to Frontier Partisans, run by Jim Cornelius, where he celebrated Ben Haas, aka John Benteen, and much discussion of the excellence of Fargo and Sundance commenced. Regular visitors to my own site should know just how much I like the work of Ben Haas.

Right, time to finish breakfast and do daring deeds!

Sundry

I promised myself that I’d do a better job keeping up the blog, but there’s really not much to report. I turned over the “new” novel — new to everyone else, but not me, since I’ve been working on the thing for years — and have taken most of this week to play catch-up on all kinds of house and farm stuff. There’s a bunch of vegetation that’s grown up through the horse fence that I have to cut back or chop down, not to mention the fence itself. And don’t even get me started on all the work I have to do inside, or (sigh) the taxes.

Horses really DO think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and one of ours routinely leans with his not inconsiderable weight against the upper board. Eventually the board breaks, and then I have to cut a new one to size and replace it, a process that takes 45 minutes ONLY if everything works perfectly. Usually it’s more like an hour and 15 minutes. I spent most of Monday repairing everything currently busted and cast a sad eye on the other boards that are ready to go if he decides to lean on them a few more times…