Beating Heart & Battle Axes – New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Forges a Book
New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine, championed by Oliver Brackenbury, has emerged over the last few years to provide a market with “love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling.” Black Gate has featured the crowdfunding for and reviews of the initial volumes (link). Today we highlight a crowdfunding endeavor that is in progress now, set to end on July 20th: a collection of six stories called Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. Starting with this new anthology, Oliver Brackenbury (Publisher) & Jay Wolf (Editor) will carry that same approach into the Brackenbury Books lineup. It’s a bold meeting of Sword & Sorcery and the current zeitgeist in fantasy publishing: Romantasy. Some of the stories get quite spicy, too!
Check out the Beating Heats & Battle Axes campaign now!
What is Sword & Sorcery?
A unique fantasy sub-genre known for short, episodic tales with historical inspiration and horror elements, of outsider protagonists with personal motivations, often facing dark and dangerous magic!
… and Romantasy?
Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes infuses Sword & Sorcery, a Fantasy sub-genre of mighty thewed bodies, action-adventure, and supernatural weirdness, with greater spice and romance than you usually find, elements that pair so naturally with such archetypically underdressed characters.
Featuring a variety of partners and partnerships, this anthology is ideal for Romantasy fans seeking more action, S&S fans wanting more focus on relationships in their steel-swinging stories, and everybody seeking prose that will set their blood pumping!
Contributing Authors
Spinning these stories are Bryn Hammond (Sister Chaos), S&S stalwart David C. Smith (Sometime Lofty Towers), T.A. Markitan (The Wolves of Winter Road), Brent Lambert (A Necessary Chaos), Valerie Valdes (Where Peace is Lost), and superstar S.L. Huang (The Water Thieves)
Cover and Interior Illustrations
Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes features a vibrant, wraparound cover by M.E. Morgan, inspired in equal parts by Savage Sword of Conan comic covers as classic fantasy romance paperbacks. The interior will feature a full-page B&W illustration by the talented Trevor Ngwenya – upped to an illustration for each story if the crowdfund does well enough!
Optional Add-on: Cover Action Figure
Optional Add-on: Professional Editing
Put Jay’s developmental editing skills to work on your short story! BH&BA Editor Jay Wolf will read and perform a developmental edit on one short story, up to 7500 words, submitted via email by arrangement after the crowdfund. This will include an edit letter and Word document markup.
Check out the Beating Heats & Battle Axes campaign now!
S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He is also the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group and an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone, Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II, DMR’s Terra Incognita, and the 9th issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull.