This will be our final post about the World Fantasy Convention in 2014. Tomorrow, we will be leaving early to drive back to Indianapolis.
Today, I slept in a bit more and didn’t join the convention activities until 11. I attended readings by Joe Haldeman, Kelly Link, Mary Robinette Kowal (my close friend), and Lee Martindale.
Joe Haldeman
Team Black Gate has been friends with Suzanne Church for a long time. It’s not just that she’s friendly and full of energy — she always seems to show up with a helping hand just when you need it most. She’s pulled us out of more than one fire, usually when something has gone terribly wrong at a convention and we’re standing around looking lost. Purely in terms of karmic balance, we owe her big time.
So I was delighted to see her first collection Elements arrive. Not just because I’m a fan of her delightful short stories, but because I figured we’d finally have a chance to balance the scales a bit, you know, help spread the word. As it turns out, of course, Suzanne needs no such help, as figures with far greater reach than Black Gate have already jumped ahead of the line to sing her praises. Bestselling author Kelly Armstrong calls the book “An engrossing collection of tales, sometimes dark, always thought-provoking and original,” just as an example. Someday we’ll be able to repay Suzanne for all her kindness. But today, we’re just going to curl up with her collection and enjoy it.
Can humanity survive an ice age? Will the storm man steal Wanda’s baby? When will Bob and Sebbee escape the relentless march of the Lost Circle? What is the cause of the taint in Faya’s courted ice? If you can’t escape hell, can you at least afford a trip on a teleporting couch?
Church infuses emotion into every tale. Whether quirky or horrific, the prose deftly snatches the reader onto a whirlwind expedition of laughter and sorrow.
Elements collects science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories published in such places as Clarkesworld, Cicada, On Spec, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts, and Urban Green Man. It was published April 30, 2014 by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. It is 248 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $4.99 for the digital edition. The creepy cover is by Neil Jackson. Amazon.com currently has the trade paperback edition discounted to just $2.73, an 82% savings. But move fast to make sure you get a copy. Check it out here.
I’m going to try to periodically post some reviews of RPG modules and supplements. If you see “Modular” in the title line, that’s such a post. And here’s one!
Warlord: Saga of the Storm was a d20-based collectible card game from AEG. I’ve never played it and know as much about it as I’ve read on Wikipedia. But I do know that in 2006, AEG released four books that made up a fine d20 RPG setting and campaign.
The World Atlas is the best starting point. There’s a long history of the world of Larisnar, going back to The Great Dragon, which destroyed gods and nations before finally being slain. But the essence of the Dragon escaped into the air and became The Storm. While its body fell deep into the earth and produced demon-like Abyssals. Most of the remaining nations and races signed The Accord as a means to survive the changed world.
The Atlas profiles each of the major nations, including those of the dwarves and elves. As part of The Accord, the Dwarves agreed to leave the surface (the Dragon had destroyed their lands) and head underground to protect against the Abyssals. They stayed down so long that the surface dwellers forgot they existed and their selfless dedication.
Meanwhile, the Elves had become short-lived, barely lasting thirty years, so they turned to necromancy. These ain’t Tolkien’s elves!
Friday was the first day when I felt like I had enough sleep to actually function properly. So I decided to stay up until the wee hours of the morning.
The day began with panels: Language and Linguistics in Fantasy, Everybody Was There, and Guns, Gears, and Wheels: Medieval Technology in Fantasy (photo below).
Pictured above: Michelle Markey Butler, Scott H. Andrews, and Elaine Isaak
Another panel was Beyond Rebellion in Young Adult Fantasy.
NaNoWriMo rumbles on. Some of my friends report impressive word counts. Others are strangely silent. Possibly some of these last have plotted themselves into a corner. The best way around this is to consider your conflicts, who the players are, but I’ve talked about that. However, I suspect a lot of people who are stalled have got caught up in a war of attrition with the mechanics of narrative.
We take narrative for granted. It’s what we do in the pub, or when swapping stories with fellow con-goers. However, if we sit down to write — type — narrative, we suddenly become aware of the words themselves. It’s a bit like driving a car and being overwhelmed with the physics of it all. From there it’s easy to get lost in a warren of second guessing, sniped at by injunctions we picked up at school; use joining words, be elegant, write complete sentences etc etc.
Finding your groove is about getting the hang of dragooning the words into some kind of order without needing to think about it all the time.
Some people do this naturally or get there by trial and error. Others learn how to do this by following their natural inclination and having a really good think about it so they can then stop thinking about it. It’s the Geek Way.
That’s what I’m going to do here. Specifically, I’m going to pull apart a selection of passages from genre books on my Kindle so we can see how established authors do it…
A fresh, fascinating story hides in this book. The gods are dead — their bodies litter the earth — but their powers leak into the lives of mortal men and women. And sometimes, tragically, children. Deific power is messy. One sprouts extra limbs, trails plagues in one’s wake, or combusts and takes out whole buildings. It’s a curse, isn’t it, to bear such power?
Ayae, a young apprentice cartographer, took refuge in a city built on a dead god’s bones when her homeland fell. Now an army of fanatics marches on her new home and those fanatics seem to want to wake the dead gods. What will Ayae do now that she’s cursed with the local god’s power over fire? She could be a doomsday weapon or a loose cannon that destroys the people she cares about. Her best hope for help in mastering her powers is a man so old he remembers the world as it was before the gods died, fifteen thousand years ago. He’s been wise. He’s been mad. He has done terrible things with the power that curses him. Ayae wants to trust Zaifyr, but he doesn’t always trust himself. The dead — human and divine — talk to him, and the dead have their own agenda.
Alas, the story is hiding, not in the sense of requiring a brisk readerly workout to piece the clues together, but rather in the sense of having been copyedited so poorly that it’s hard at times to figure out what the author is trying to make many of the sentences say.
I’ve written reviews before of books with lots of promise that could have used one last pass of polishing. This is not that.
The cornerstone of the fans’ love affair with Firefly is the 13 television episodes, culminating in the film Serenity. But if you’re a fan of the show, you’ve probably watched all of the episodes numerous times – maybe even with the audio commentary from Whedon, the stars, and other show creators. For real fans, though, this may not be quite enough. Is there any way to dive into the individual episodes more deeply?
Titan Books helped out the fans by publishing a series of stunning, glossy fan-gasmic volumes that include not only images of the props and various production stills, but also full scripts of the episodes of the series. Across these three books – ultimately collected into a single volume – there’s a glimpse into nearly every aspect of the production process on the series, why it was ultimately cancelled, what the various actors felt about their characters, and even some new stories.
And so very many shiny, shiny pictures.
Get a bunch of writers together and , once you can get them to stop talking about the Oxford comma, you’ll find they talk about the three basics of writing, Where? When? and How much? (Where “how much” refers to word count, not bank account) As you soon figure out, there are no right answers to these questions, there’s only what works for you – except for those occasions in which nothing works, but let’s not go there. At least not today.
For fulltime authors, “Where?” is one of the easiest questions, because the answer so often is “in my home office.” Whether that home office is a dedicated room, the kitchen table, or a TV tray in the living room, “home” is the operative concept. Mystery writer Vicki Delany, for example, doesn’t write in her nice office with the big monitor and the wood stove. She writes standing up, having found that the pass through from her kitchen to her dining room is the perfect height.
Many who aren’t fulltime writers also write at home, but others, like my good friend and fellow Black Gate contributor Derek Kunsken (check out his series on selling short fiction) have other methods. Derek gets up hours before he needs to be at work (I won’t say where) and takes his usual table at a coffee shop near his not-at-home office. He likes this particular table because it’s perfectly situated for one of the available outlets… and other reasons that aren’t picky at all.
Although there were some pre-convention workshops to start the day, the panel discussions didn’t begin until 2. So Bess and I decided to do some sight-seeing. We took the Old Town Trolley tour from our hotel, which allowed us to ride between multiple locations at our leisure.
Who’s this handsome devil? Just kidding. I know it’s me.
Our first stop was the Lincoln Memorial, which is also near the Vietnam War Memorial and the Korean War Memorial. It seems cliché to use the word surreal, but seeing these monuments just makes me feel like I’m not living in reality or it’s the realization that I am living in a reality I wasn’t fully aware of.
Let’s go ahead and admit it – fairy tales are creepy.
I’m not talking about the rosy-cheeked Disney versions that ultimately end in royal weddings. I’m referring to the Brothers Grimm versions which were gathered from fireside tales dating back to Middle Ages, where the children sometimes get eaten and happily-ever-afters are a rare thing indeed.
Back in August, I had the pleasure of reviewing a revisiting of the Grimms’ work with Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome from Quercus Publishing. In it, modern writers were invited to take up the “voice” of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm to pen new tales mimicking their style, which were then mixed with a selection of the original works. The result was a must-have edition for fairy tale lovers and fans of the macabre in equal measure.
So where is all this leading?
Straight to Quercus’s latest US publication, Path of Needles.
This is the third novel by British author Alison Littlewood, and her second since I introduced you to her with her first book, A Cold Season. All indications are that Littlewood has outgrown some of her “freshman-itis” and transformed into a definitive female voice in the horror genre.
Yay for us girls!
And where does the fairy tale stuff come in? Read on…