Howard Andrew Jones is dead.

It’s hard to write those words. Howard has been a huge part of my personal and professional life since 2002, when I opened a submission to Black Gate magazine and found a long, rambling, and extremely enthusiastic cover letter from him, expressing his delight at finding a quality magazine devoted to heroic fantasy. The letter ended with “I want in, bad,” and was attached to a terrific tale featuring two adventurers named Dabir and Asim.

We eventually published three Dabir and Asim tales in Black Gate, and within a few years Howard’s editorial contributions had become so essential to the magazine that we named him our first Managing Editor. He ran our non-fiction department, single-handedly recruiting and managing over a dozen contributors to fill some 80 pages every issue with thoughtful essays, book reviews, gaming coverage, and much more.

In November 2008 Howard told me he wanted to remake our website, and post new articles every single day, instead of a few times a month. I told him he was crazy. How in the world could we produce that much content, especially without a budget?

Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers, and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog. It was his vision, and he executed it magnificently, with a little help from Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight,  Ryan Harvey, and others. Eight years later, the website won a World Fantasy Award — an honor that I still believe should have been presented to Howard.

Before long Howard’s own writing career had taken off with such magnitude that he had to step back from day-to-day duties at the magazine. Over the next fifteen years he released fifteen books, including three featuring Dabir and Asim, four novels in the Pathfinder universe, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy, three volumes in The Chronicles of Hanuvar, and the Harold Lamb collections Swords from the East and Swords from the West.

Howard was a wonderful writer. He believed in heroes, and that steadfast conviction informed all of his writing. But despite all his success Howard never lost touch with his other major talent — finding and nurturing new writers. Howard was an enormously gifted editor, and a tireless champion of underappreciated writers. It was a gift that led to his first editing gig in 2005, running Flashing Swords ezine for Daniel Blackston at Pitch-Black Books, an underfunded online magazine that produced six excellent issues in 2005 and 2006.

Howard’s accelerating career brought him countless additional opportunities, but the ones he seized were usually the ones that gave him the chance to find and publish new talent. Joseph Goodman brought Howard onboard to launch Tales From the Magician’s Skull at Goodman Games in 2017, and with Howard at the helm the magazine quickly became the premiere outlet for modern sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy. Howard got the band back together for the Skull, recruiting much of the same talent he’d called upon at Black Gate — including Bill Ward, John C. Hocking, James Enge, Chris Willrich, Mark Rigney, and many others.

Back in 2011 Howard sent me the draft of a new story he was working on. It featured a new hero, the last general of a defeated people. His name was Hanuvar, and he was consciously modeled on one of Howard’s heroes, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, whom Howard has first encountered in a Harold Lamb novel. The story was both more sober and more ambitious than anything Howard had sent previously, and I knew instantly that I wanted to publish it in Black Gate.

Alas, I never got the chance. Black Gate magazine folded in 2011, and that was the end of my editing career. Howard found a home for his Hanuvar stories in magazines like Adrian Simmons’ Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Tales from the Magician’s Skull, and fine anthologies like Jason Waltz’s Neither Beg Nor Yield. Eventually they were collected in 2023 in Lord of a Shattered Land, a volume that relaunched Howard’s career and put him in front of countless new fantasy fans.

Baen Books signed Howard to a five-book contract for Hanuvar, and on his way home from Gen Con this summer, Howard called to let me know that Baen had agreed to extend his contract for an additional two volumes. Howard had nearly finished book four, and had grand plans to extend the series to add in several new storylines. He was as upbeat about his writing career as I’d ever heard him, and I was overjoyed to hear it. Howard had found his audience at last, and a publisher who could help him reach it. The world was finally starting to notice just what a talented writer he was.

Just a few weeks later, Howard called to tell me that he was experiencing a strange leg pain. He blamed it on not doing morning stretches before long writing bouts on the kitchen stool. The ailments spread over the next month, and in late August Howard was diagnosed with glioblastoma. Terminal brain cancer. He passed away at home in Evansville, Indiana, at 12:15 am yesterday night.

It’s hard for me to understand that I won’t talk to Howard again. That I won’t get eight-minute phone calls from him as he’s dashing to pick up groceries. That we won’t talk about writing and pulp fiction and Star Trek for long hours. That he won’t be at the center of our raucous annual dinner gatherings at Windy City Pulp & Paper. That I won’t sit on the porch and gossip about whose book series just got canceled, who’s making waves in the industry, who’s the best fantasy writer not named Howard Andrew Jones.

I loved him. And now he’s gone. I don’t understand. The world isn’t fair, but I know exactly what Howard would tell me. Keep writing. And don’t let it get you down.

Here’s to you, Howard. You were the best of us, and you’ve been taken away. You fought tirelessly to make sure the world didn’t cruelly forget the writers you respected, like Harold Lamb, Leigh Brackett, and Roger Zelazny. Now it’s time to lay down your pen, douse the lamps in your wind-swept tower, and let others take up the fight.

Rest well, my friend. You’ve earned it.