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Author: Bill Ward

Fundraising Month at Ralan’s

Fundraising Month at Ralan’s

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ralan-banner-01As a significant number of the readers of this site are writers I thought it only appropriate to mention that this month is the annual fundraising month for a terrific writer’s resource, Ralan’s Webstravaganza.

Those of you who use it know why it’s so great: up to date market information on everything from book publishers and pro-markets, calls for anthologies, freezines, pro-markets, contests — in fact just about everything that’s out there is listed at Ralan’s. It’s no exagerration to say that without Ralan’s I would not have found half of the magazines that I currently subscribe to or submit to, including the one I’m typing this post for right now.

So, if you use it, why not kick a little back to the guy that’s been doing all the work of keeping track of this stuff for us for years, Ralan Conley, a guy who doesn’t bombard his users with the hassle of a lot of adds or redirects or phony links. When I think about how much use I get out of Ralan’s over the course of the year, a 10 or 20 dollar donation is peanuts, an absolute bargain for a site that has become my favorite way to find new fiction markets and keep track of everything that is out there.
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BILL WARD is a genre writer, editor, and blogger wanted across the Outer Colonies for crimes against the written word. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as gaming supplements and websites. He is a Contributing Editor and reviewer for Black Gate Magazine, and 423rd in line for the throne of Lost Lemuria. Read more at BILL’s blog, DEEP DOWN GENRE HOUND.

The Call of Cthulhu Movie, 2005

The Call of Cthulhu Movie, 2005

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the_call_of_cthulhu_dvd_coverDirected by Andrew Leman; starring Matt Foyer, Chad Fifer, Noah Wagner, Ramon Allen Jr., and Ralph Lucas.

I cannot say I’ve ever been impressed with any film I’ve seen purporting to be based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft, as they have all tended to stray pretty far from what makes Lovecraft’s stories interesting in the first place. And they generally show the limits of their budget as well as being both poorly shot and acted. But then I heard about this little gem, distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, that adapts Lovecraft’s foundational short ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in as loyal and accurate a way as possible. Not only that — and here’s the really interesting bit — the movie itself is a black and white silent film, as if it had been filmed at the time of the story’s publication in the 1920s.

The choice to make this a silent film was a smart one. Firstly, it does help evoke the period of Lovecraft in a way no film before it ever has (all of the ones I’ve ever seen where contemporary pieces, for a start), and also makes it feel like a world apart from our own. In leaving some things unseen and unsaid, and in creating an at times stylized environment, this film activates the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks — and speeches or effects which would seem silly or dreadful when laid bare in a modern film are instead left in the shadows. In surmounting the very limited budget for this project, the choice could not have been better.

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The Ham-Sized Fist Award

The Ham-Sized Fist Award

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fist-bigA while back I talked about The David Gemmell Legend Award, given this year for the first time to a fan favorite novel of heroic fantasy. Like most fans of adventure-oriented secondary world fantasy, I was used to seeing writers and books I liked pretty much ignored when it came to awards — so the Gemmell Legend Award came as a pleasant and welcome surprise. Well, seems another award for our fair sub-genre is also getting its start this year, one that specifically looks at sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy short fiction — The Ham-Sized Fist Award.

Boasting a (currently) 800 dollar prize split between author and publisher, and a name no one is likely to forget, The Ham-Sized Fist Award was founded by editor Jeff Crook with the intention of recognizing excellence in the rather neglected field of short form  heroic fantasy. It’s open to any works published in 2009 in print or electronic venues that use an editorial process for selection. So far, works from Black Gate, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Flashing Swords, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Black Dragon, White Dragon, and Rage of the Behemoth, among others, have been nominated.

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Public Opinion In the Age of Fractured Culture

Public Opinion In the Age of Fractured Culture

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broken_glassThis is a direct follow up to James Enge’s post yesterday, Metabloggery. Being completely devoid of ideas as to what to write about here this week — the previously fertile blog fields of my mind having been trampled by a Diplodicus — I thought I’d just jump on in and add my own spin on what James is talking about (which, of course, you’ve already read). In some way, my lack of a ready topic only proves we writers shouldn’t be fooling around with blogs — after all, I spent most of my free time this week writing fiction, of all things.

But James is right about the potential for trouble that arises when writers pick up the e-pen and scribble without any sort of editorial check or, quite often, without even taking a deep breath and counting to ten. Thus far, I’ve been lucky to avoid getting the dog doo of web embarrassment all over my new trainers — but only because I’m pretty strictly averse to talking politics, religion, or current affairs online (especially on my blog). Call it cowardice, or call it forbearance, but honestly I think it’s mostly just laziness. I mean, if I’m going to get into a long, drawn-out argument and be forced to commit to one side or another, let it be about something important, like Early vs. Late Heinlein, or the virtue of Conan pastiches, or whether the Dune sequels are worth reading.

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Getting It Right — and Wrong — on Film

Getting It Right — and Wrong — on Film

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braveheartThe film spares no trick in getting the celebratory atmosphere just so — for the court is alive with news that an entire treasure fleet of the hated Spaniards has been captured, the funds diverted to her majesty’s treasury, the ships scuttled or pressed into privateering service for the Crown. Elizabeth herself blushes in anticipation of receiving the hero of the hour, the man whose name is on every tongue (and has been for quite some time, truth be told), Vice Admiral Sir Francis Drake. The tension builds, the courtiers grow restless, the lavish entertainments are ignored. All necks stretch, even the alabaster column of the monarch’s herself, when the herald announces the great man’s arrival and the doors swing open.

Francis Drake strides confidently forward in ripped jeans, bowling t-shirt, and backwards pointing baseball cap.

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Thank You, D&D

Thank You, D&D

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dungeon-masterA recent entry over at Joe Abercrombie’s blog about his encounter with a neighbor boy who hadn’t even heard of D&D got me reflecting on many of the things Abercrombie himself covers in his post. He and I are about the same age, and belong to a pre-internet, pre-500 cable channels, pre-iPhone generation that entertained ourselves around the wood stoves of our drafty log cabins with shadow puppets and recitations of railway time tables. But something happened to transform our sepia-toned youth into an exciting time of monster-slaying, dungeon-crawling, infinite gold-carrying, NPC-bullying, and rules-lawyring adventure — and that something was Dungeons & Dragons.

Of course, let’s get something straight, there was Dungeons & Dragons, and there was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and my activities were limited solely to the later. And, hey, I was a snob about it. I mean, in D&D elves and dwarves were considered a class? All the cool kids where into AD&D — though for the purposes of this entry, and since the distinction no longer has any meaning, anyway, I’ll just lump them both together as D&D.

I say ‘cool kids,’ but that wasn’t the case. Cool kids played flag football in their spare time, rebuilt carburetors, and rode their Schwinns to rendezvous with married women in their thirties whose husbands were out of town. Actually, I have no idea what the cool kids did, preferring as I did the company of dorks, misfits, and other geekly types such as myself, and I suppose if I ever imagined what they were up to it would veer widely between the poles of pathetically banal and enviably adult. Me, I drew dungeons on graph paper.

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Sam Raimi to Direct World of Warcraft, or What’s Wrong With Video Game Movies?

Sam Raimi to Direct World of Warcraft, or What’s Wrong With Video Game Movies?

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worldofwarcraft1Come with me, if you will, to a magical, improbable land. A land where ideas and craft outweigh brand recognition and marketing potential, where films are the visions of writers and directors rather than of moneyed committees, and where the word ‘remake’ is most commonly associated with smoothing the bedsheets after a midday nap. It’s a place perhaps more fantastic than worlds of warring orcs and elves, since at least the orcs and elves are behaving according to their nature.

Blizzard — world-straddling giant of the video game industry — just issued a press release saying that Sam Raimi of Evil Dead and Spiderman fame has signed on to direct a movie based on Blizzard’s megaton MMORPG hit World of Warcraft. This interests me on a lot of levels, though as one of the mere thirty or so people in North America that has never actually played World of Warcraft I can’t really discuss it from the angle of a fan.

In fact, I may be spectacularly ill-equipped to talk about this at all. When I heard that WoW — as World of Warcraft is affectionately known to its fans (it’s also called Warcrack, as many a neglected girlfriend can well-attest) — was potentially being made into a film, I said to myself “Oh great, another video game movie,” closely followed by “Oh great, something to blog about at BG!” I then did my best to be charitable and think of all the video game movies I liked. Drawing a blank, I ransacked the little gray cells for examples of video game movies I’d actually seen. Coming up with nothing, I then went to that resource of first-resort for the google generation, Wikipedia, for a list of films based on video games and confirmed my suspicions.

They all suck.

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Charles R. Saunders’ ‘Luendi’

Charles R. Saunders’ ‘Luendi’

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0_61_100906_diamondCharles Saunders has posted a terrific short story over at the blog section of his website — the sort of story that would not have been out of place in a classic issue of Weird Tales. ‘Luendi’ is in four, rather short, parts, and gives us the fate of one Piet van Brug, a man that embodies all the vilest characteristics of imperialism. Colonial Africa in 1890 is the setting, or more precisely an unexplored section of the interior beyond the British and Boer possessions of South Africa dubbed ‘Azungaland’ by its conqueror. It is an area rich in diamonds — rich enough to bring the yoke down around the heads of the peaceful and previously unknown people that live there.

The Azunga rescued van Brug from disease and death in the wake of a disastrous expedition sponsored by Cecil Rhodes to explore the land “between the Zambezi River and the upper reaches of the Kalahari Desert.” Peaceful, living in a fabulous stone kraal akin to the ruins of Zimbabwe, the Azunga welcome van Brug with kindness and are repaid with treachery. When van Brug discovers they posses a rich seam of diamonds in a cave nearby, he returns to Johannesburg, raises an expeditionary army with the diamonds he managed to steal, and returns to enslave the people that had saved his life.

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Sapkowski Wins Gemmell Legend Award

Sapkowski Wins Gemmell Legend Award

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blood-elvesMy first thought upon hearing that Andrzej Sapkowski had won the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award (which happens to be the award most suited to home-defense — just try to scare off a burglar with a Hugo rocket) was “great, there goes that post I planned examining if Abercrombie’s work really fits the spirit of David Gemmell’s fiction.” My second thought, of course, was “just who exactly is Andrzej Sapkowski?”

In his native Poland, people don’t have to ask that question because there Sapkowki is a Really Big Deal, author of a fantasy series that outsells the works of Stephen King (all the press releases love to use that datum — but for all I know Poles don’t like Stephen King). In the Anglophone world, Sapkowski’s work is just now being offered in translation, but his world is probably most widely known as the subject of a computer role playing game which saw world-wide release (The Witcher).

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Books Best Appreciated In Their Natural Habitat

Books Best Appreciated In Their Natural Habitat

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bookstoreRecently I received a bit of a surprise when I went to a local library that has long been one of my ambush zones for the acquisition of unsuspecting books. All those lovely 25 cent mass market paperbacks with the stickers on the spine, all those nicely broken-in trades, all those hardbacks with the covers mylared over and glued down, were gone. Vanished. Whisked away on an electron breeze to inhabit the alternate world of the internet.

That’s a world I’ve hunted in a lot; in fact, the internet may indeed be my own Happy Hunting Grounds, the place where all those impossible to find treasures I’d only ever heard about as a kid grew like ripe fruit within easy reach. Not only was it simple and cheap, but it’s a world where anything is possible.

Of course, it’s also online cheapskates like me that are killing book stores.

I’ve blogged about my library shock in full over at my site, and talked about how important library sales were to me as a kid. How owning books, having a collection, taught a different sort of relationship and fostered a deeper respect for the world of books, fiction, and education than did borrowing them. I truly do think having these books available for purchase furthered the library’s mission of instilling a respect for the written word in the populace — especially in us kids who could buy a handful of SF novels with our lunch money after school — but, I suppose, it may have also reinforced other less desirable traits in me.

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