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Author: Derek Kunsken

Hobo Fights: A Chat with Image Comics’ Rock Candy Mountain Creator Kyle Starks

Hobo Fights: A Chat with Image Comics’ Rock Candy Mountain Creator Kyle Starks

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Rock Candy Mountain Volume One-small

Image Comics is soon releasing the first trade paperback of Kyle Starks’ Rock Candy Mountain, collecting issues 1-4. The original solicitation runs as follows:

Eisner-nominated comic creator Kyle Starks would like to invite you to enter the magical world of hobos. The world’s toughest hobo is searching through post-WW2 America for the mythological Rock Candy Mountain, and he’s going to have to fight his way to get there. Lots of hobo fights. So many hobo fights. A new action-comedy series full of high action, epic stakes, magic, friendship, trains, punching, kicking, joking, a ton of hobo nonsense, and the Literal Devil. Yeah. The Literal Devil.

Who could turn down a description like that? I had a chance to catch up with Kyle for an e-mail interview about this fiesta of fisticuffs and the hobo code of honor.

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Crappy Parents All Around: A Look At Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series

Crappy Parents All Around: A Look At Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series

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Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse-small

At one point, I wanted to encourage my son to read more. He owned a copy of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, but he was disinclined to actually open it.

So, I got the audiobook, played the first two chapters, and then said we could listen to any chapter he had already read. And presto! He got through three of the first five books.

Listening to Rick Riordan’s first Percy Jackson series was fun enough for me as an adult too, a lot like watching a Pixar movie as a parent. There are some levels and ironies for me that my ten and eleven year old son didn’t get.

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Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology…

Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology…

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saturn rukh cover

I know this is a fantasy blog, but for this one I want to appeal to the third (and most famous) of Clarke’s laws, which is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” because I want to talk about the scienciest, most extrapolatey, most out there science fiction, which isn’t overtly different from fantasy except in aesthetic.

This comes from my musings about writing a story set in orbit of a neutron star, and also because I was recently discussing with a friend where to find the hardest SF.

I get a lot of ideas when I read other authors. I love seeing what science people know and transform into story, and I love seeing that unique kind of creative ambition.

Some caveats: When I looked in my book shelf for examples to show a friend, I came up with three authors and six titles. My shelves don’t have every book, and so I’ll certainly miss some stunning works.

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Building Your Own Writing Master Class

Building Your Own Writing Master Class

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600x600bb I started writing seriously when I was 15 years old. At 46, I have almost twenty short stories published and one novel sold and more news I can’t talk about yet.

Most days, I feel pretty good about my skill level and experience matching what I’m hoping to do. But, I still spend an *enormous* amount of time in learning about the craft of writing.

I’m less concerned now about the mechanics (dialogue, editing, paragraphing, word choice, etc, although that took me a good 20 years to get right), but I still worry about giving an emotionally compelling and thematically meaningful story every time I go to the plate.

My main learning now, my kind of grad school of writing is listening to experts. I like podcasts and they fit into my lifestyle (driving, washing dishes, cleaning the house, etc). Lots of famous and skilled writers, editors, artists, directors, producers, etc are interviewed all the time for podcasts.

These luminaries also appear on panels, which are also recorded and published on the internet for free. The kinds of people speaking about story and form and theme are the kinds of people you’d seek out as you progressed from apprentice to journeyman.

I probably listen to 20-30 hours of podcasts a month in the course of living my life (think dishes…), and I do feel like I’m getting a masterclass out of my listening. I thought I’d share some of my free education in case writers out there wanted to take advantage of this too.

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Don’t Mess With the Amazons: The Wonder Woman Movie

Don’t Mess With the Amazons: The Wonder Woman Movie

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Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman

A lot has been said about Patty Jenkins’ movie Wonder Woman, pretty much all of it by people smarter and more qualified than I.

But given that I do a lot of comic books musing for Black Gate, and that I also reviewed Rogue One and Dr. Strange, I wanted to give Wonder Woman the attention it deserves.

Superhero movies are what they are.

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A Grab-Bag of Comic Reviews: Southern Bastards, Jaegir, Deep End

A Grab-Bag of Comic Reviews: Southern Bastards, Jaegir, Deep End

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Southern Bastards-small

My comic reading has jumped all over the place this month, but I’ve been finding lots of good stuff.

Southern Bastards: I picked up Southern Bastards as part of a massive Image Humble Bundle last year. I finally got to Volume 1 this 2014 series by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour.

It was scary amazing.

I know nothing about the deep south, but both Jasons come from there. Their mission is: to write about the place they grew up in in all the ways it is peaceful, primal, timeless, haunted, hateful, spiritual, beautiful and scarred.

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A Mythic Crime Story: Top Cow’s Postal

A Mythic Crime Story: Top Cow’s Postal

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postal1

Regular readers may notice that I try to sample a lot of different comic series. I like individual comics, but I also try to understand the field and its sub-genres. Crime fiction has a long history in comics. Its modern incarnations include titles like Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets, Ed Brubaker’s Gotham Central and Criminal, among many others.

Last year I heard the Nerdist Comics Panel interview Bryan Edward Hill, a TV writer working on Top Cow’s Postal.

The premise was catchy: Eden is a town entirely populated by criminals laying low or getting new identities, completely off the grid. And the main character of the story is Mark, the mayor’s son who works as Eden’s postman and who has Asperger’s.

And it’s in development for TV.

So I checked it out.

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Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

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The Quantum Magician - Cover 2, May 2017
Cover art! By Justin Adams

Black Gate readers were very supportive when I reported the start of my 2-year experiment as a more present parent and as a full-time writer in June of 2015. I am happy to announce some of the fruits of that experiment 23 months into this leave from work.

First of all, my son is now 12 years old and is a wonderful human being. He cares about others, listens more, has more self-possession and seems successful enough socially that girls keep calling him. I can of course, only take half the credit for that, but even if the only thing I accomplished in the last 23 months was my contribution to raising a responsible person, I would have called it a very successful sabbatical.

However, while he was at school, I went to the library to write or edit, and some good things have come of that too.

Last night, at 7:30pm, 6 May, while I was reading at Ad Astra, Toronto’s premier fan convention, a very dedicated but surely sleepy-eyed gentleman in Oxford was posting the press release announcing my first novel! The world English rights to the The Quantum Magician sold to Solaris Books in the UK in November, via my excellent agent Kim-Mei Kirtland, but the news has been under embargo for the last six months while cover art was being developed by the extremely talented Justin Adams.

The Quantum Magician is an sf heist story, basically Ocean’s Eleven meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I took many of the elements of hard sf and aliens that are found in my short fiction pieces “The Way of the Needle,” “Persephone Descending,” “Pollen From a Future Harvest,” “Schools of Clay” and “Flight From the Ages” and found something I’m really excited about: stealing things.

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Breaking Into Comics as a Writer: Mucho Opportunities

Breaking Into Comics as a Writer: Mucho Opportunities

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Fantastic Four Ego the Living Planet-small

I knew I wanted to be a writer basically when I learned how to write in English. That might have been as young as grade two, but certainly by grade three (I was in immersion school so we learned to read and write in French first).

My mother gave me my first four comic books in the summer between grades four and five, and I remember making plans with my best friend Eric (who liked to draw) about us making comics together.

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A Babe in the Woods: Derek’s Literary Adventures in New York

A Babe in the Woods: Derek’s Literary Adventures in New York

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Sheila Williams speaking at Asimov’s 40th Anniversary Celebration in Manhattan-small

Sheila Williams speaking at Asimov’s
40th Anniversary Celebration in Manhattan

For those of you who don’t know, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine turns 40 years old this spring, and a celebration was held at a New York book store. Asimov’s invited its writers and I finally, finally used this as my excuse to visit New York!

I’ve traveled lots of other places, but I’ve never been to the home of Spider-Man,  Dr. Strange, Saturday Night Live, and *all* the crime shows ever!

Like a lot of non-Americans, I’ve also been hesitant to cross the border more recently, in part because I have friends who might not be able to do so anymore, and in part because I wasn’t sure how I’d be treated.

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