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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

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lolani 3We published 107 blog posts in April. And they were all fantastic.

But, as they say, some were more fantastic than others. And you sure liked some more than the rest. For example, if it concerned Star Trek, you were all over it: Howard Andrew Jones’s enthusiastic review of the latest episode of Star Trek Continues was our top article for the month, and by a tidy margin.

Bob Byrne’s new column The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes continues to win over new readers; his post on Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective, was the second most read article last month.

Rounding out the Top Three was Sean McLachlan’s engrossing photo-essay on The Waterloo Panorama. (You skimmed the article and just looked at the gorgeous pics, didn’t you? It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.)

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in April were:

  1. Star Trek Continues with “Lolani” and Soars to Warp Eight
  2. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
  3. The Waterloo Panorama: An Epic Example of Military Art
  4. Descend Into the Depths of the Earth in Forgotten Realms: Underdark
  5. Kirkus Looks at The Meteoric Rise and Fall of Gnome Press

    6. …

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in April

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in April

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tea-makers-task2There’s a new sheriff in town. And he has a cat.

Gallery Hunters Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh, last seen in “The Daughter’s Dowry” (published here October 2012) and “The Sealord’s Successor” (March 2013), accept a dangerous commission to investigate a deadly island in Aaron Bradford Starr’s compelling fantasy mystery, “The Tea-Maker’s Task,” which vaulted to the very top of our fiction charts last month. Louis West at Tangent Online called it:

An entertaining, tongue-in-cheek fantasy… Their adventures take them from the rancid food of Burrow Deep Lane in the city of Ravanon to the workshop of a Tea-Making master then through the forests of Candelon, wherein lurks the Walker of the Woods, until they finally reach the ruined city of Vandelon. All the while, Gloren and the cat engage in constant, silent banter, much like two brothers or war buddies… I wanted more.

Steven H Silver’s tale of the strange astral adventures of Hoggar the Cremator, “The Cremator’s Tale,” extended its run at the top of the charts, taking second place this month.

Next was Mark Rigney’s adventure fantasy, “The Find,” the second part of the tale of Gemen the Antiques Dealer.

Also making the list were exciting stories by Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Joe Bonadonna, Martha Wells, Peter Cakebread, E.E. Knight, Gregory Bierly, Dave Gross, Ryan Harvey, Jason E. Thummel, C.S.E. Cooney, Jon Sprunk, Michael Shea, Harry Connolly, John C. Hocking, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, and John R. Fultz.

If you haven’t sampled the free adventure fantasy stories offered through our Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in April.

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Sumerian Zombies, Chicago Vampires, and Stephen King: David C. Smith’s The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

Sumerian Zombies, Chicago Vampires, and Stephen King: David C. Smith’s The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

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The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories David C Smith-smallDavid C. Smith has been a friend to Black Gate almost as long as we’ve been around. I remember attending a World Fantasy Convention with Howard Andrew Jones many, many moons ago when we were both four years old (or thereabouts), when Howard dragged me excitedly to an autograph session to meet him. Dave was astoundingly gracious to two young sword & sorcery fans, entertaining us with tales of writing Red Sonja novels with Richard L. Tierney and the wild S&S publishing scene in the 1970s.

In person and on the page, Dave is a natural storyteller. We both live in Chicago and I’m honored that we’ve become friends over the past few years. We’ve published his fiction and non-fiction here at Black Gate — including an excerpt from his new noir thriller Dark Muse, and one of the most popular works of fiction we’ve ever posted: an excerpt from his supernatural pirate dark fantasy novel Waters of Darkness, written in collaboration with Joe Bonadonna

Dave and Joe co-wrote one of our most popular blog posts in 2012, “The Big Barbarian Theory,” and Dave followed it up with a classic article that still brings traffic to our site today, “New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times.” Howard interviewed Dave for us in 2007, and Jill Elaine Hughes conducted a interview/career retrospective a few months later.

Dave’s latest book is a new collection of four new short stories, a novella, and more — including “The Man Who Would Be King,” the tale of a writer who resents Stephen King’s success, until an odd encounter with the most popular horror writer in America changes his life. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories also includes a story set in the universe of his popular novel Oron, a zombie tale, a sample chapter from The West Is Dying, author notes, and much more.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

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Pictures for Sad ChildrenYou Black Gate peeps sure are a reliable bunch. You love vintage fantasy paperbacks, 80s horror movies, and gaming news, and with a noble passion. But you know what you really crave? Tales of People Behaving Badly, that’s what. Figures.

And thus we find that the #1 article on the Black Gate blog last month was our report on John Campbell’s ugly KickStarter implosion, a sad tale of comics, hubris, and book-burning. (It was my favorite, too. I’m not throwing stones.)

Things got a little more wholesome (sort of) with our #2 article, M. Harold Page’s “What’s the Point of Steampunk?” (You remember. The one with the line, “WHAT WAS THAT, SIR? I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY ZEPPELIN ENGINES.”)

Moving on, we find that Derek Kunsken’s interview with comic wunderkind’s Mirror Comics was the third most-read post for the month, followed by Bob Byrne’s opening post in his popular new blog series, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes. Rounding out the Top Five was Fletcher Vredenburgh’s look at a forgotten Lin Carter novel, Kellory the Warlock (forgotten by everyone but Black Gate readers, apparently).

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in March were:

  1. Another Crowdfunding Fail: John Campbell Self-Destructs on Kickstarter
  2. What’s the Point of Steampunk?
  3. Rising Star Indie Publisher Mirror Comics on their Weird Western Mission Arizona
  4. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes
  5. His Name is Vengeance: Kellory the Warlock by Lin Carter

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Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger, Together Again: The Vril Agenda by Derrick Ferguson and Josh Reynolds

Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger, Together Again: The Vril Agenda by Derrick Ferguson and Josh Reynolds

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The Vril Agenda-smallOne of the first things I did when I landed at the Windy City Pulp and Paper show on Friday was make a beeline for the Airship 27 booth.

Time is finite and the Windy City Dealer’s room is vast, and to make sure you get the treasures you really want, it helps to be a little determined. The treasures I really wanted this year included B.C. Bell’s 1930’s pulp vigilante novel, Tales of the Bagman, which I wrote about enthusiastically in my report on last year’s show, and Jim Beard’s supernatural detective collection, Sgt. Janus, Spirit-Breaker — both of which are published by Airship 27. Plus, I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to look over their whole table, since it’s always piled high with a tantalizing array of new titles.

As proprietor Ron Fortier happily sold me those two volumes, I casually mentioned that I’d first heard of Sgt. Janus via Josh Reynolds’s splendid Nightmare Men column, published at the fabulous Black Gate website… which, coincidentally, I happened to run, did I mention? Without missing a beat, Ron pointed out one of the many titles on his table, saying, “Josh is a terrific guy. That’s his latest book, a new pulp adventure, right there.”

I was suitably astounded. Here I was, trying to impress Ron by name-dropping Josh Reynolds, and he was able to produce a novel I didn’t even know existed! I know when I’ve been one-upped. Besides, I’ve known Josh as a terrific writer for years, so it was a thrill to discover he’d written a pulp adventure novel.

The Vril Agenda was co-written by Derrick Ferguson, author of Dillon and the Voice of Odin. Derrick does a terrific job of relating how the book came about on his blog and I think I’ll turn it over to him:

It got into my melon of a head a particular obsession to have Dillon be trained in various disciplines by the great pulp champions of the past. Since Dillon is a spiritual son of those heroes, I always thought it would be a gas for him to seek out some of these men and women to learn what they know…  Of course I knew I couldn’t use The Big Three by name. I’m talking about Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger. But I could allude to them…

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in March

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in March

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Steven H SilverSteven H Silver’s tale of the strange astral adventures of Hoggar the Cremator, “The Cremator’s Tale,” surged to the top of our fiction charts in March.

Second on the list was Jason E. Thummel’s fast-paced story of a skilled swordsman caught up in a web of treachery in a decadent city, “The Duelist.”

Joe Bonadonna’s sword & sorcery tale, “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” a perennial favorite, claimed the #3 spot.

Martha Wells’s complete novel, the Nebula-nominee The Death of the Necromancer, came in fourth, and Michael Shea’s novelette of Lovecraftian horror, “Tsathoggua,” rounded out the Top Five.

Also making the list were exciting stories by C.S.E. Cooney, Peter Cakebread, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, E.E. Knight, Aaron Bradford Starr, Mark Rigney, John C. Hocking, Jon Sprunk, Harry Connolly, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, John R. Fultz, Dave Gross, Jamie McEwan, Mike Allen, and Ryan Harvey.

If you haven’t sampled the free adventure fantasy stories offered through our Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in March.

  1. “The Cremator’s Tale” by Steven H Silver
  2. “The Duelist,” by Jason E. Thummel
  3. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  4. The Death of the Necromancer, a complete novel by Martha Wells
  5. “Tsathoggua,” by Michael Shea
  6. “Godmother Lizard” by C.S.E. Cooney
  7. An excerpt from The Alchemists Revenge by Peter Cakebread
  8. An excerpt from The Sacred Band by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
  9. “The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
  10. “The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr

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Tales From Windy City Pulp and Paper

Tales From Windy City Pulp and Paper

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The Weapon Shops of IsherThis coming weekend, Friday April 25th through Sunday April 27th, is Doug Ellis’s magnificent celebration of all things pulp, the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Convention here in Chicago, in nearby Lombard, Illinois.

Windy City is one of my favorite local cons. I’ve written about it before, and in fact I’ve been attending the show for around 10 years. 2012 was perhaps the most successful show in some years, considering I returned with a fabulous assortment of mint-condition fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from the collection of Martin H. Greenberg. See the article and photos from that show in my 2012 post, “Thank You, Martin H. Greenberg (and Doug Ellis).”

The show has been growing steadily over the years. Doug and his cohorts have added a film program, an Art Show, panels, an auction, readings, and more programming, but the real draw continues to be the massive Dealer’s Room, a wall-to-wall market crammed with pulps, paperbacks, rare DVDs, posters, artwork, comics, and much more.

I jotted down a few notes last year, and promised myself I’d write them up before the 2014 convention, to let folks who may be on the fence about attending (or those sad and lonely souls who, like me, just enjoy reading far-off convention reports), know what they’re missing.

In 2013, the list of Dealers was the longest I’ve ever seen, boasting some 80 vendors. They had to add more space, and it took even longer to walk the floor. Doug reported that he sold more tables than at any previous convention, and in record time.

If there’s a drawback to the show, it’s that the Dealer’s room closes at 5:00 pm. That made it impossible for me to make it there after work on Friday. My weekly D&D game with my kids kept me tied up until after 3:00 pm Saturday, which meant that by the time I made the show on Saturday, I had less than half an hour to walk the floor before it closed.

I put the time to good use. After a few years, you tend to find a few favorite sellers and I searched them out immediately.

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Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Four: The Maps

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Four: The Maps

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MIddle-EarthHave you ever designed a campaign and thought to yourself, ‘Damn, this is so good, I should build a company on it?’ Well, certainly you aren’t the only one, and dozens of game companies have been born from folk’s home brew campaigns, but it wasn’t until very recently that I realized that I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Role-Playing was born of the same ilk.

Now before you all go running off to Twitter about Tolkien being a RPG nerd, you have to have the full understanding of what I’m talking about. First and foremost, Tolkien WAS NOT a gamer, but that didn’t mean that his world wasn’t ripe for table-top role-players to want to explore in the mid to late 1970s.

One case in particular came out of the University of Virginia in 1977, when then student Pete Fenlon decided he wanted to create a role-playing game around Tolkien’s world for some friends on campus.

My first question upon finding this out was, ‘Why didn’t you just play D&D?’ and Pete’s answer was simple: D&D simply wasn’t Tolkien. As an avid camper and backpacker, as well as a member of the SCA, Fenlon understood way too much about Tolkien to throw a campaign into a world of negative integer armor classes and D20 to-hit charts.

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The Series Series: Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories by Peadar O Guilin

The Series Series: Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories by Peadar O Guilin

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Forever In The Memory Of God-smallHow did he pull it off?

The stories in Peadar O Guilin’s Forever in the Memory of God are in some ways old-school weird fiction, Clark Ashton Smith style, heavy on disturbing imagery and sanity-shattering trauma so far over the top that it risks going beyond gallows humor and straight into comic absurdity, and yet it works. Every time. Even for me, and this is usually not my kind of thing. What these stories have going for them that the old pulp classics didn’t is striking characterization, a flesh of psychological realism animating some surprising configurations of plot bones.

The characters in the three stories here collected find themselves in dire predicaments. These characters — not all of them can be called heroes — bring their own moments of insight and blindness, laughter and grief, to their struggles. O Guilin keeps them struggling against plot twist after plot twist, all the way to twisty endings that gave me that wonderful readerly shock followed by a sense of inevitability: What?! Oh, but of course!

In the opening story, “The First of Many,” a young woman, born into the Rememberer tribe in a post-alien-invasion Earth, is the first of her kind to be a host organism to the larval young of the slug-like conquerors. She copes with the gradual loss of her arm and her privacy in her own mind — as the larva learns to read her thoughts and chemically manipulate her emotions — with a gallows humor that will be familiar to anyone who has lived with a chronic illness.

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The Kick That Did Not Start

The Kick That Did Not Start

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Not all Kickstarters will fund. Farewell, Something Lovely didn’t.

That was unfortunate, but it was not a complete loss. Some of the backers hadn’t backed Centurion: Legionaries of Rome, my successful Kickstarter, so I had increased my network. I also learned some lessons which helped me prepare for my ongoing Kickstarter for Nefertiti Overdrive: Ancient Egytian Wuxia. Since I’m a generous guy, let me share my lessons learned with you.

1) Expect failure and you can expect failure.

I went into Farewell, Something Lovely with a strong suspicion that I would fail. I’m not saying that I created my own failure… actually, I am saying that, but not that I gave up on the Kickstarter.

I kept pushing until the end. I wonder, though, if that expectation of failure curtailed my efforts in some way. Perhaps I could have done more if I believed the Kickstarter would succeed.

It’s similar to an explanation of backer psychology I heard: backers will only pledge to a Kickstarter they expect to fund. Just as a backer will create a failure by expecting a Kickstarter to fail, I have a feeling that if you go in with your parachute on, maybe you’ll bail out of the plane before absolutely necessary. Maybe if I had put more effort into the Kickstarter, I could have saved it.

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