It was the summer of 1969. Very much like the one described in the song by Bryan Adams. I quit the rock and roll band I’d been playing with since high school, went to work with my Dad, and had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings; a year earlier, while still in high school, I’d read The Hobbit. Now, after completing my magical journey through Middle-earth, I was totally hooked. I had found a liking — no, a…
So a bit over a month ago I started my first every Kickstarter, a retro-fantasy book launch with Jeff Easley that ended earlier this week. It was a very interesting month and as people seem interested in Kickstarter’s and the possibilities that the Kickstarter site provides, I thought I’d continue blogging about it on Saturdays as long as I find out new and applicable facts concerning the program. That being said, I’ll take you into the process once more and…
Last week I wrote about art direction in a film, primarily a film that failed, but that certainly isn’t the only such place where an unfortunate failure can happen. I recently had the opportunity to go to Oceanside California and share a lunch with Nick Parkinson a former developer on the Sony Online Entertainment MMORPG Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Now I’d had some limited experience with Vanguard back in about 2008. In a former life I took part in Sony’s…
I think I first heard about The Witches of Lublin on Facebook. You know me, I’m a sucker; you put the word “witches” in the title and I’m on it. So I grabbed up my broomstick, and flew over to Ellen Kushner’s FB page where she’d posted the link about it, and I said, “This looks incredibly cool!” (Or something to that effect.) “A radio play! I love radio plays!” And then, about five seconds later, I had a little…
When you taste honey, do you think of ravenfolk, the wicked and the lovely? Do you find sex, death and trickery on your tongue? Ms. Amal El-Mohtar does. Amal was given 28 vials of honey. She tasted one vial per day over the course of one month and wrote down her impressions – some days in prose, others in poetry. These writings have been published as The Honey Month. Seriously, you should buy the book for “Day 27: Leatherwood Honey”…
In my ongoing Art Evolution series, I explained my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists of all time for a shared project. They were to illustrate a single character in their most recognizable style. So far, the list has included Jeff Laubenstein, Eric Vedder, and Jeff Dee, with this week adding again to that prestigious list. Three down, and I now had a “1st Edition D&D Lyssa”, but I’d only scratched the surface of my goal…
As I was walking the hallowed halls of the Indianapolis Convention Center during this year’s GenCon, I managed to uncover a handful of truly wonderful relics. Perhaps the greatest of these [although I contend that L3 Deep Dwarven Delve by Len Lakofka with Wayne Reynolds art in 1st Edition format is still in the running] was this masterpiece from TSR’s defunct Wild West game Boot Hill. Now you may be asking “Boot Hill, really?”, and indeed I would be saying the…
This is the second of two installments which I pre-wrote for the Goth Chick Intern to gratefully post on my behalf. In a strange fit of wanton generosity I found myself also agreeing to allow the little minion to come up with a title for this entry, so in the event it is lame (heaven help him if he used a Sound of Music reference) please accept my apology in absentia, and rest assured my response will be swift and…
By Rich Horton Copyright © 2008 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. STATS I read various issues of 51 print magazines, 33 electronic sources, 40 original anthologies, 12 story collections with original pieces, 19 single story chapbooks, and a few other miscellaneous spots. These places included (that I read) a total of 2343 stories: 73 novellas, 366 novelettes, and 1904 short stories (338 of those short-shorts). That’s a personal record, and so is the total wordcount: somewhat over 12.7…
November 1-4, 2007, Saratoga Springs, New York Reviewed by Howard Andrew Jones Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. Harrison For - er, Howard Andrew Jones and Eric Knight. photo 2007 by E. E. Knight John and I had a wonderful time at the World Fantasy Convention, but in addition to the good memories and the books, I seem also to have flown back with a mild bug: sore throat, headaches, low-grade fever. Blech. After teaching this morning,…