My name is M Harold Page and I’m an outliner! Some creative writing forums greet this kind of statement with all the dismay of children being reminded there’s homework to do: Only writing in flow — “pantsing” — is creative! Outlining is dull, hard work and mechanistic! Etc. Etc. (Oh the angst! I am blocked again…) The “hard work” whinge just tells me people don’t know how to type. Writers type. If you can’t touch type, go learn. Touch typing…
Pop quiz. Who was the first superhero to make it into film? Yes — you in the back…what? Spawn?! Sit down! Okay… you there, in the Marvel Zombie tee-shirt… no, it was not Wolverine, though there may never be another superhero movie made without him. Yes, I see you… Superman? Good guess, but nope. Batman? Warmer, but still no. The first superhero to make it into the movies was Captain Marvel (or as his four-color arch-nemesis, Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana,…
This week Will Self, one of the UK’s stars of Literary Fiction, told everybody that the “novel is dead.” Just seeing the title of his piece was enough to make me bring up Amazon and check… but no, the books hadn’t gone, replaced by app downloads and cheap white goods. So, what did he actually mean? Reading the actual article, I discovered he meant “the literary novel is dead”, plus — as far as I can tell from what’s a…
The potential GM, a curly-haired Scot of about my age, shakes his head. “I don’t know… ten year olds? I’ve had bad experiences GMing kids who don’t get it.” “They’re genre-savvy,” I said. “DeeM here runs D&D 4th edition and they’re both experienced players. D&D. Fate…” Kurtzhau senses my drift and chips in, “And I play Tom Clance—“ “Inappropriate computer games,” I interrupt. “They’ll be fine, honest… and it’s OK to swear in front of them.” So the GM heroically…
I don’t remember when I learned about dragons, but I do remember the first time they took my breath away. I was ten years old, helping to restack the shelves in my school library while a younger class watched a movie in the next room: a cartoon I’d never seen before, but which I eventually learned was called The Flight of Dragons. As it played in the background, I gleaned that there was a princess called Melisande and some sort…
The Hugos have become science fiction’s more recognizable award, ever since they were first presented in 1953 at the 11th World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia. In the decades since though, there’s been plenty of speculation in fan circles about classic SF published before 1953. “Oh, Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth would have win the Hugo Award hands down back in 1951.” “Are you kidding? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published that same year — it would…
This 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…
This is really the March and first week of April short story roundup. While Swords and Sorcery Magazine came through with two new tales, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly did not come out in a timely enough fashion to suit my schedule. Then Beneath Ceaseless Skies spent all of March publishing science fantasy issues. It’s all right if you’re inclined to read that sort of stuff, but I’m here to write about fantasy, preferably of the heroic kind. Actually, most of those stories in BCS…
The Goddess is dead. The Earth is very old. The fabric of time itself has worn thin. Who knows what might be glimpsed through it? — Opharastes, After Revelation When the Goddess who reigned over Earth died her body shattered and the pieces, resonating with her power, rained down over the world. Wherever they settled they caused great changes in both the people and the land. In some places new realities were created. In others, images of the Goddess herself…
How 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…