Howard Andrew Jones's Blog, page 23

Dedication

Remember how my new book, Through the Gates in the Sea is now available? Well, inside is the saddest dedication I’ve had yet to write: “To the memory of Kris Ghosh, M.D. (1969-2015), father, chef, surgeon, traveler, and brother in all but blood.”

Wish I could have dedicated it to him while he was still with us. Still can’t believe he’s gone.

I haven’t yet had the heart to delete his contact info. I suppose some part of me still expects to receive a phone call from him, greeting me in his terrible fake Liverpool accent…

Kickstarting

Talk about first world problems! There are so many cool Kickstarters running right now that I can’t afford them all!

Longtime site visitors might remember that Hannibal of Carthage was one of my heroes growing up, right up there with Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew in importance to my moral development. Well, I’ve just stumbled upon a Kickstarter that’s a graphic novel about Hannibal’s life, complete with a cool t-shirt and some other goodies that can be ordered. The Kickstarter’s actually over, but you can still join in here. Judging by the amount of money raised, I’m not the only one who grew up with Hannibal as a hero. Wish I’d known some of those other folks when I was a kid…

Speaking of my favorite Carthaginian, the acclaimed board game Hannibal: Rome Vs. Carthage is getting re-released via Kickstarter in just nine days, and it comes with an additional game starring Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, who led Carthaginian forces through the First Punic War. I’ve been hearing about how glorious this game is for years and I’m more than a little interested in seeing how it will play.

And if THAT weren’t enough, one of my all-time favorite role-playing games is coming back into print. Steven Sechi has created a new version of Talislanta, a wondrously evocative role-playing game, and it’s being Kickstarted right NOW! I’ve been such a fan of Tal for so long I’m going to sit down with Mr. Sechi for Black Gate and get some additional details about the new edition — and gush about why I’ve admired it for so long. Succinctly — fantastic imagination with plot hooks and ideas galore.

If you want to go off and explore Talislanta on your own, here’s a site where Mr. Sechi has permitted fans of the game to archive all of the preceding books, downloadable for free as PDFs. I helped do a little of that myself.

How will I afford it all? I guess I’d better get back to work…

 

 

Behind the Scenes

A few weeks ago Paizo’s James Sutter asked me to draft an essay about my newest Pathfinder novel, Through the Gate in the Sea. It ended up being a peek behind how I drafted the novel, with a little discussion about my own role-playing gaming. If that sounds of interest, you can find it here.

I think this novel, and its predecessor, Beyond the Pool of Stars, are stronger than their predecessor Pathfinder novels. In particular I love the characters, and would like to return to them someday. The famously hard-to-please reviewer known as Mrs. Giggles even seemed to like this one, although she couldn’t help sideswiping the previous novel a little as she talked it up. Ah well. I was pleased that she enjoyed the book as much as she did!

This week also brought a video review from Dungeon Master Mark, one which could only be described as glowing. So, good news all around, actually.

When I first become a professional writer I used to regularly keep an eye out for reviews. These days I don’t — I wouldn’t have learned about Dungeon Master Mark’s review if he hadn’t contacted me. Curious to see if there had been ANY other reviews I actually broke my resolve, surfed about, and found that one by Mrs. Giggles.

Too often, reading reviews is like getting a gut punch. I grew tired of discovering one or two-star reviews on Goodreads or Amazon where someone didn’t like my adventure novel because it wasn’t very funny (where did they get the idea it would be a comedy?) or because the elf was wearing the wrong hat, or even because the reviewer was sloppy and wrote a scathing review of the wrong Pathfinder novel and tagged it to mine.

It’s different when the criticism is legitimate, or where you can see the point, and it’s most painful when the critic is wrong-headed and very shrill. A reading group for one of my novels decided that I was a misogynist and that I had stolen my plot from a game I’d never heard of. I get a lot of praise for my characterization, but now and then I get complaints that they’re wooden, and I can only assume that’s because my characters don’t constantly emote all over the page and tell you what they’re feeling, as we see in a lot of modern YA, or in anime.

But I can’t ever really know why some people see some things in my writing I don’t think is there, or why they miss things that are, and I’ve managed to stop losing sleep over it. You can’t control how anyone reacts, and people arrive at your book with different expectations. It may be that they expect EVERY writer to write only like their favorite author does, and it may be that they don’t know what a certain genre of novel is intended to deliver, or that they can’t help looking down their nose a little at what you’re doing because they’ve been taught only literary writing is truly good. It may even be that your style of writing just doesn’t click with them, which I understand — enough that that sort of honest difference doesn’t sting.

When the next big book drops, as I launch the first book of my new trilogy, I may be on pins and needles and am likely to find myself waiting for the reviews to roll in. I hope I won’t drive myself crazy when I do so. I have a lot riding on this one. I’ve been working on it since 2014, and it has characters and plot situations I’ve been working with since the 1990s. I’ve really poured my heart and soul into the thing, moreso than with any preceding novel.

I’ll have to harden my heart, though, because I know that there will be some nasty words said about it at some point, probably in short, blithe declarative sentences, possibly ungrammatical, that will nevertheless effect my overall rating on Amazon or Goodreads to the same effect as a thoughtful, well-considered review. Here’s hoping that I’ll be able to ruefully shake my head and move on, as I’ve had to learn to do over the years.

Nominations

Robert E. Howard

On Monday I meant to fit in another Robert E. Howard related topic, but I ended up talking about Breckinridge Elkins for so long that I left that topic for today.

I recently learned that in addition to having a number of friends on the preliminary ballot for the 2017 Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards, I myself am on there as well! Three times!

I was nominated for an essay I wrote for Two-Gun Raconteur about one of my favorite historicals, Robert E. Howard’s “Gates of Empire.”
Bill Ward and I were nominated for our Conan read-through, which actually began in 2015, but concluded in 2016. We were nominated last year for the first half of the read-through and I have fingers crossed we cross the finish line for the back half of it. I was proud of our work and thought Bill especially had some great analysis.
Lastly, this site itself was nominated — which seems like the longest shot to me, although I suppose I do talk about Robert E. Howard an awful lot, even more than I do Harold Lamb.

It’s exciting to be in the running again. And I have to say that if I do get onto the final ballot, I’ll hope for a win. Because it would be an excellent time to finally make the pilgrimage to Cross Plains, Texas and see the home where Howard lived and worked, and hang out with some Robert E. Howard fans and scholars.

There are other writers I love as well, but as I was tidying up my office the other day and looking at my shelves I realized that there’s no other writer I return to as frequently.

 

REH Palooza

The other week I had a chat with Robert Zoltan and Edgar the Raven, and we discussed Robert E. Howard, sword-and-sorcery, my own writing, and all sorts of other stuff as well. You can journey to the Dream Tower yourself and listen in through this link.

If you haven’t dropped by the Dream Tower yet, I encourage you to do so. The interviews so far have covered Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.R.R. Tolkien and have been with a couple of my favorite people.

I’ve been in the midst of a whole lot of spring cleaning over the last weeks and it’s time to get back to writing, although part of each day will still be devoted to some not-quite-finished projects.

At the end of each busy day I’ve been reading the Breckinridge Elkins stories of Robert E. Howard, something long overdue for me. The Robert E. Howard Foundation recently printed the second and final volume that collected all of the Breckinridge Elkins tales, along with adventures starring other similar characters.

I’d tried reading them years before, and while I thought they were fun, I’d never dipped back in. Now I’m regretting that. Maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. A couple of times I had to sit down the book and stop reading for a while because I was laughing so hard.

Breck Elkins is a fairly obscure Robert E. Howard character. There’s no lurking horrors or exotic settings or swordplay, and no supernatural events — apart from the exaggerated amount of damage and violence Elkins himself can endure and inflict — so even those Robert E. Howard fantasy fans who get all the way through his adventure catalog may not dip into the tales.

And that’s a shame, because the over-the-top, bare-knuckled, ludicrous shenanigans of the titanic, dumber-than-a-stump protagonist are a lot of fun. I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy Robert E. Howard’s humorous boxing stories, but I think I like these even more. Robert E. Howard seems to be having a lot of fun with the ridiculous turns of phrase and colorful descriptions, the depictions of simple-minded subtlety, and the wonderful understatements that accompany all of the action.

Here’s an excerpt that gives you some sense of the style. Separated like this from the surrounding text it doesn’t give a chance for the set-up and humor to build, but maybe it will work its spell. Breck, a mountain of a man, is in a town called Grizzly Claw and just wants something to eat. But so far as he can see everyone’s acting plum loco. He doesn’t understand why everyone keeps accusing him of being a counterfeiter, and he loses his patience with the cook.

“I brandished my bowie under his nose, and he hollered and stampeded back into the stove and upsot it, and fell over it and the coals went down the back of his shirt, so he riz up and run for the creek yelling bloody murder. And that’s how the story got started that I tried to burn a cook alive, Injun-style, because he fried my bacon too crisp. Matter of fact, I kept his shack from catching fire and burning down, because I stomped out the coals before they done no more than burn a big hole through the floor, and I throwed the stove out the back door.

“It ain’t my fault if the mayor of Grizzly Claw was sneaking up the back steps with a shotgun jest at that moment. Anyway, I hear he was able to walk with a couple of crutches after a few months.”

For most of my life I didn’t share that much fiction with my father, owing to our different tastes in storytelling. I wouldn’t ever have shared Conan or Solomon Kane or even the Robert E. Howard historicals with him. But I wish I could have shown these tales to him. I can imagine his wry smile as we discussed them, and imagine his chuckle as we traded some of the outrageous turns of phrase and dialogue.

It’s been almost seventeen years since his death now, and as the years have gone on it’s harder to imagine interacting with him because so much has happened and so much has changed. But I can picture so clearly what it would have been like sharing these yarns with him that this, too, is part of the pleasure of reading them.

You can find Breck Elkins over at the Robert E. Howard Foundation web site. I highly recommend him. I also recommend reading the novelized versions of the short stories (in volume 2) first, because REH really did a great job of weaving the tales together.

Favorite Book

On a podcast interview the other day I mentioned my favorite of my own books. Rather, I MEANT to mention the title of my favorite of the books I’ve written. I think I instead said “my favorite book,” as though I am even more egotistical than you might suspect. I assure you that while I have a healthy dose of self-respect, I don’t think my favorite book is one that I wrote.

But that got me thinking — among all of those I’ve read over many years, do I still have a favorite book? It was much easier to choose when I was a kid. Certainly I can point to ones that used to be favorites, like Swords Against Death or (perhaps unfairly because it’s actually a series, albeit one about the size of single modern doorstop fantasy novel) the first Chronicles of Amber, narrated by Corwin. But do I re-read those anymore? Not for a long while. So then perhaps the favorite is Hour of the Dragon, or some Robert E. Howard collection, or maybe a Leigh Brackett collection of short stories, or maybe a collection of Harold Lamb tales, or James Stoddard’s The High House, or something by Wade Miller or Ben Haas or Raymond Chandler or one of the Parker novels by Donald Westlake/Richard Stark.

The truth is, I don’t know anymore. I have various favorite writers, and favorite books, but I’m not sure I have ONE favorite to rule them all. There’s no single text that I refer to again and again above all others that’s my end-all and be-all perfect example of the way writing ought to be. I suppose it would be cool if there was.

What about you folks? Is there a favorite, or are you more in my camp where there’s a range of favorites?

Link Day

Linkman! Copyright Darian Jones

Week 2 of my Spring Cleaning tour continues. I’ve repaired all the horse fence. I’ve still got to get all the weeds and weed trees and vines from off of the back horse fence, clean out the barn, organize the basement, clean a bunch of tile grout, and other mundane things that Asim would never bother telling you about.

I have just a handful of links to share. First, Dark City Games keeps developing their nifty little solo adventure games, and there’s a newish one in their science fiction one available now. It’s been years since I reviewed one (back when Black Gate was a print magazine) but I find them a lot of fun.

Second, over on James Reasoner’s site there was a lengthy discussion of Ki-Gor and Harold Lamb and all sorts of pulp goodness you might find of interest. As a matter of fact, Reasoner’s site is almost always of interest and I myself need to visit more often.

Speaking of interesting sites, my third link is to Frontier Partisans, run by Jim Cornelius, where he celebrated Ben Haas, aka John Benteen, and much discussion of the excellence of Fargo and Sundance commenced. Regular visitors to my own site should know just how much I like the work of Ben Haas.

Right, time to finish breakfast and do daring deeds!

Sundry

I promised myself that I’d do a better job keeping up the blog, but there’s really not much to report. I turned over the “new” novel — new to everyone else, but not me, since I’ve been working on the thing for years — and have taken most of this week to play catch-up on all kinds of house and farm stuff. There’s a bunch of vegetation that’s grown up through the horse fence that I have to cut back or chop down, not to mention the fence itself. And don’t even get me started on all the work I have to do inside, or (sigh) the taxes.

Horses really DO think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and one of ours routinely leans with his not inconsiderable weight against the upper board. Eventually the board breaks, and then I have to cut a new one to size and replace it, a process that takes 45 minutes ONLY if everything works perfectly. Usually it’s more like an hour and 15 minutes. I spent most of Monday repairing everything currently busted and cast a sad eye on the other boards that are ready to go if he decides to lean on them a few more times…

At some point here this summer I’m going to have to rebuild an entire pasture gate because said horse has been leaning against that and it’s pretty much held together now with chewing gum and wishes. With my limited carpentry skills and lack of proper tools, all the slant cuts and precision necessary for gate building seems a little beyond me, so I haven’t decided how to handle it. Measure it and ask a friend or the father-in-law for help cutting the boards? Hire it out? Try to push through and have it end up looking like a 3rd grade science project, complete with glue sticking to the sides of everything?

On your left is Trigger, probably eyeing that yummy looking grass on the other side of the fence. Despite being Slayer of Fences he’s my favorite of our horses because he’s the most interested in interacting with humans and has a really nice disposition. Once, I was out in the middle of the pasture with my board and drill and saw and my bag of screws, and he wandered up to see what was going on. He stood there for a minute, snorted hello, then bent down, dainty as you please, picked up the paper bag with the screws, and trotted off. As soon as I shouted “hey!” in indignation he dropped it and wandered away.

I swear he was teasing me.

 

Winning

You always hear about people who win contests, but they don’t seem like real people. Sometimes it feels like they were invented just for the camera, because you rarely meet them in person.

But the other day I picked up some Special K for the wife with a “you can win an XB0x One” ad on the cover. And lo and behold, there was a magic sticker on the inside. We read it and re-read it, making sure it didn’t ACTUALLY say that we were eligible to win, or that we’d won second place or something… but no, we actually had won a new XBox One, which was unexpected and kind of cool. Kellogg’s mailed it to us just yesterday.

So, thanks Kellogg’s! That’s a pretty cool thing. I’ll open it soon and see if it came with any games.

Manuscripts and Tales

Including a new Dabir and Asim story!

I’ve been going through a lot of… stuff lately, so I haven’t had time to update the site.

The good news is that I’ve turned over the final draft of the long-suffering project to my editor and agent. Here’s hoping that book 1 will be appearing next year or maybe even late this year, although we’re running short on time for that. I need to get to revising the second book, although I have to take a couple of weeks and assault the honey-do list.

The other good news is that there’s a new Dabir and Asim story available in the new issue of Skelos, available here. There’s also a whole bunch of other cool looking stuff in the issue that I look forward to reading just as soon as I finish outrunning this boulder.