Howard Andrew Jones's Blog, page 66

Out of the Mud

Wow, what a busy week. I was working on my truck until 9:00 Wednesday night and spent part of Thursday morning tinkering some more until I finally gave up and had it towed to the service center. Turns out there was a single bad wire, so, apart from the tow fee things weren’t nearly as bad as I’d feared.

While I’m far behind, I have once again been reminded of how I ought to be thankful of all the things that I take for granted. Say, time to work, or a working truck, or my health.

Today I’m turning attention back to my Dabir and Asim story for Kaiju Rising. I’m delighted that the funding level not only reached the stretch goal that activated my story, but that ALL the stretch goals for the anthology have now been met. I find myself in the odd position of having a story I’m not through writing already planned for an antho.

I believe I’ve mentioned before that writing a character who’s a genius is tricky because I’m not a genius. And right now I’ve written poor Dabir and Asim into a corner and am scratching my head trying to get them out. Dabir, of course, will put it all together quickly over the course of the story, but Howard doesn’t have it yet.

Still, though, the day is good. Wonderful weather here. And I had a delightful accidental phone conversation this morning. Allow me to explain. My phone is a constant irritant. The way that the screen touch buttons are arranged means that if I put the phone to my face while talking I can accidentally mute my phone, activate the speaker, block the mic, or even dial random strings of digits. While finishing a chat with my wife while she drove into work I accidentally chin dialed Lou Anders.

Lou’s pretty busy these days so I’ve been holding off talking with him, but once I accidentally dialed we kicked back for about a half hour and he regaled me with details of his recent trip to Norway. I got to vicariously explore the fjords, lone mountain farms, a waterfall glimpsed through a cloud, Viking barrow mounds, and all manner of cool Norwegian things.

Now I’ve got to go make Dabir brilliant. Have a great weekend.

No Joy in Mudville

I wish I could report that the likely continued silence this week is because I’m closing on a deadline, but, alas, the real world has things that need tending, and my deadlines are slipping. I had to get new tires for the truck, and now it looks like I’m having to replace the truck’s batteries — expensive, and just getting the darned things out is proving a challenge I never anticipated (especially given how many auto batteries I’ve removed over the years).

To top it all off my poor son woke up with a nasty toothache, so I’ve got to get him in for an emergency tooth appointment!

Hope your own week is going better than ours here.

Link Day

Copyright Darian Jones

With all this talk about the excellence of John Hocking’s Conan and the Emerald Lotus, it pleases me to be able to point all of you to a new short story from his Archivist sequence, over at Black Gate. Cool stuff!

Also, my writer friend Harry James Connolly has a really cool sounding series fans of heroic fantasy ought to go check out. The Kickstarter is here, and it’s already funded… but there’s two weeks left if you want to make sure you get a copy!

And speaking of kickstarters, it looks like there will definitely be a Dabir and Asim story in Kaiju Rising, because my secret author status was unlocked! To all you who signed up to help spread the word I offer you my sincere thanks. For those of you who are just hearing about it, sign up for a copy here, and help back the project! Two tiers yet remain to be unlocked — author Peter Swallow and some more art. I hope you’ll swing by and consider it!

Now I must away. I have to finish a Dabir and Asim story!

Sword-and-Sorcery Campaigning

While I was wrestling with insomnia and/or lack of sleep over the last months, one of the things I was doing in my down time was leafing through reams of campaign settings and adventures.

If you’re a fantasy reader but not a gamer, you may not know just how much fun can be had paging through a good role-playing setting. The key word there is good. There aren’t THAT many, but there are now many more than there used to be, even keeping in mind that Sturgeon’s Revelation applies equally to gaming stuff. If part of the kick you get from reading fantasy is seeing fantastic and amazing places and the odd people and creatures that dwell within, then you might get a similar kick from a good campaign setting. For instance, I just reviewed an outstanding RuneQuest supplement, Monster Island, over at Black Gate. I don’t play RuneQuest (I don’t even own any of the game’s rulebooks) but the setting got the creative juices flowing. Similarly, I’ve recently picked up Fire in the Jungle, a short but glorious booklet for the generation of jungle adventure scenarios.

But that’s not all. I’ve also purchased Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea and Crypts & Things, each great takes on the sword & sorcery/Weird Tales vibe, a half dozen issues of NOD magazine, which has page after page of inventive ideas in various connected settings, Red Tide and its companion PDF, An Echo Resounding, and, of course, Barbarians of Lemuria and Legends of Steel. I’ve picked over other things as well, but these are far and away my favorite new settings.

Toss all of those in an idea blender with the Necromancer Games reprint of The Wilderlands of High Adventure and you suddenly have me dreaming of putting a wild sword-and-sorcery setting together. Why, I’m not sure. With all the truly inspired settings and locations within these products, shouldn’t I just use what I already have? Aren’t I busy enough?

Yes. Yet I keep thinking of a foggy, coastal land dominated by city-states ruled by sorcerers, with primeval jungle encroaching to the south and a cold and mountainous plateau to the northwest. All a weird, wonderful blend up of my favorite elements of sword-and-sorcery, presented in a hex crawl format. I might just put it together. Every now and then I make a few notes.

I’m just not sure I could do better than some of the great material in the booklets I already own. For instance, the weird monsters and wonderful encounter tables in Fire in the Jungle and Monster Island are so inspired I’d probably just use them for whatever setting I created myself. I shouldn’t feel guilty about that! But worrying about whether or not I should use something someone else created gets in the way of me thinking about designing the setting for play versus designing a setting for play that I might one day sell. Ah well. As it’s all a pipe dream, I can worry about those fine points later.

Time to Read

The Lamb, REH, and pulp collections on the north wall.

As I was re-organizing the study this weekend I got to thinking about a conversation I’d had with John Hocking a few months back. The years keep speeding along, and we’re both wondering how much longer we’ve got to truly enjoy the books on our shelves. Hocking started a “bucket list” of books he’s been meaning to read. I should say that he’s not only started the list, but that he’s started reading from it.

I’ve done a little of the same. Neither of us is trying to throw ourselves at classics we’re not interested in, but at books that we have on the shelves and for some reason have never gotten around to checking out. I’m 45, after all, and I don’t feel any guilt about not having read War and Peace or Finnegan’s Wake. Not anymore. If I’m reading for amusement and/or edification, I’m not going to slog through something that feels more like work than pleasure.

Click to enlarge. Half of my paperbacks, just east of my desk.

So what’s on my TBR pile? A mixture of work by friends and colleagues, the obscure, some pastiche, some questionable adventure fiction, some classics — both in and outside the genre — fiction in other genres, and newer work. For instance, in the friends category, I’m looking forward to reading E.E. Knight’s newest Vampire Earth novel, Appalaichan Overthrow, which is still sitting untouched on my shelf. I haven’t yet read Dave Gross’s latest, or a number of the more recent Pathfinder novels, and I’m particularly curious about both Chris Jackson’s Pirate’s Honor and Richard Lee Byers’ Called to Darkness because I hung out with both authors at GenCon 2013 and they’re pretty cool. Nathan Long’s first Ulrika book impressed the heck out of me, and I have the next two books, but I haven’t opened them. I want to read more of  Elizabeth Bear. I could go on.

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More paperbacks, east wall.

The obscure, well, Keith Taylor’s Bard books from the ’80s are really good and unfortunately all but forgotten. I have three more books to go (and a fifth to track down). I have a handful of Ki-Gor novellas left. It still seems incredible to me that I could enjoy jungle-man adventures so much, but the ones that are good are outrageous fun. And pastiche, well, I’ve got a few more John Maddox Roberts Conan novels to read, and the Andrew Offut Keith/Taylor Cormac Mac Art books, which are supposed to be great fun, and Karl Edward Wagner’s Legions from the Shadows, which is allegedly excellent.

Among those books that might indicate that my taste is questionable are some of Gardner Fox’s novellas. I’ve got all the collections, but I can’t take too many in a row. They’re eye-rollingly ridiculous but unpretentious, full of cool gonzo moments and ridiculous bits in equal measure. I have one or two other Lin Carter books that I’ll probably read that will fall into the same vein.

Classics in the genre, well, I have a number of the Ballantine Adult Fantasies that I’ve never read. I am almost ashamed to admit that I’ve never gotten very far into Vathek, or Khaled. And as someone who admittedly loves Lord Dunsany, it pains me to admit I’ve never read his three most famous fantasy novels, Don Rodriguez, The Charwoman’s Shadow, and the King of Elfland’s Daughter, no matter that they have been on my shelf for at least twenty years. There are more than this besides.

Classics outside, well, I thought I might try Pride and Prejudice, mostly because I enjoyed Mary Robinette Kowal’s Jane Austenesque fantasy novels and I’m told by many, including my good friend Eric Knight, that Austen writes fantastic dialogue. And as much as my father loved Moby Dick I thought I’d give it one last try, in his memory.

Outside fantasy and science fiction but still in the genre ghetto are a number of historicals and thrillers. Poul Anderson’s Viking trilogy about Harald Hardrada is supposed to be pretty good, as are a few of his standalone historicals (I’ve read and enjoyed two of them) and I hear that L. Sprague de Camp’s historicals are pretty tasty as well. I read a big swath of the Parker novels by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark) but I haven’t read them all, or a related series, or, indeed, some other books by him. What a great writer. I have a handful of books from Ben Haas that I haven’t read, mostly westerns. I never knew I loved westerns until Hocking introduced me to the fiction written by Haas, usually under pen names. Then there’s the shelf of pulp fiction both preserved by collectors and reprinted by outfits like Black Dog Books and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.

Hardbacks on my west wall.

Lastly, there’s recent stuff, like work by Brent Weeks, or PYR authors like Jon Sprunk, or George Mann. There’s just a LOT on my shelves.

I hope to live many more healthy years for many reasons, most important of which is to be here for my family. …And to read all of this cool stuff I’ve accumulated!

Hey, which of you out there has my copy of Scott Oden’s Men of Bronze? I know I loaned it out, but I can’t remember to whom. And where are the rest of my James Enge novels? Read ‘em, and bring them back!

 

Writer’s Desk

Click to embiggen.

Here at Jones central I spent a long weekend putting my study into complete order. It had been converted into my mother’s convalescent room while she was staying with us for about five months, and between that and all the paperwork from her hospital stay AND the usual clutter, it took a couple of days for me to get it working again.

Now, though, I have everything filed, and I’ve culled my bookshelves. The desk itself is clean of all clutter that doesn’t need something done with it, pronto. Chief among that pile of “stuff to be done with” are the reviews for some excellent products I received for review at GenCon. I sent a number of nifty looking books on to John O’Neill, but beside me are four books that I’m particularly fond of and which I’ll be mentioning both here and at Black Gate in more detail in the coming weeks.

1. Dungeonslayers, a neat little fantasy role-playing system that’s extremely compact but full-featured.

2. The Demolished Ones,  an awesome sort of Victorian FATE scenario with elements like The Prisoner (but this one defies easy explanation).

3. Monster Island, a fabulous sandbox setting for RuneQuest.

4. My friend Sarah Newton’s Monsters & Magic, which is a system for re-envisioning older role-playing systems as new FATE style games.

Now I must get back to writing. I’ve got some short stories due very quickly, and some novels to finish drafting, an outline to finish, and some promo work to get done! Oh, and I need to feed the horses…

Home Repair Man

That’s been me the last week or more. Today I have to drive in and get some new tires for the truck. Still, despite all this I’m getting some good writing work done. A new short story has been green-lighted for Paizo, and it looks more and more like the stretch goals of Kaiju Rising will be unlocked… which means that as long as people keep pledging support, I should be included on the table of contents for the anthology! (Which FURTHER means I really need to finish this new Dabir and Asim story!)

I have a handful of reviews to write and I should finally be taking those live over on the Black Gate site this week.

For now, though, I must away!

 

Spoiled by Water

*Not actually Howard or the hole he dug.

There’s nothing like going without running water in the house to remind a person how much we modern humans take for granted. Or to remind me, at least. The water line to our house busted over the weekend, so much of the last few days has involved me digging a really big hole (to access the water pipes) and then filling said hole when the job was completed. I was assisted by another neighbor who wandered over with a small back hoe, and a kind city utility guy who advised us about how best to line things up. If not for the digging and the reassurance from the other gentleman so that we continued digging, I would have been at it for far longer. My faith in humanity went up several notches, because neither man was under any obligation to donate so much time.

The actual repair took our plumber just a little over an hour, but if he’d had to dig that hole the cost would have been over a thousand dollars… and the job would have been delayed, because he didn’t have time in his schedule to dig such a hole, but had time to swing in and replace pipe.

Out here in the country we aren’t in easy walking distance of other water sources (except, of course, for the Sea of Monsters, and there’s always the danger of getting dragged in by a tentacle if you get too close). Our nearest neighbor was away, but fortunately some old friends live only a ten minute drive off. We took over a couple of big coolers (and they loaned us another) and the buckets our horses drink out of, and filled ‘em all up. We ate out rather than cooking and getting more dishes dirty. We washed from basins that we filled via recycled two liter bottles filled from those coolers.

We got by, but it was easy to see things would get old, fast. By yesterday evening we had running water again, which now strikes me as an incredible luxury. I wonder how long before I start taking it for granted again? In any case, I’m out some time, and my back’s a little sore, but I’m ready to start the day with some writing. I sincerely hope that you’re own weekend was far less eventful.

Now for something completely different. Here’s a sneak peek at the first chapter of Scott Lynch’s third Gentleman Bastards novel, Republic of Thieves. He likely needs no extra help promoting this book, for hundreds of thousands of readers across the world have been eagerly awaiting its release. But I’m going to promote it anyway, owing to the facts that I found the advance version brilliant and that Sir Lynch is just a cool dude. Via Gollancz, here’s the first chapter of Republic of Thieves.

To the Rescue

We’ve been dealing with some pretty depressing family health news around here over the last year. As I was driving away from one of our visits to see my mom in the hospital my teenaged son decided to lift my spirits with a music track so ludicrous I was soon crying with laughter.

I now bequeath this track to you, to lift your spirits when YOU are feeling low.

Here, then, is the theme to the Wonder Woman TV show. Ah, how many ways do I love thee, Wonder Woman show theme?

1. You begin with an explosion, and grow less subtle going forward.

2. You have a splendidly catchy, driving bass line.

3. How about your blaring brass section that knows just when to over-emphasize something dramatic?

a. And how about the great tuba part between the second and third verse?

b. Then there’s the melodic motif that adorns every verse. Fabulous.

4. The dramatic piano glissando between the end of one verse and the start of the next (for you non-music nerds, that’s when a pianist swipes a hand from the top keys all the way to the bottom).

5. The vocals — oh my God, the vocals. The sheer breathless excitement of the background vocalists is not to be believed, and I LOVE how the lead singer always knows just when to hold the note just a little too long, for extra dynamic emphasis.

6. The lyrics. You, dear reader… have you LISTENED to these lyrics as an adult? They’re beyond belief, from the “I’m so clever with my sexual double-entendre” line to gems like “Fighting for her rights, in her satin tights, and the old red white and blue–oo!”

Of course none of it would work at all if the song itself weren’t actually ear-worm catchy and the musicians themselves weren’t quite talented. And it must be emphasized that it is THIS particular arrangement that works best, with just the right tempo and instrument mix. When you combine the arrangement with over-the-top performance and the ’70s lyrics the song becomes so cheesetastic it’s actually kind of awe inspiring. Like a well-executed sculpture of Elvis that’s made out of butter.

Now before you castigate me, I know as well as the next guy how you have to judge a piece for its time and appreciate art in its context. Yeah, I’m not doing that right now. This song lifts my spirits when I’m down. Maybe it’ll lift yours.

 

Link Day

(Link Man copyright Darian Jones.)

It’s Link Day again here at Jones central, as I’m hard at work battling mountains of prose.

First, a fascinating but grisly look at some skeletons dripping with jewels found in catacombs and churches in Europe. Seriously, if you’re creeped out by skeletons and tombs, don’t follow the link. As an added bonus, the captions are perhaps among the worst ever written, but not quite so bad as to be actually amusing. They just repeat, word-for-word, what is said in the accompanying text.

Second, some ruined cities, as revealed at I09. Some are more mysterious than others, but it is worth a read.

Third, and completely unrelated to the theme I have going with Indiana Jones-like stuff, a great post from author Chuck Wendig on 25 ways to revise your work.

My work here is done. Link Man, away!