Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 53

Persistence Counts

Genre-nomad M. H. Norris has interviewed me on behalf of 18thWall Productions. We talk a bit about my novella, “The Door of Eternal Night”, the unfortunate fate of Mr. James Phillimore, and my advice for aspiring authors. If that sounds interesting, check it out here, and maybe pick up a copy of the novella while you’re at it.

Zibaldone #10: Cemetery Gun

Today’s commonplace book entry…cemetery guns. What are cemetery guns, you ask?

Guns set up in cemeteries, obviously. Along with grave torpedoes and coffin torpedoes. Ostensibly to deter grave robbers and body snatchers, these old-timey sentry guns might also have seen use in the ghoul wars of 1870. What better way to alert watchmen to a creeping ghoul or a corpse-eating werewolf than the sound of said beastie getting a faceful of lead.

Interestingly, this entry has dovetailed with an earlier one, in my mind. In fact, I’ve already started scratching out a rough draft. As night falls on the tomb-city of Ossuary, a gunman named Beckford sits in the dark, listening to rats, and waiting for something to come slinking…

Weekend Weird: Mister Hollow

A dose of weird for your weekend…The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow. This short film centers on an unusual photograph dating back to the 1930s. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing.

WIP Wednesday #13: Speak Loud

Week thirteen. I’ve written roughly 200,000 words since January, which makes me a bit queasy to think about. And write. Before you ask, no, I don’t count the blog. Purely recreational, this.

I’m 22,000 words (out of 50,000) into the Novel-With-No-Name, which isn’t bad for a week and a half. Then, I haven’t really worked on anything else, so maybe not as great as all that. I’ve been playing with this one a bit, indulging my taste for wordplay. Lots of dialogue, some of it funny, some not so funny.

You can do a lot with dialogue, if you’ve got an ear for it. The way characters speak, and interact while speaking, can sometimes say more about them than how they fight, or what macguffin they’re after. Do they joke? Do they ramble, or digress? Do they laugh, frown or smile as they speak? Do they ignore one of the parties in the conversation? Speaking of which, a good conversation can make a scene in and of itself, if you pace it right.

Too, dialogue is great for delivering those oft-necessary bursts of exposition. Need the plot explained? Let a character do it. Preferably in a witty and engaging manner. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking all dialogue has to advance the plot. I’ve found that giving characters a bit of room to wander verbally can punch up a slow scene, or drive subsequent scenes in ways you never expected.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for this week. Sing me out, Eartha.

The Black Rift Opens

A war between gods. A kingdom in chains. And two friends, formerly united by oaths of honor and loyalty, now face each other across the ruins of the city they once fought to save. Klaxus shudders, and the Black Rift opens…

Today sees the release of “The Sulphur Citadel”, the eighth and final installment of The Black Rift of Klaxus series. I haven’t talked much about this, for reasons. But, given that the final chapter is out, and Gav Thorpe and Guy Haley seem to be making this a thing, I figured it was time. I mean, given my last commission statement, somebody is obviously buying them, so I might as well, right?

Right.

Anyway, this is, as far as I know, the first full-length Age of Sigmar novel to be commissioned, way back early last year. Or it was, before I was asked to convert it into eight individual installments, for immediate serialization. If you’ve never experienced firsthand the joy of chopping a mostly finished manuscript up into eight roughly equivalent chunks on a tight deadline, may I recommend not trying to do it on the fly, like I did. Finish the whole thing first and then break out the carving knife.

Trust me, it’ll save you (and your editor) money on paracetamol, if nothing else.

While I’m fairly happy with the end result (insofar as I’m happy with *anything* I’ve written), it doesn’t flow quite as smoothly as I’d like. It’s not quite a set of eight individual stories, or eight chapters in a serial, but a little of both. I knew the whole thing was going to be collected at some point, so I wanted to keep as much of the original flow intact as possible, but the need to divide it into 10K chunks necessitated rearranging the plot beats a fair bit. I hope I succeeded, but I’ll leave it up to you, the reader, to judge.

In retrospect, I probably could’ve simplified the whole deal and just kept it to two static points of view per installment (Orius Adamantine and Anhur, the Scarlet Lord, natch, as they’re the main characters), but then we wouldn’t have gotten those oh-so special moments with characters like Kretch Warpfang, Baron Aceteryx, Redjaw the Resplendent or Kratus the Silent.

As it was, I still left about 15,000 words of character interaction and dialogue (including, like, two really great joke-bits, one of which I managed to recycle for Legends of the Age of Sigmar: Skaven Pestilens) on the cutting room floor. This was necessary in order to quicken the overall pace and spread the action out as evenly as possible over all eight installments. Initially, there were two full installments out of the eight that were almost nothing but characters talking to one another. Great in a book, but bad in a serial.

None of what got cut was important, mind…it was all just ‘bits of business’, as my good chum, Derrick Ferguson, calls it. Just random bits of dialogue, meant to flesh out the side characters a bit more than they ended up being, and explore some of the thruways of the new lore.

That was, to my mind, the goal of this book. To show just how vast the mortal realms are, and just what’s at stake, as the Stormcast Eternals fight to free these lands and their peoples from the servants of the Ruinous Powers. To add some heft to the World-That-Is, and show that it’s got as many potential characters and stories as the World-That-Was (Who are the Furnace Kings? What, exactly, were the Steam Ramparts?). I suspect I overegged the pudding in a few spots, but…eh. Better too many ideas than too few, right?

That said, I doubt I’ll revist any of the characters herein. At least not any time soon. I mean, not unless the editors okay my Kretch Warpfang/Archfumigant Kruk spinoff, Rats A-Poppin’. It’s a musical comedy, involving a hidden temple inside a giant worm, a magmadroth full of explosives and one very unlucky Stormcast Eternal.

Too, if you’ve been waiting for a print version to dive into The Black Rift of Klaxus, I suspect there’s one on the way fairly soon. More on that later, though.

Super-Sounds: Vril-YA!

Two years ago, Derrick Ferguson and I wrote a little something called The Vril Agenda. Now, courtesy of Airship 27 and Radio Archives, it’s available for your listening pleasure, via Audible. Listen as two legendary heroes come together to defeat an evil as old as time itself!

Other available works in the Super-Detective series include my 2012 novel, The Mark of Terror, my two recent novellas,The Death’s Head Cloud and Red Shambhala, and three short stories, “Death in Yellow” , “Proof of Supremacy”,and “The Black Bat at Bay!”.

The new audio, narrated by Bob Kern, is available from Audible. Why not give the sample a listen, and see what you think? And if you enjoy it, why not leave a review?

WIP Wednesday #12: Bones

The title is a hint as to the nature of my current project. Not a subtle one, mind, but, then, subtlety has never been my bag. I write in technicolor, as one reviewer had it. Then, maybe that’s not a bad thing. The subtle knife is all well and good, but sometimes a sledgehammer serves just as well.

Last week I mentioned that I finished the first drafts for the Novel-With-No-Name and its accompanying short story. This week I started another Novel-With-No-Name, shorter than the first. The post title is a nod as to its subject–one I’ve written about before, and recently. It’s always nice to visit old friends. I’d say more, but NDAs, etc.

I’m around 9000 words into it, out of 50,000 or so. Which is pretty quick. Then, it’s had some time to gestate. I was supposed to start it two months ago, but due to various scheduling conflicts (including the previous Novel-With-No-Name) had to postpone work on it until now.  A 50k novel is a different sort of beast to a 80-100k one. Less time to set up the plotline and string it out. The story beats have to come more quickly, the characters have to develop faster. I’ve written a few of these in my time, and I quite enjoy the process, compared to the larger novels.

Story-wise, I started and finished a new short, “The Last Song of Iranon”, over the weekend. It’s for an anthology I was recently invited to submit to, and features characters last seen in “Mordiggian’s Due”, my contribution to Pulp Mill Press’ 2014 anthology, Libram Mysterium. I was aiming for around 3k, but ended up with a healthy 4,500 words. Not bad for two days of work. Set in H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, it finds Amina Algol and her adopted ghoul-siblings, Bera and Arif, stalking a murderous ghost-eater through the ruins of Sarnath.

I also received and completed the first round of edits on Phileas Fogg and the Heart of Osra. Thankfully, there weren’t many, if we’re not counting my seemingly unshakeable habit of randomly switching between US and UK spellings. Sometimes in the same paragraph. I’ve really got to stop doing that.

Anyway, that’s what I’m working on. How about you?

Zibaldone #9: The Deep School

Today’s commonplace book entry is a bit of free writing from a few years ago. I used to scratch out little vignettes like this every other day or so in order to warm up the old creative muscles, and play with ideas. I don’t do it so much anymore, mostly due to a lack of time.

It’s really just a spatter of story, based on something unpleasant I heard as a kid. I like it, though I doubt I’ll ever do anything more with it. There are a few more pieces like this, floating around my notebooks. If I can find them and dig them out, I might share them as well.  Anyway, enjoy, or not, as it pleases you.

The school sat back way deep in the woods. Some place where the only light that reached the school was moon-light. It was a tin-roofed building, black brick’d and red shuttered. It sat in the bottom of one of those tree-filled craters that pock-marked the county.

A man from the university had said them craters was ancient meteor strikes. That was why the plants grew so funny up amongst them. Fleshy plants that sweated unpleasant juices. The school nestled down among them plants like a toad.

It hadn’t been built, leastways not in living memory of any man or woman in the county. It had always been, though not always in the same place. No one rightly knew why folks thought it was a school, but everybody did, though few talked about it. The students, whoever they were, found it regardless.

No one knew who it was who used the school, only that it was used. At night, long past the sun, the school bell would ring…a deep, tolling sound that wasn’t really sound, but more an absence of it. A loud emptiness that shriveled the soul.

Folks who lived near would sometimes report that they’d seen goofer lights way back and deep as the students of the school followed a trail that only they could see to class.

Sometimes, in the night, there’d come a knock on the door of someone who lived too close to the school. A rattling, storming blow that shook the shack to its foundations. There’d be laughter, high and shrill, and goat-eyed shapes peeking in the windows. 

In the morning, folks would usually find dead animals, butchered and half-eaten, on their roof-tops or laying in the road. Blood dripped from the upper branches of the trees and puddled in cold pools in the dirt where those fleshy plants sopped it up like gravy.

Most folks who lived near the school moved after a few years.

The school followed them.

Conqueror of the Crawling Contest

The Crawling Contest of Ghur officially closed last night at midnight, leaving me with around fifty entries to pore over. And believe you me, that was no easy thing…they were excellent, each and every one. From Tyler Mengel’s slick-looking Retributors to Amy Snuggs’ wonderful Dread Saurian, each entry displayed such an impressive level of skill (not to mention reminding me just how *bad* I am at painting miniatures…) that I wish I had a few dozen more copies of the book to hand out.

But, alas, I’ve got just the one. So, this morning, I made my choice, based on various highly scientific metrics (i.e. what I thought was cool). And the winner is…

…Wayne Kemp! 

Congratulations, Wayne. You win a copy of my newest Age of Sigmar novel, Legends of the Age of Sigmar: Skaven Pestilens.

I chose this one for a few reasons…one, it’s been converted, and I dig that. Two, I like the paint job. It’s simple, but effective, with plenty of nice little touches–the coloring of the brand on the wolf-rat’s flank, and the greasy look to the warpstone shard on the staff, for instance. Third, and most importantly, it’s a rat riding a slightly larger rat, which made me laugh.

Highly scientific metrics, as I said.

As I mentioned above, I really do wish I had about twenty more copies  to give away, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to enter the contest, and send me a pic. There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch. Y’all are some talented folks.

And if you missed out this time, don’t worry. I’ll be holding another contest in a few weeks to give away a copy of my next Age of Sigmar novel…

Crawling Contest Update

Just a reminder–the Crawling Contest of Ghur will end tomorrow, so if you’re planning on entering, you’ve got a day and some change to do it in. I’ve gotten about forty entries so far, which is great, but I’d love more. I’ll announce the winner on Saturday. And if you miss out this time, don’t worry–I intend to do this again, and likely off and on until I’m out of books.