Author Archives: ogresan

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About ogresan

Richard Parks' stories have have appeared in Asimov's SF, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies, including several Year's Bests. His first story collection, THE OGRE'S WIFE, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is the author of the Yamada Monogatari series from Prime Books.

The Heavenly Fox – Discarnate Edition

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Heavenly Fox - eBook1Okay, one more and I promise I’m done, at least for a little bit. To our left is a picture of the ebook edition of The Heavenly Fox, my PS Publishing novella that was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award in 2012. The unsigned edition is still available from PS, though the signed edition has long since sold out. Regardless, for anyone who’d like a reading copy but don’t want to lay out limited edition hardcover prices, this is the way to go. The Kindle edition is already up. I should have the Nook/Kobo version ready in a few days.

Here’s the synopsis from the hc edition:

“A fox who reaches the age of fifty gains the ability to transform into a human woman. A fox who reaches the age of one hundred can transform into either a beautiful young girl or a handsome young man at will and can sense the world around them to a distance of over four hundred leagues. A fox who reaches the age of one thousand years, however, becomes a Heavenly Fox, an Immortal of great power, able to commune with the gods themselves.”

—From the Hsuan-Chang-Chi of Kuo P’u

The fox vixen Springshadow has reached the age of nine-hundred and ninety-nine by taking the form of a beautiful girl and stealing the chi, the life force, of mortal men. She prides herself on having done so without permanently harming any of them, but when, just before her one-thousandth birthday, her mortal lover, Zou Xiaofan, inadvertently forces her to choose between his life or her immortality, she chooses immortality without a moment’s hesitation. As a fox, and thus completely devoid of a conscience, for Springshadow this was no choice at all.

Or so she thought. Springshadow soon discovers what a trap immortality can be. Even more serious—and very annoying—is her discovery that her new state of being includes a new emotion, one that feels very much like regret. She knows from there it is only one small step to developing an actual conscience. Intolerable! Yet what can she do to prevent this? When the Goddess of Mercy, Guan Shi Yin, brings her a message from the shade of her former lover, Springshadow believes she’s found her answer. Accompanied by a reprobate Daoist immortal named Wildeye, the Heavenly Fox undertakes a quest through the courts of Heaven and the terrors of Hell to redeem the soul of Zou Xiaofan. Maybe then she can get on with the rest of eternity without regret. Or that pesky conscience thing.

All the Gates of Hell – Incarnate Edition

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ATGOH-Proof CopyTo our left is a picture of the printed proof copy of All the Gates of Hell that arrived on my doorstep day before yesterday. The picture isn’t that great (cameraphone), but the book itself turned out pretty good, in my own opinion. So for anyone not yet ready to embrace the ebook revolution, there is now an actual, real book that you can hold in your hands and, you know, read. You can order from Amazon at the link above or directly from your favorite bookseller.

ISBN-10: 1492993263
ISBN-13: 978-1492993261
300 pages, $11.99

“Legal Assistant Jin Lee Hannigan thought she had problems enough as a single woman in rundown Medias, Mississippi. That was before Jin meets a homeless man on Pepper Street who just happens to be the King of Hell, and learns that she’s really the mortal incarnation of Guan Shi Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, charged with the rescue of unfortunates trapped in the various — and nasty — hells scattered around the cosmos. That doesn’t even turn out to be her biggest problem. It seems that the Goddess of Mercy is on the run and in hiding, which is why she incarnated as a human in the first place. Hiding from what?
Love.
But why would anyone fear love? Jin already knows that love is powerful, but what she has to learn, and fast, is that the wrong kind of love is also potentially the most destructive force in all the universe and–even more important–how to stop it.”

Surfing for Survival

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FoxMaybe not literally, but as far as visibility and career are concerned. I’ve been thinking about the question of career survival because it finally occurred to me that I’ve been shifting gears a bit lately when it comes to my own writing, in that I’m doing more novels these days, and fewer short stories. Now, for many cases that’s just considered par for the course, and was once considered the only course—you started off writing short stories, with the intention of getting good enough to sell them to the major magazines, of which there were several. If you were planning any sort of career, then part of the plan was to build up your name recognition through short fiction and then use that visibility to transition to novels. Short stories were never considered to be an end in themselves in that scenario. Sure there were probably as many exceptions as not, and writers who started with novels from day one and were either barely or sometimes not at all aware that the magazines even existed. I wasn’t one of those. I discovered the magazines at about the same time that I started to write in the first place, and I began with short stories, and the first novel I ever wrote I thought was going to be another short story, until an editor took pity on me and informed me that what I had submitted was not a short story, but the opening chapter to a novel, and so it later proved. Regardless, the short story was my go-to form. Continue reading →

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Interludes

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WRITING 02Time for a blog post in which a lot is going on but almost nothing is, you know, actually happening. First Reader still has the manuscript for The War God’s Son and probably will for another week or two. Once she’s done I’ll be ready to look at the book again and possibly get the submission draft together. I would really like to get that done before the end of November, though realistically even if I do, that’s very close to the time that publishing shuts down for December, so it’s unlikely I’ll get a decision on the book until January at the earliest. The only reason I think it may be that soon is that the publisher knows the book’s on its way and might be able to expedite things. We’ll see.

Since it turns out my brain is still too fried from TWGS to write anything else for a bit, I’ve used the time to try and get the print version files of All the Gates of Hell ready instead, though I’ve hit a couple of snags with the formatting. That is, the template I’ve used twice before with no issues is now getting reported with errors that I don’t believe are errors. Computers are great, except when they aren’t. I’ll get it sorted out and put up a notice when the physical book is available, since I know not everyone is a big fan of ebooks. I am, but I also acknowledge that there’s just something special about a “real” book, and I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon, if ever. Provided the coming apocalypse leaves us with at least a Gutenberg-era level of technology. If we’re back to the stone age, all bets are off.

 

P.S. Yes, I know I misspelled “lama” in my last post. Or rather used the homonym rather than the proper word. Or was confusing the Dalai Lama with Wally Llama. My mind works that way sometimes.

Off to See the Lama

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MothI’ve been scarce this week because First Reader and I took a trip to Atlanta to hear the Dalai Lama give a talk at Emory University. He was there because there is a co-operative initiative between his monastery and the school in, of all things, the science department. Tibetan monks are being trained as science teachers at the university so they can go back to the monastery and teach classes in modern science within the Tibetan curriculum (said monastic program takes a mere twenty years to complete. And I thought Grad Students had it rough).

I don’t have a lot to say about the talk. You sort of had to be there. But I will note two things.  1) The Dalai Lama is an incredibly smart guy. You only had to hear him question one of the scientists present on a fine point of experimental methodology to pick up on that.  2) It was nice to hear someone who ought to know holding the opinion that a) religion isn’t enough for a full understanding of the universe and b) science and spirituality are not and should not be in conflict. Which has always been my own opinion on the subject.