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.

In Passing

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I wasn’t going to mention this here, but it occurred to me that some people out there might be annoyed with me if I didn’t, so here goes. I have a new Kindle single in Amazon’s new KDP Select program, which means in this case that the download is free through Sunday, and free to “borrow” from Amazon for the next 90 days after the free download promotion is over.

A Hint of Evil-US

A Hint of Evil-UK

It’s the first story in a projected series, “Tales of the Divinity Recruitment Taskforce,” and concerns what happens on earth when the War in Heaven “accidentally” spills over into the mortal realm, and I don’t mean spiritually:

“The world is a very changed place. When the Archangel Michael accidentally chased an archdemon onto the physical plane, the War in Heaven spilled over into the human world in a direct and tangible way. Now most nations on earth are ruled by an Ecumenical Council, and Anti-Demon Taskforce agents such as Samuel Donovan fight a guerilla war against demonic incursions. Yet Sam Donovan is far from convinced that the alleged “War in Heaven” is what it seems to be, even as he and his fellow agents struggle to keep humanity from becoming “collateral damage” to the schemes of greater powers.

Matters go from bad to worse when Sam discovers that the Adversary is recruiting earth’s non-aligned spiritual beings, ancient and forgotten gods and goddesses, monsters and immortals, to fight against humanity. The situation then goes from worse to terrible when the Advocate and the Ecumenical Council discover that Sam has the natural gift of detecting evil. Now he and the Angel Deneba are partnered in the newly formed “Divinity Recruitment Taskforce” to track down, assess, and if possible, convince other non-aligned powers to join the war on humanity’s side.

To complicate Sam’s life even further, it turns out that Deneba has a sister, a fallen angel named Aereis, who has also taken an interest in Sam’s gift. Especially after Sam gets his first good look at this fallen angel—and sees no evil in her. Sam still has a job to do, but it’s getting harder and harder to pretend that he knows beyond all doubt that he’s on the right side.”

I will try to keep these to a minimum, I promise.

ReReading Vs ReWatching – It Isn’t the Same Thing

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Unless you’re one of the people to whom the Grand Design was handed on a platter, “meaning” is where you find it. And when one is in that particular karmic space, one finds the strangest things to puzzle over. For instance, I’ve been going around and around over possibly the stupidest, least consequential questions in all creation: why do I have no problem re-reading an old story series but balk at watching re-runs?

It’s not that I can’t watch re-runs. I’ll catch an occasional Buffy episode, or ancient “I Love Lucy” at opportunity, but I don’t seek them out, even when easily available. Small doses, that’s it. Anything else and I start twitching and looking for something else to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s a show I liked or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s a program I watched religiously, though there aren’t many of those. Yet this only applies to fictional/story series. I can rewatch old Mythbusters episodes in marathons, no problem. Yet when Mrs. Ogre, who loved loved loved  the tv series “Ugly Betty,” discovered the station that was re-running them and became glued to the screen, I had to go do something else. Just about anything else.

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Avast, Mateys! It’s “Steal Like a Pirate” Day

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Yesterday, I finally joined the club. I had an entire book pirated. I’ve had short stories stolen before, even one translated into Russian and published without my knowledge or consent, but this is the first time someone’s gone to all the bother of ripping off an entire book. And it was at least a little bother. Someone took the time to convert the only electronic files available into an entirely different format, one I’d never sanctioned, and made it available for download for free (and NO, I’m not going to say which or where, you sillies).

I’m a little annoyed, yes, but not much more than that. See, I spent several years on the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Anti-Piracy Committee, helping to track this sort of abuse. I learned a few things in my time there. One was that there were several types of pirate, who distributed work not their own for different reasons. Some were just out to make a buck on other people’s hard work, and those were the ones we tried to shut down whenever possible. Some were like hoarders, and more or less “counted coup” on the number of free books they could accumulate on their disks, and reading any of the stash was never the point. And then there were the ones who considered themselves fans, and honestly thought they were doing nothing wrong but rather helping the writer out by making the work more widely available. I’m not really convinced by that reasoning but I have to concede the possibility, because the other thing I learned, both on and off the committee, was that any given writer’s worst problem was not piracy, but obscurity. You might lose a few sales, but most likely they were to the sort of reader who wouldn’t have bought the book anyway because they didn’t have a clue who you were. Next time? Well, that’s where it gets tricky. Especially if the pirates are enthusiastic and determined.

So what am I going to do? I’m going to monitor the situation and consider a takedown notice if I think he’s doing more harm than good. The pirate is Russian, but his hosting service isn’t, so there may be something I can do. But maybe I won’t need to. We’ll just have to see.

Janiform – When Looking in One Direction Just Isn’t Enough

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 It’s a new year, and it’s time to look ahead. Which I will now do by looking backwards. It’s not as much of a contradiction as it seems at first glance. How do we know where we want to go if we don’t look at where we’ve been? So now I look backward. Just a bit.

When I think about my first novel, The Long Look, it still scares me a little to think of how much I put into the book without being consciously aware of what I was doing. Now, I do have to make a slight distinction here. I was conscious of the story elements in a procedural sort of way, but if you’d asked me what this or that bit was about, why it was there, I probably couldn’t have told you, I only knew it had to be there. It wasn’t until I’d read the manuscript for possibly the fifth or sixth time, cold, during the line-edit phase that I finally realized what I had done, and was able to express it with any kind of coherence.

The Long Look bears some resemblance to Rashomon in that it has more than one character viewpoint on a series of events, but at heart it is two separate but intertwined narratives about those same events. The first narrative is a (relatively speaking) conventional fantasy adventure story with a quest, battles, magic, and a love match with just a tad of a complication. Ok, so it’s a pretty big complication. Yet this is the story that will become part of the history of the Twelve Kingdoms. Within the context of this universe, this will be the story that “everyone knows.”

The second narrative is something else again. It’s the story of what really happened. And how much work, danger, and adventure went on behind the scenes in order to make the first narrative unfold the way it should. I can’t say any more about it without getting into spoiler territory, but that’s not really the point. Those who read it will see what I mean. Or not.

What might happen is that those who read it for the first narrative are going to wonder what all the rest is about and why it’s intruding into their adventure story. Those readers who (am I kidding myself here?) are expecting something more along the lines of the second narrative from me are going to wonder what all that rubbish about alarums and excursions is doing taking up space and distracting from the real story. Thing is, both narratives together are the “real” story. The way the story appears, and the aspects of the story that must remain hidden below the surface narrative for all time.

The funny part is, that’s the book I meant to write. And yes, I feel a bit like the cat slamming into a plate glass window, then casually grooming its fur with an attitude of “I meant to do that.”  But I did. In the three years since its initial publication the book’s done all right. It sold out its hardcover run and moved on to ebook form. It hasn’t been to everyone’s taste, but what book is? I’m happy with the way it turned out, and enough reviewers and readers have reported in to let me know that most of them feel the same way. I did ok.

Maybe next time I can even do it on purpose.