Category Archives: Writing

2016, Can’t Wait to See the Back of You

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Yoshino-1Well, 2016 continues to suck. Last week I heard about the passing of Tammy Grimes. For those too young to know, she was an actress who won two Tony Awards for her work on the stage (for The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Private Lives). That’s all Wikipedia stuff and you can look it up if you’re interested, and all even before my time. I remember her best for two things: She was the voice of Molly Grue in the Rankin-Bass version of Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (still one of my favorite animated films, excusing the duet between Lady Amalthea and Prince Lyr) and for the narration of several Edward Gorey pieces, especially The Wuggly Ump. Hearing her wonderful whiskey baritone hum of a voice rendering the final lines “…from deep inside the Wuggly Ump.” Gives me chills to this day. RIP.

What I thought was a short story might be turning into the first chapter of a novel. Still too early to tell, but the scope is shifting. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, but only bad if I can’t figure out what the story wants to be. After that it’s just seat of pants to the chair and fingers on the keyboard. I’m ready for something to go right.

Speaking of which, tomorrow here in the States we have a golden opportunity to make 2016 suck a little bit less for everyone here and around the world. Let’s not blow it.

In the Realm of Legend

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In the Realm of Legend

In the Realm of Legend

Which is the title of my retelling of the Perseus and Medusa myth. It would have been the last story I published in Realms of Fantasy, only they folded before that happened. I decided to put it out there myself, since we don’t have a magazine that fills that niche any more. So try to imagine what it would have been like to read it there, with something like the illustration I chose for it. Good times.

In the Realm of Legend

 

Rainy Days and Mondays Redux

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skelos1Right at this moment I’m beginning to wonder if this blog post is going to get written today, or if it is, posted. Suffering from a wonky internet connection. We—okay, I—have gotten so dependent on this ephemeral flow of electrons that I now find it hard, creation-wise, to function without them.

Case in point, the illustration to the left. That is Skelos #1, a new magazine of dark and weird fiction from Skelos Press. I ordered a copy when I first heard about it, and I admit this was mostly from nostalgia. See, when I was first entering the field, there were no online magazines like Lightspeed or Beneath Ceaseless Skies. In fact, there was no “online.” There were personal computers of various sorts, and something called a BBS, which was basically a bunch of users clinging to one central computer via analog modem. Yes, I am THAT old. Regardless, magazines like Skelos were almost the only game in town if you wanted to write and sell(?) fantasy fiction. Pro level magazines did pop up from time to time. Most didn’t last long. Pro magazines like Weird Tales or Fantasy & Science Fiction were the exceptions, not the rule. There were a lot more pure SF magazines around, but they wouldn’t touch a fantasy story with a ten-foot cattle prod. So it was the amateur and semi-pro magazines that filled the gap. Most were shoestring affairs, everything from perfect bound presentation pieces to saddle-stitched fanzine level crap, published only as long as the creator’s energy and money held out. Names like Copper Toadstool, Fantasy Macabre, Whispers, Weirdbook, Space & Time. Some of those names you may know, since Weirdbook and Space & Time have resurfaced in new incarnations. I would have included Weird Tales in that, but it has apparently died yet again. Continue reading →

Disposing of the Bodies–With Empathy

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sheffield1One of the joys of living with cats is, every now and then, it will be your job to clean up a crime scene, dispose of (parts of, usually) a body, that sort of thing. They bring their prey home. That’s what cats do. Dogs are predators too, but only under the right circumstances. They’re mostly content to let us handle the food thing. Not cats. They are predators all the time. A well-fed, healthy cat is just a more efficient hunter, that’s all. You know all the time they’re purring in your lap or rubbing against your face they are still thinking “If I was as big as a leopard, I would totally eat you.” And they would.

So what has that got to do with the price of tea in Nepal? Continue reading →

In Which I am (Dis) Organized

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Powers-Shadow-Rough-3If you write long enough, one thing you eventually learn is that actual writing is only part of the picture. A big part of the rest is keeping up with what you’ve written, and the longer you spend in the trenches, the more of a pain keeping everything organized becomes. There are different approaches. The system I use is adapted from one L. Sprague de Camp wrote about using, and if anyone reading this has forgotten or never knew who he was, Google is your friend. Regardless, with some updating it works well enough for me. I keep five separate text files: a Works List, a Submissions List, a Sold List, a Bibliography and a Trunk List.

These are all pretty self-explanatory but I’m going to explain them anyway, if for no other reason than to remind myself how it all is supposed to work, because sometimes I am lax. Ahem. Continue reading →