Shattered Illusions

My wife makes a mean Mongolian Beef dish, and it so happens that she was whipping up some of her Mongolian Beef magic when we had a pair of sister missionaries over for dinner (and I don't mean that in a cannibalistic sense).

Coincidentally, one of these sister missionaries was from the far flung land of Mongolia. I couldn't resist asking her if she was familiar with the dish.

She was very emphatic that she had never tasted anything like it in her homeland. This left two possibilities 1) either I needed to readjust my world vision to accept the idea that Mongolian Beef really has nothing to do with Mongolia or 2) That sister missionary was an imposter.

After much consideration I was about to sensibly settle on the second option, but I told this story to an acquaintance to ask her opinion and she informed me of a friend of hers who was also from Mongolia. It seems this friend was at a Chinese Restaurant and was curious enough about the Mongolian Beef to order it. After it came she immediately jumped to her feet and began chewing out the waitress for daring to malign her country by serving such a dish.

Fortunately, the sister missionary who visited our house was very polite about our slight on her country's culinary prowess. She ate every single bite and even thanked us for it. Though my illusions have been shattered and it turns out that all this time I've been eating faux Mongolian Beef...I've discovered that I don't care if it's real or fake--I still love eating it.

The next thing you know, I'll discover that French Fries aren't really French.

Martian Audio

I have no copyright on Mars-related fiction and Joshua Reynolds has turned out a great story entitled The Strange Affair of the Martian Engine. This story features the lovely, ubiquitous, daring and sometimes morally ambiguous Countess Felluci. Yes, the same Countess Felluci that appeared in Josh's The Strange Affair of the Artisan's Heart.

It so happens that Rachel Beveridge of Cossmass Productions has done a reading of The Strange Affair of the Martian Engine and it makes for great listening. So if you've got a high speed connection and a few moments head over to Cossmass Productions and start downloading. It's free!

Dire Planet Compendium: Farona's Girth

"Farona's Girth"- Farona is a legendary Muvari warrior of both incredible battle prowess and incredible girth and over the centuries the term "Farona's Girth" has fallen into common Muvari usage as a mild epithet or exclamation. There are historical incidents of serious oaths that have been sworn "By Farona's Girth", most notably Elri Shancumar who swore by "Farona's Girth" that she would not lie again with her husband until a looting band of exiles was driven from the land. Elri's husband took this oath so seriously that, in violation of Muvari custom, he strapped on a sword blade and single-handedly routed the exile bandits.

Farona is one of the trio of warriors-- that included Thavunye of the Spear from the Rathuri Tribe and Ardahla of the Munothi Tribe-- who fought valiantly against overwhelming odds beneath the shadow of Golem Rock and drove back the Brecknar armies who had formed a league with the spiderous sinthral.

Some legends say that three warriors swore a pact that united their tribes for all time but the symbol of this pact has been lost and the oath largely forgotten--each of the tribes becoming independent and isolated from each other.

Copyright 2010 by Joel Jenkins. All Rights Reserved.

The Winner is...

Take a gander at Jair Trevino's newly-revised version of The Blood Vault artwork that will be appearing on the Blood Vault chapbook which will be released this coming May. This chapbook will contain the complete short story, The Blood Vault, and various samples of other released and soon to be released novels.

Thanks to all who made name suggestions for my new blog feature which will feature footnote-style entries relating to the denizens, people, customs, culture, and etymology of the Dire Planet. There were some great sounding suggestions like Dire Planetology, and Dire Planetarium that I didn't go with because the meanings weren't quite right. However, I've settled on The Dire Planet Compendium which Triton suggested. Somehow, it seems appropriate that someone named after a planetary body made the winning suggestion.

Noel Tuazon has sent me some wonderful artwork, so I'll post the first installment of The Dire Planet Compendium later this week.

Hunter and Triton, I do appreciate your participation in my impromptu contest. Shoot me an email, that contains your mailing address, at Joel dot Jenkins at Gmail dot com and once The Blood Vault chapbook is released I'll mail each of you a signed copy.

New Blog Feature

I've decided to introduce a new regular feature to the Vaults of Caladrex. For the rest of this year I'm aiming for a weekly feature (more or less) that will be an entry (illustrated by no less than the talented Noel Tuazon) on the denizens, people, and etymology of Mars, also known as the Dire Planet.

Those who have read Exiles of the Dire Planet and Into the Dire Planet will have noticed a number of footnotes detailing certain customs, legends, phrase origins, and practices of the people of the Dire Planet. In this new feature I will be adding and expounding upon those footnotes.

However, I've yet to come up with a name for this new blog feature and I'm looking for some suggestions. Encyclopedia of the Dire Planet doesn't quite have the right ring to it, and Dictionary of the Dire Planet, though it's a great alliteration, doesn't quite do it for me either. Bestiary of the Dire Planet sounds great but the beasties of Mars are only going to be a small portion of the entries--so it's not quite accurate.

Anybody who makes a suggestion that I decide to use gets a free copy of the upcoming chapbook release of The Blood Vault, which will be released Mother's Day weekend at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. After all, when one thinks of Mother's Day one thinks of vampires-right? No? At any rate, I'll be posting more about The Blood Vault chapbook in later blog postings. Make some suggestions!

The West Gets Weird

Here's the latest press release from Pulpwork Press. You may note that How the West was Weird contains a story by me. In Wyrm Over Diablo a secret organization conspires to build railroad tracks along mystical ley lines, so to draw the energy into one position and release a horror from its prison in outer darkness. Once again, Lone Crow, on loan to Miskatonic University for occult investigations, and a gunslinger of some renown, finds himself in the middle of trouble--but on to the press release!

On March 1, the history books get a lot more interesting...

Aztec vampires gorge themselves on a small Mexican village. A masked hero of the 1940s stumbles onto a town that time forgot. A gunslinging exorcist works to save a boy from demonic possession. These are the stories of the American West your history teacher never told you about... because she was scared!

Edited by Russ Anderson and published by Pulpwork Press (www.pulpworkpress.com), HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD is an anthology featuring nine original, genre-mashing stories of cowboys, Indians, aliens, exorcists, and tentacled horrors from other worlds... all wrapped in an original cover by Jim Rugg (STREET ANGEL, AFRODISIAC).

Those stories? Glad you asked, pardner.

Camazotz, by Josh Reynolds (available as a free preview at the Pulpwork Press website)
Wyrm Over Diablo, by Joel Jenkins
Space Miners, by Ian Taylor
Don Cuevo's Curative, by Thomas Deja
The Town With No Name, by Mike McGee and Chris Munn
Sins of the Past, by Barry Reese
You Need to Know What's Coming, by Ian Mileham
Of All the Plagues a Lover Bears, by Derrick Ferguson
Out South of Borachon Creek, by Bill Kte'pi

Cover price is $11.95 - that's peanuts for this kind of entertainin'.

HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD will be available for order on Pulpwork and Amazon on March 1. But if you'd like to get a jump on everyone else, it's available for pre-order right now on the Pulpwork Press website. Order before March 1 and get free shipping in the US!

The Golden Bell Tolls

In Derrick Ferguson's latest Dillon Novel, Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell, bad things happen when the Golden Bell tolls--bad, bad, bad things. In fact, it might mean the end of the world.

Speaking of which, we're reaching the end of the Dillon Blog Tour so take a few moments and check out what former Frontiersman Russ Anderson has to say about Dillon.

Three Questions with Derrick Ferguson

Given the recent release of Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask Derrick Ferguson a few nagging questions.

1)Your previous novel, Dillon and the Voice of Odin, has a few horror-like elements, but in Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell you fully embrace certain horror elements and mix them in with the spy genre in a fascinating way. What's more, you make it seem effortless. Is there any precedent for a "James Bond meets Cthulhu" type mishmash and what inspired you to go this route?

Just my own perverse desire to mash genres and see if I can get away with it. I like the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink nature of Dillon's adventures and it helps me from getting bored with the long and sometimes tedious process of writing a novel. In the original draft of GOLDEN BELL (which was easily twice the length of the finished book) there was doubt if Tikon actually existed or was just part Evarghan Trout's madness. But during the rewrite I said, what the hell and just went for broke.

2) Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell is the sequel to your previous novel Dillon and the Voice of Odin. What prompted you to revisit the character of Dillon and does this book actually take place in sequential order or does The Golden Bell take place prior to The Voice of Odin?

In my original Dillon Chronology GOLDEN BELL actually took place before VOICE OF ODIN. But since VOICE OF ODIN happened to be published first, I futzed around with the chronology so that now, yes: GOLDEN BELL takes place roughly a year after the events of VOICE OF ODIN.

3) One thing I enjoy about the Dillon novels is the glimpses of the world and people around him. Dillon does not exist in a vacuum and many of the bit players and movers and shakers you bring into the story are just as interesting as Dillon (for example: Brandon, a boy with an organic computer brain, adventurer Eli Creed, mercenary Awesome Times, director of the American Intelligence Machine John Velvet, and the list goes on and on) --and some of them share a history with Dillon. Do you have any plans to revisit Dillon in the future, and if so can you divulge who among your wide ranging cast of characters might show up?

Growing up I loved reading comics, novels and TV shows where the supporting cast was just as interesting and fascinating as the main character. Any of the supporting players in a Dillon adventure could easily take center stage and star in their own story and indeed, I have gotten many requests for an Eli Creed story.

And I do deliberately have Dillon and the other characters refer to events and characters outside of whatever adventure they're involved in now because that's what people do in real life: they talk about past events, or relate stories about things that have happened to them or refer to other people and places.

Will Dillon be returning? You bet your bullets he will. If my plans don't go gangagley later on this year you'll be seeing THE ADVENTURES OF DILLON, VOL. I which will collect all of the Dillon short stories and novelettes that have been floating around on various web sites over the past few years. At last I've gotten off my lazy ass and put them together in one book along with two new stories: "Dillon And The Last Rail To Khusra" and "Dead Beat In Khusra" which finds Dillon once again trading insults and danger with his frienemy, your Sly Gantlet.

And then after that will be DILLON AND THE PIRATES OF XONIRA which will see a lot of the characters from GOLDEN BELL returning.

Golden Bell Blog Tour Continues

Today is day three of the Golden Bell Blog Tour. Check out author Percival Constantine's blog for an in-depth interview with Derrick Ferguson, which happens to include a mention of the infamous Gantlet Brothers. And if you want to hear about the time that Sly found a nuclear suitcase in the New York City subway system be sure to grab a copy of The Nuclear Suitcase.

A Note From C.S.

Check out Josh Reynold's blog for details on a note he received regarding Dillon's various exploits. Besides being a note of curious origin, Joshua Reynolds mentions the envelope in which the note came in had an even curioser anatomical illustration of something called a senrast.

Now for those not familiar with the term it is indeed a creature of Martian origin, known only to select government scientists and a few of the general public by the leaked photos the Mars Voyager took of its fossilized remains. Some others know of it by their perusal of the records of Garvey Dire's Mars excursion.

By using the arcane search device on Amazon one can actually access these records and learn that senrasts are blind creatures that locate their prey by scent. You can also learn that Martian mothers use the specter of the senrast to scare their children into obedience.

The Battered Golden Bell

One of the unique things about Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell is that right out of the wrapping it looks like an old pulp magazine that's been around for seventy years.

No, PulpWork Press isn't pulling a switcheroo and sending you an old beat up copy they've passed around the offices, lent to their friends, and that they in turn lent to their friends. Cover artist Tamas Jakab (artist for El Gorgo the greatest comic book about a wrestling rock-star gorilla that ever was) purposely simulated the cover of a beat up pulp magazine. Look close and you can see the cracks, wrinkles and stress lines. You can even see the texture of the canvas upon which the cover art was painting. (These canvas textures come out more clearly in the printed copy of the book. They might be difficult to see in the low-resolution digital image on your computer).

Now, I don't know if Tamas Jakab actually painted the cover on canvas or if he used some nifty Photoshop texturizer filter to create the effect, but while I was toting Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell around, so I could read it whenever I had a spare moment, I had a number of people comment on the "old book" I was carrying.

So enough about the cover. We all know that we can't judge a book by one, right? What about the contents of the book? Well, I like to describe it as "James Bond meets Cthulhu" and Pulpworks liked my quote so much they used it on the back cover.

I asked Derrick Ferguson a few questions about Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell and I'll post his responses later this week. In the meantime, consider picking up a copy at Amazon.com, order a copy at your local book seller, and/or check out the press release at Derrick Ferguson's own blog.