The Immortals of Immergoth

To the left is the cover of the upcoming Dark Worlds #3, which includes a story called Immortals of the Cannibal Coast--a piratical fantasy tale co-written by me and Martin Edward Stephenson.

Years ago I came across a couple of short stories he wrote at a website called Pulp and Dagger: Storm in a Jewel and Temple of the Mandricanth. Both were written in the present tense, which I find a bit awkward--but once I got past this I found the main characters, Rozak and Tarajel, quite engaging and Stephenson's use of language vivid and colorful.

After contacting Stephenson I discovered that he had a novel length manuscript featuring Rozak, and he asked me to read it and make some editing suggestions. In addition to the aforementioned qualities, I found that the fantasy milieu (one I named Immergoth when co-writing Immortals of the Cannibal Coast) that Stephenson uses borrowed a styling from Greek mythology that I found quite intriguing.

In Greek mythology the gods are always meddling with mortals for their own mostly selfish purposes-- for good or ill, but mostly ill. In Stephenson's milieu powerful immortals, gods and demi-gods, spend a lot of time meddling in mortal affairs. Immergoth is their sandbox to play in and the weakling mortals are their play pieces.

So when the opportunity arose to co-write a story with Martin Stephenson (I can't remember if he suggested it or if I suggested it) I leaped at the chance. We made Tarajel the protagonist and started the tale as her pirate ship was being blown onto the reefs of the Cannibal Coast with bloodthirsty nagas swimming in the surf--and let things get worse from there.

I hope to revisit Immergoth or a similar land some time, perhaps with a different character, just to see if he or she is able to handle the meddling of the demi-gods with the aplomb that Tarajel does in Immortals of the Cannibal Coast.

As soon as Dark Worlds #3 is available I'll let you know.

Cutting Spending the Conan Way!

Governor Schwarzenegger, what is best in life?

Governor Schwarzenegger: To cut unnecessary government programs, to see the liberal spenders driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!

Following Gray Davis' disastrous governorship of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger took over and hopes were high that he could turn the state government around. Though markedly better than Davis, mostly, Schwarzenegger has proven to be a mediocre governor--more reactive than proactive. Now, about four years after Gray Davis was ousted from his position (only the second governor in the history of the United States to be recalled) Schwarzenegger finds himself in a similar predicament to his predecessor: too much money going out and not enough coming in.

Finally, Schwarzenegger has decided to get serious and make some big spending cuts. If I were one of the grinning fools sitting at the table nearby, I wouldn't get too close in the case that the Governor decides to wipe their smirks away with a few well-aimed chops of his sword.

Counting Beans at the Water Cooler

Generally, I try to get a blog posting up every week but I've been a bit tardy this year. Not to say that there haven't been some interesting developments worth chatting about.

It seems that at Pulpwork Press, the publisher of my novel length works, there has been some talk around the water-cooler about adjusting the company's focus. No, the company is not ditching all pulp-style fiction in favor of publishing paranormal romance--but there has been some bean counting and the beans are saying that the print copy portion of the company is barely breaking even while the digital books (available at Fictionwise) are selling ten times the copies with a much, much larger margin of profitability.

Being fairly practical when it comes to the bottom line, Pulpwork is planning a greater emphasis on ebooks come 2010-- with more frequent releases and fewer books released in hard copy.

Though I freely admit that I'm still a print copy junky, I can see the writing on the wall. As technology like Amazon's Kindle comes down in price and the memory capacity grows I think more and more people will be moving away from print and into less expensive digital reading. In my science fiction book, Dire Planet, I envisioned a "clip-pad" device that was capable of storing books, movies, and music. Only a few years later the I-Pod is de rigueur wear for high-schoolers and joggers--capable of storing weeks worth of music and even a few movies. Another five years or so and the price of the Kindle or a similar product could be reasonable enough that it moves into the mainstream, and that people will be capable of toting around entire libraries on screens that provide comfortable reading.

So what does Pulpwork's readjustment of focus mean for the planned 2009 releases of Through the Groaning Earth and The Nuclear Suitcase? Fortunately, they are still on the docket. I'll keep you posted when I get a firm release date.

The Artificial Woman

My first story retelling the adventure of Captain Aaron Barclay and his intrepid crew of intergalactic salvagers aboard the Scavenger appeared in Dark Worlds #1 and was titled The Investment. It was very much a cross-over genre piece of fiction mixing space opera and horror.

I'm about 8,000 words into another Barclay Salvage story, which takes place before The Investment and even features a couple of different crewmembers. As it turns out this story, The Artificial Woman, is also going to be a mix of genres--except this time it will be a combination of space opera and mystery.

Barclay and crew come across a freighter cruising full speed through the Elbar system, the airlocks wide open and the crew disappeared, except for one skeleton--a crewmember that the log shows being alive just twenty hours ago. Oh yeah, and there's that strange pounding noise coming from the refuse tanks beneath the hold...

In the meantime, if you're interested in finding out more about Barclay Salvage and crew pick up a copy of Dark Worlds #1 (digital or hard copy)and give The Investment a read. On a side note, I'm just getting around to reading Dark Worlds #1, myself--and I just finished a terrific story, The Red Engine, involving motorcycle magic (a pretty nifty concept, I think you'll agree, if you read the story) and a horrific entity from beyond the veil of space and time.

Immortals of the Cannibal Coast

Immortals of the Cannibal Coast, a collaboration between author Martin Edward Stephenson and myself, has been picked up for inclusion in the third issue of Dark Worlds.

The heroine of the short story is Tarajel, a former Southern Raider who has taken to pirating and plundering Thraxian slaver ships. With a Thraxian warship in pursuit and a storm raging, her own ship founders on the reefs of the Cannibal Coast and things get worse from there...

Tarajel is Martin Stephenson's creation and originally appeared in the short stories Temple of the Mandricanth and The Storm Jewel, which appeared at Pulp and Dagger and through Electronic Tales.

I've collaborated with other authors before, but Martin and I approached things a bit differently than I've done in the past. We constructed an outline of the story and then alternated the writing of the chapters. Of course, I'll let everyone know when Dark Worlds #3 becomes available. In the meantime you might like to check out Dark Worlds #1 and #2 (available in electronic or hard copy format), which contain my space opera tale The Investment, and Lords of the Bitter Dark--a sneak peek at my upcoming fantasy novel, Through the Groaning Earth.

Burroughs, Lin Carter, and the Dire Planet

I was perusing a posting about the Green Star series of books by Lin Carter on the Dark Worlds blog the other day, and was pleasantly surprised to find a mention of my Dire Planet series.

I might not have been too pleased had it been in a negative context, but since it was quite positive I thought I'd share the link.

GW Thomas, the author of the posting lumps both the Green Star and Dire Planet series of novels into what he considers Burroughs ' inspired stories--and I'm going to have to agree with him on Dire Planet. When I set out writing it I was trying to recapture that sense of adventure and wonderment that I felt when I first read Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter Warlord of Mars books.

The Dire Planet books can be picked up at Amazon.com, PulpworkPress.com, and in various digital formats at Fictionwise.com.

Short hand a Short Fall?

A little while back a short story by author Josh Reynolds, in which he incorporates such real life and fictional characters as Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (among others) got me to wondering how someone who was not familiar with those characters or historical figures would perceive the story.

This question was of particular interest to me because I recently wrote a story in which the historical Wyatt Earp encounters my fictional character, Lone Crow, and they spend some time encountering strange secrets beneath the freezing Alaskan tundra.

In pondering Josh Reynold's Mr. Brass and the Crimson Skies of Kansas I think that he is able to pull off the use of real historical figures and public domain fictional characters because he is able to imbue them with enough personality that we get to know the character, whether or not we were ever familiar with them in the first place. Being familiar with them is just a layer of icing on his literary confection.

I was able to contrast Reynold's work with the first couple chapters of a short novel, The Eldritch New Adventures of Becky Sharp, in which the main character is derived from a literary work I am unfamiliar with--namely, William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1947 novel, Vanity Fair. The author is able to effectively illustrate Sharp's character, but he quickly maneuvers her into an encounter with She--the title character of an H Rider Haggard novel written around the turn of the century (not this century but the one previous).

Now, I had previously read this particular Haggard novel, but it had been a few years--so though I recognized the character, I realized that this new author who had appropriated She was relying (either purposely or accidentally) on the reader's knowledge of the character to serve as a kind of shorthand to fill in She's characteristics. Even though I had some knowledge of the character, I didn't feel like the insertion of She worked within the story, because She was only vaguely drawn in this particular novel.

The Eldritch New Adventures of Becky Sharp is full of borrowed literary characters and is getting great reviews elsewhere, but I suspect that in this case a strong familiarity with those borrowed literary characters is required for a full enjoyment of the novel.

The summation of my ponderings on borrowing characters from history and public domain is that the author needs to be careful to draw the character into full life and not depend upon the reader's previous knowledge of the character. If the author can pull it off it adds an extra bit of spice in the story, but if the author fails to flesh out the borrowed characters the informed reader is left bored and the uninformed reader mystified.