Immortals Arrive

The latest issue of Dark Worlds has hit the newsstands, so to speak, and you can pick up an electronic or hard copy here!

This issue contains Immortals of the Cannibal Coast a swashbuckling fantasy tale by me and Martin Edward Stephenson. It also features a host of other pulp-style tales, which I've listed below:

The Tomb of the Amazon Queen by Michael Ehart
Roadblock, a space opera adventure by Jack Mackenzie
The Storming of Big Spree, an historical adventure by David A. Hardy
Bayou Mirage a Dark Fantasy by E. P. Berglund
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, a detective Mystery by Nick Andreychuk
Laocoon, a Weird Western by G. W. Thomas
Communications Delay, SF by Lee Beavington

...and an interview the inestimable Joshua Reynolds, a fellow Pulpwork Press author. In celebration of this interview Pulpwork has Josh's short story horror collection, Bury Me Deep on sale for half price! This sale is limited to the quantity on hand, so get your order in now.

Excerpt from Immortals of the Cannibal Coast:

Chapter 1: Damnation's Chest

Tarajel clutched the riggings of the pirate caravel as it reeled, dwarfed in the raging waves. Water engulfed her, tearing at her body so that she lost her footing as the entire ship plunged beneath the salty waters of the Southern Sea. She kept a death grip on the lines of the aft sail, her body locked in the cold depths and her lungs crying for oxygen. The spent air within her gushed away into the midnight blackness, and her fingers began to slip, drawn away from the hemp fibers of her lifeline by the inexorable pull of the ocean. Then suddenly, the ship was granted a momentary reprieve from its salty grave and bobbed to the surface, shedding long ropes of black seawater from its decks.

For a moment the dark clouds gusted away from the face of the moon, and Tarajel saw the tattered sails hanging useless from the broken masts. The savage wind howled in her ears, biting at her lithe form, and whipping out across the spume-tossed seas. Long brown hair whipped about her face, her sloe eyes scrying the rain swept night for some sign of salvation. From foot to neck she was clad in dark leather, a cuirass of tortoiseshell mail bound around her chest and back. For a brief moment she dared loosen one hand from the rope. It went to her side, and she felt calmer when she found the hilt of her curved sabre still firm in its scabbard, right alongside the oiled leather pouch that contained carefully measured doses of poisons from every known corner of the world.

A voice cried out to her through the howl of the wind, and she turned to see the almond-skinned face of Krat, one of the slaves she had freed from the slaver ship Damnation while relieving its merchant master of a chest full of ill-gotten loot. Less than six hours ago Tarajel and the crew of the pirate caravel had put the Damnation to torch and sent it to the bottom of the sea. The Damnation had become separated from its escort of Thraxian warships by the high winds of the impending storm, and when the pirates discovered the defenseless ship the fever of greed burned hot in their minds. They chose to ignore good sense and the foul weather on the horizon in favor of looting the slave ship.

“Are we going to make it?” asked Krat, his narrow eyes squinted against the spray carried on the storm.

Tarajel shook her head, water dripping from her tangled locks. “I’ve been raiding slave ships for two years now and I’ve never seen anything like this. You’d best start praying to your god, because this ship is going down.”

All about the deck of the ship pirates of every size and race clung to the ropes, looking, for all the gold in Shardia, like drowned rats. Captain Bronnit stood lashed to the wheel, his dripping beard a tangled mat, and water running from the empty socket of one missing eye. He roared out curses at his crew.

“Man the bilge pumps you scurvy runts! Will you die like men or like simpering women?”
Tarajel ignored the unintended insult and glanced over the side of the ship, noticing the stoven planks and the water that gushed in. “Blood from my guts!” she swore. “You’d have us pump the entire Southern Sea dry!”

Captain Bronnit was not accustomed to having his orders questioned, and he’d run his sword through more than one of his own men for less than an evil eye cast in his direction. “I’ll cut the head off any man—or woman—who lags. Now to the bilge pumps!”

Several pirates scurried to the pumps, but others eyed the mountainous waves that rolled about them, tossing the caravel like a cork, and threatening to fall on them at any moment. Tarajel and the short, but stoutly built Krat, didn’t move.

As the massive swells tossed the pirate caravel aloft, Tarajel thought she glimpsed something through the sheets of rain and wind. “I’ll be a Shardian camel herder,” she breathed.
Krat saw them, too. “The sea folk!”

They frolicked in the tossing seas, scaled tails flipping them aloft before they dove back beneath the surging brine. They were half men and half fish; torsos lean and sleek, naked to the bracing Southern Sea. The males were narrow-faced and handsome, with aquiline features and piercing blue eyes like the waters of the daytime sea. The women were long-lashed and full-lipped, and their merry laughs came tinkling to the ears of the pirates, carried on the howl of the wind.

“Sea nagas!” hissed Tarajel.

“How do you know they be nagas and not mermen and maids?” asked Krat, his blue-knuckled fingers wrapped around the rail.

Tarajel bit back a sharp retort as she remembered that Krat was not an experienced sailor—only a slave recently chained to the oars of the Damnation and not privy to the lore of the sea. “The mermen dive deep during the storms, but the nagas love the winds, because they know that the gales drive ships into reefs.”

“Is it true that the nagas eat human flesh?”

The warrior didn’t reply, but the steel in her eyes answered Krat’s question as eloquently as any verbal response. Another question came to the former slave’s lips, but before he put it to voice the ship lurched, the hull grinding against a coral reef hidden by the fury of the lashing waves.

Pick up a copy of Dark Worlds #3 here.

Crewing the Scavenger

Recently I've finished a draft for The Artificial Woman--my second space opera story featuring Captain Aaron Barclay and the crew of the Scavenger. When I first began writing the Barclay Salvage stories I considered the captain of the Scavenger, Aaron Barclay, the central character and that everyone else was there as a supportive character in his adventures.

As I began writing The Investment (which appeared in Dark Worlds #1--pick up a digital or hard copy here!) I began to realize that this was not so. As I wrote The Artificial Woman the crew of the Scavenger made it painfully clear that they were in no way secondary characters and that they had agendas of their own.

In fact, not all the crew members are the same in The Artificial Woman, which takes place prior to the events of The Investment. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the crew of the Scavenger.

Cullen Hanniger- the very irritable, but very brilliant engineer of the Scavenger.
















Tabitha (Model Designation TAB1-18-20-969391-12-2125)- She's an artificial life form, a robot, and the titular character of the story. Though not technically a member of the crew at the time of The Artificial Woman she does come into contact with Aaron Barclay and his crew during the course of events. How she later replaces Ursula Vench as the co-pilot of the Scavenger is a story yet to be told.



















Hank- The Security officer of the Scavenger does double duty on the gun turret. It's not that big of a crew after all. He's a Pagouline and his quadruple set of eyes stalks makes him very good at watching his back, as well as the backs of the other crew members.



















Aaron Barclay- The Captain of the Scavenger with a soft spot for a person in distress.

















Ursula Vench- Copilot of the Scavenger who totes a scatter gun, and whose mercenary tendencies have a tendency to come to the fore. She's got a nickname for everyone, a weakness when it comes to cold hard cash...and a not so secret interest in the captain of the Scavenger.

Constructing the Short Story

I admit that I'm not much of a short, short story writer. I have little use for flash fiction which offers all of two or three hundred words to develop character, plot, problem, and solution. I have nearly as much difficulty trying to tell a tale in under 8,000 words.

Case in point, Against the Gathering Darkness--a weird western tale I wrote recently with an invitation to submit it for a weird west anthology for Pulpwork Press. The target word count was between 7,000 and 8,000 words.

I finished the story in something over 12,000 words. The editor of the anthology kicked it back and said to shorten it or he couldn't use it.

Unlike Stephen King I'm not an advocate of cutting out 1/3 of my manuscript during the editing process. I write lean stories with very little in the way of the extraneous. If I cut a third of the story it wouldn't hang together very well.

My solution? Submit Against the Gathering Darkness elsewhere and write another much shorter story featuring Lone Crow (and without Wyatt Earp this time, Wyatt's got lots of baggage and requires more words). With only 6,000 to 7,000 words to work with I've decided to cut my story structure to the bare bones:

1) Introduce characters and problem
2) Resolve Problem

In the process of a longer story there are usually a number of characters introduced throughout, and quite a few steps taken to resolve the problem of the story. Not so with the short story. In Wyrm over Diablo it's taken me about 3,000 words to introduce the characters and the problem. Now I've embarked on the second half of the story structure--resolving the problem.

I think I can do it in under 6,000 more words...er I mean in under 5,000 more words.

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.