Twilight Echoes #1

So, let me drop this casually on you. I’m in a magazine with Robert E. Howard. You might respond with, “Robert E. Howard died quite a long time ago.” Yes. Yes, he did. But his stories live on. And one of his living stories has just been reprinted in Twilight Echoes #1, from Carnelian Press, edited by Steve Dilks. And it so happens that my own story, “A Whisper in Ashes” is also to be found in the same magazine. It makes me a little giddy.

There are stories by two other writers in the mag as well, and plenty of great illustrations, so let me give my brief review here. First up we have my own story, “A Whisper in Ashes.” This is the first tale I completed about a character I call Krieg. Krieg is not a pastiche of any previous sword & sorcery character out there, but his development was certainly influenced by Karl Edward Wagner’s stories of “Kane,” and Howard’s tales of “Kull.” One difference is that nothing is revealed here, or in the first few stories, about Krieg’s origins. We don’t know where he came from and no one will until some of the later stories in the series. So far, only three tales are complete. The second one, “Where all the Souls are Hollow” was recently published in the anthology Unsheathed. The third one, “The Rotted Land,” is ready to be sent out. And two more are in partial stages of completion.

The second story in the magazine is “Bride of the Swamp God” by Davide Mana. I’ve not been familiar with Mana’s work but intend to change that. We’ve got strong characters in Aculeo, a Roman legionary, and Amunet, the daughter of a sorcerer who seeks her own power. Twists and turns and betrayals abound in this tale of sorcerous bargains gone wrong. Throw in an elder god and you have all the ingredients of a great sword and sorcery tale.

The third story is “The Eyes of the Scorpion” by Steve Lines. I was also not familiar with Steve Lines’ work but this is an excellent tale written in an interesting style. For those of you know of Conan, you know of the quote: “Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of…” To me, Lines’ style captures this kind of feel. Great atmospheric piece. I also loved the vocabulary here, which is something I always enjoyed about Robert E. Howard’s work as well.

Finally, we have Robert E. Howard, with a Conan tale called “The Vale of Lost Women.” “Vale” is not one of the better known Conan stories; in fact, it wasn’t published during Howard’s lifetime. These may be the reasons our editor selected it. The plot is very simple. A female captive needs rescuing, but Howard doesn’t give us that rescue in the way we think it’s going to happen. The tale certainly showcases the “vigor” of Howard’s prose. That’s always the word that comes to mind when I read Howard. There’s a “physicality” to his writing that is hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it.

These stories, along with dynamite illustrations by the likes of Jim Pitts, Tony Gleeson, Yannis Rubus Rubulias, Kurt Brugel, and Regis Moulun, as well as a substantive editorial by Steve Dilks, make Twilight Echoes #1 a sweet little package. If you’re interested in picking up a copy, here’s the link you need: https://www.facebook.com/Carnelian-Press-522470481199180/

The Snake-Man's Bane, by Howie K. Bentley

The Snake-Man’s Bane, by Howie K. Bentley, is a collection of heroic fantasy short stories from Wild Hunt Books. It contains: The Snake-Man’s Bane, All Will Be Righted on Samhain (with David C. Smith), The Heart of the Betrayer, Where There Is No Sanctuary, Thannhausefeer’s Guest, and Full Moon Revenant. Several have been previously published in magazines or anthologies but are collected here for the first time. Most are longish tales, which puts a lot of meat on their bones.

All stories in the collection stand on their own but there is a common thread that runs through them. This is the character of Thorn, a kind of demon-god from the “Rune Realms” who feeds on the essence of other gods and often possesses mortal warriors to use as avatars in our world. Thorn does not appear in all the stories but there is a connection to him in each of the tales.

The primary setting for these pieces is a mythical Europe. There are many hints to suggest that it is the same world, only later in time, as the world described by Robert E. Howard in his Hyborian Age Essay. Mention is made in the stories of Valusia (from Kull’s time) and Zamora (from Conan’s). There is mention of an imprisoned “elephant-headed god from beyond the stars” and of a “great warrior” who destroyed the tower where the god was imprisoned. This is certainly a reference to Robert E. Howard’s “TheTower of the Elephant,” which would make Conan the “great warrior.” In addition, the snake men of the title, who play a prominent role in the first story, seem quite likely to be related to the serpent men mentioned by Howard in some of his Kull tales.

One thing that doesn’t quite jive with the setting as described above is that in the story “All Will be Righted on Samhain,” which was co-written with the excellent author, David C. Smith, there is mention of Rome and the historical Queen Boadicea of the Kelts. A time is even given, 60 CE. However, the main character of this tale, Boadicea’s daughter, Bunduica, becomes a sorcerer who is able to open doorways to other realms. This connected realm concept may explain how this particular story links to the others in the collection.

Although the Howard influence is clear and spelled out for the reader in these tales, I also felt like there was a bit of influence from Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” series. In particular, the way that the demon-god Thorn inhabits various forms through time suggests this. At least to me.

My favorite story in the collection is “Where There is No Sanctuary.” This tale starts out in a way that was reminiscent for me of Howard’s “The Frost King’s Daughter.” This story also features my favorite warrior character in the collection, Argantyr. Argantyr is a literary descendent of such heroes as Conan and Karl Wagner’s Kane, but he is unique to Howie Bentley, with a particular talent that I won’t spoil for you here. He’s quite an appealing character, albeit grim, and I’d love to read more about him.

All influences and discussion of settings and characters aside, the key aspect to these stories is that they are “tales of high adventure.” They’re exciting works full of both heroic and villainous deeds, violent swordplay, and the dark doings of sorcery. I very much enjoyed them and highly recommend them to you. The book is available in both paperback and kindle if you’re looking to pick up a copy. Here’s the link:

Today’s Beautiful Writing: Robert E. Howard

Since, too often these days, I’m not coming up with blog posts related to my own work, I thought I’d start doing some more posts where I highlight beautiful writing from others. I started here but have been doing most of this on facebook. For my selections so far, I’ve gone with writers like Ray Bradbury, Pearl S. Buck, and Peter Matthiessen, all recognized literary figures who are known for their good writing. But beautiful writing comes from all kinds of places. It comes from places that many literary readers might not suspect.

I’m not a literary reader. I’m just a reader. I read pretty much anything and everything. The following selection is from a writer who has had a big influence on my fiction interests, both reading and writing. It’s Robert E. Howard, a man who died young but who in a short time created several iconic characters, including Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane. Howard was a very fine writer. Here’s the opening of one of his “Crusader” stories. The tale is called “Lord of Samarcand.”

“The roar of battle had died away; the sun hung like a ball of crimson gold on the western hills. Across the trampled field of battle no squadrons thundered, no war-cry reverberated. Only the shrieks of the wounded and the moans of the dying rose to the circling vultures whose black wings swept closer and closer until they brushed the pallid faces in their flight.”

To me, beautiful writing isn’t just about describing beautiful scenes and beautiful feelings. Often, in fact, the scenes and feelings can be anything but conventionally beautiful. Beautiful writing is about creating a mood with a flow words that are placed in the right order for maximum effect. It’s about creating an emotional resonance in my psyche. This piece achieves that. Much of Howard’s work does.  

Elak of Atlantis, A Review

Elak of Atlantis, by Henry Kuttner. Planet Stories, 2007, with an introduction by Joe Lansdale.

This anthology of some of Henry Kuttner’s early work contains the four Elak of Atlantis stories that he wrote, plus two Prince Raynor tales. The Elak stories are: in order of first publication in Weird Tales, “Thunder in the Dawn,” “Spawn of Dagon,” “Beyond the Phoenix,” and “Dragon Moon.” The Raynor tales are: “Cursed be the City,” and “The Citadel of Darkness.” All these fall firmly into the genre of Sword & Sorcery, and they fit well together in this anthology because the characters of Raynor and Elak are quite similar. In fact, Elak just seems to me like an Older Raynor.

From what I had read previously to actually perusing these stories, Kuttner’s Elak tales were written in part to capitalize on the success of Robert E. Howard’s Sword & Sorcery works, particularly Conan. There is some clear influence there it seems to me, but these certainly aren’t pastiches of Conan, like the Brak stories of John Jakes. Both Elak and Raynor are far more cultured characters than Conan. Both are from the nobility. Elak certainly has some roguish elements to his character, especially where women are concerned, but neither Elak nor Raynor would be considered a loner like Conan. Each has a boon companion that travels always with them.

In fact, I see more influence on these stories from H. P. Lovecraft than from Howard. All the pieces in this book have clear “elder god” elements, and when I looked up Kuttner on Wikipedia I found that he was a big fan of Lovecraft and was considered part of the “Lovecraft circle.” That’s how he ended up meeting his future wife and collaborator, C. L. Moore, although the Elak and Raynor stories were written prior that joining.

The nice thing about the Elak tales is that they combine the eldritch elements from Lovecraft with the more action based adventure work of Howard. This makes for a fine pairing of elements, in my opinion. Kuttner could also pull this off prose-wise. Although I didn’t find his writing as beautiful or as dramatic as either Howard or Lovecraft, there were some very nice turns of phrase and the mood of the prose fit well with the stories. Here’s one of the nicer phrasings: “Piercingly sweet, throbbing almost articulately, a harpstring murmured through the gloom.”

All in all, I liked these stories pretty well. I understand that Adrian Cole has written a story or two with the Elak character, though I’ve not read them. These were entitled “Blood of the Moon God,” which appeared in Strange Tales, Vol. 4. No. 3., and “Witch Queen of Doom Island.” More can be found on this at Cole’s website.

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The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard:  Del Rey. 2008.

This is a massive, 500+ pages compilation of pretty much every horror tale Robert E. Howard wrote. If you’re a fan of REH you’ll surely love it. If all you know is his fantasy, his Conan stories, then it will enlighten you on the man’s tremendous range. I actually started reading this a couple of years ago and chose to read it slowly and savor it, just a story here and there. Many of these stories I’d read before but they were all worth a reread.

I read one review of this collection that said it wasn’t “horror.” Well, not if your idea of horror has been defined by Stephen King. There are vampires, ghosts, and werewolves here, but the bulk of the stories either have Lovecraftian elements, or are of a type I might call southern campfire tales. By that, I mean the kind of tales rural southerners tell each other on dark nights when panthers are screaming in the woods and the fireflies flash like dead souls haunting the piney woods. Tell one of these around a campfire and no one will want to leave the light to go gather more firewood. The only thing worse would be to let the fire…die down.

Another thing about Howard’s stories is that, as a writer, REH found it basically impossible not to include a high level of physical action in his tales. Some people think that moves a piece away from horror. I don’t. Action and horror are a great mix. There’s plenty of it here.

Among my favorite pieces in this collection are “Dig Me No Grave,” “Old Garfield’s Heart,” “The Black Stone,” and “The Thing on the Roof.” I think the masterpiece of the collection is “Pigeons from Hell,” which creeped me out pretty badly.

This collection strove for completeness and that means not every piece in here is a masterpiece. There are also some fragments at the end that I wish Howard would have finished. Generally, though, I really liked this work and gave it five stars on Goodreads. I wish I'd written a bunch of these.

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In the Memory of Ruins

I remember reading Dune by Frank Herbert years ago and loving the opening “quotes” he used to begin his chapters. These were all invented quotes from works of literature that Herbert created himself to give his world verisimilitude. Later, I found Lovecraft and his invented Necronomicon, and Robert W. Chambers and his imagined play, The King in Yellow. I saw that Robert E. Howard did this in horror stories such as “The Black Stone.”  I read Dean Koontz’s quotes from a “work” he called The Book of Counted Sorrows. I’m not quite sure why this kind of thing thrilled me, except that it suggested a much wider world than that contained within the stories by themselves.

When I wrote Cold in the Light, I decided to do this for myself. Each chapter contains an opening phrase taken from an invented book called In the Memory of Ruins. The piece that follows is one example, but there are also longer pieces from this “book” that begin the larger sections of Cold in the Light.

“Going up the river the explorers saw a raft,and on the raft a corpse's shell.  It came down with the current, from the far distant mountains where they were headed. Its passing left them cold with foreboding.”

One thing I did a little differently than I’d seen done by anyone before is that the chapter openings actually tell a story of their own that is separate and largely unrelated to the story of Cold in the Light itself. I tried to arrange for connections between the two parallel stories but wasn’t always able to achieve it. I do think there are places where a kind of resonance bleeds through.

What do you think of “invented” sources and quotes being used in fiction? Do you like it?  Does it irritate you?  If you read Cold in the Light, did you even notice the chapter opening pieces or did you skip directly to the story itself?  And if you haven’t read Cold in the Light, well why not? It’s only $2.84 on Amazon, and $4.99 on Barnes and Noble.

It’s available in print at both places for a bit more.

Heroic Fantasy and Myth Making

Heroic fantasy is a literature of myth making. It's not about telling things the way they are, or even about how they were or might have been. It's about telling, or at least hinting at, the deepest truths and mysteries of human existence. It's about ancient days when human consciousness was first arising and we as a race were becoming something more, and less, than animal. In those days the gods and demons and all manner of supernatural beings were real--at least to the people of those times--more real than they can ever be to the majority of modern humans.

Despite what one of its practitioners once wrote, Heroic Fantasy is not about a world undreamed of. In symbols at least, we have all dreamed of it. I consider thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to be more philosophers than scientists. If you want to understand psychology as a "science" then you might as well ignore them both, as well as many others of the same mindset. But, if you enjoy speculating about the origins of human consciousness and the ways in which those origins influence modern literary traditions (which is not scientific psychology), then both Freud and Jung (particularly Jung) can be useful.

For both Freud and Jung, human prehistory was a time when the seeds of later myths, and of many later truths, were being planted. I believe they are right (though not for the reasons they are often thought of as right). And I believe that one thing that separates great Heroic Fantasy from lesser work in the field is the degree to which a tale taps into the substratum of myth, and the degree to which it evokes the “depth” of prehistorical time in which those myths were arising. (All this assumes, of course, that the writer has the storytelling skills to hold the reader's attention long enough to evoke his or her sense of myth and of time’s vastness.)

Robert E. Howard is perhaps the best illustration of what I'm talking about. Howard tapped into almost pure myth when he created the worlds of Kull and Conan, and when he modified historical ages to provide an arena for the adventures of Bran Mak Morn, Cormac Mac Art, and Solomon Kane. There is an underlying coherence to Howard's fantasy worlds. His mysteries are shrouded in the web of ages but when one reads of his green-walled ruins and his leftover denizens from elder races one feels the living power behind his craftings. One feels as if there is something more there behind the stories, something that is real, or should have been real. It’s much the same feeling one gets when swimming and something powerful passes by just under the surface.
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Howard Days, Novel Spaces, and Killing Trail

It’s almost unheard of these days for me to post two days in a row, but June 11th was the anniversary of Robert E. Howard’s death. Most of you who visit here know who he is. I’ve talked about him plenty of times before. On the 11th, I talked about him again, but this time I did it over at Novel Spaces. I hope you’ll drop by.

And, of course, Killing Trail is indeed up finally as a Nook Book. I’m excited. Here’s the direct link again, in case you missed my shouting yesterday. Thanks all for visiting.

I'm Back!

Well, I'm back, although I'll be digging out from under emails and snail mail for a good while. I had 935 posts backed up on blogger and decided I didn't have the strength so I had to mark them all as read. I'll start visiting blogs again today. It'll take a bit to get back in the swing of things.

If you're wondering about my "hiatus," Lana and I had a vacation, something we haven't had in quite a long time. We took a road trip through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. We saw dinosaur footprints, petrified wood, painted deserts, meteor craters, giant caves, small canyons and giant ones, sand dunes and dust devils, tumbleweeds and massive human-made artifacts both old and new, and lots of varied wildlife. Lana took a couple of thousand pictures so you will be seeing some of those here as I start posting occasional details about the trip. I honestly didn't post that we were having the trip in the first place because these days you can't be too careful about who might be paying attention on the internet. We didn't want to come home to an emptied house.

Despite the fun of the trip, I am most glad to be home. One thing good that happened while I was gone was that the book Dreams in the Fire was published. I have a story in it called "A Gathering of Ravens." This is a charity anthology, with fiction and poetry inspired by the works of Robert E. Howard. The proceeds go to the Cross Plains, Texas group called "Project Pride," which consists of some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. Project Pride maintains the Robert E. Howard house and museum in Cross Plains. There are plenty of professional writers in the anthology, as well as some new voices. All authors are associated in some way with Howard fandom. If you're fan of Howard or just a fan of good fantasy and adventure stories, this collection might be for you. It's available at Lulu. I've posted the cover below.

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Bitter Steel Published

Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Achilles, Beowulf! Kull, Conan, Kane!

Heroes are born, but they never die. They become legends; they become myths. Bitter Steel is a collection of new myths, new heroic adventures told in the ancient tradition.

So come! Gather with me around the fire where the smoke stings our eyes. We’ll listen to the drums beat in time with our hearts. We’ll drink from the common bowl as it passes among us. The darkness whispers outside our camp, but we have no fear. There are heroes among us. Let us hear their tales.

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I’m very happy to say that Bitter Steel has now been published. This is a collection of my heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery stories, along with some fantasy poems on the same themes. Most of these have been previously published in small magazines in and out of the States, but many of those have also been revised for this book, and there are new pieces that have never before seen print.

The top of this post is the back cover blurb for the book, and for those who aren’t familiar with the genre, “Conan,” “Kull,” and “Solomon Kane” are sword and sorcery heroes created by the writer Robert E. Howard. The stories in this book are in that same Howard tradition, and Howard himself wrote in the tradition of The Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Norse Sagas.

These are the kinds of stories that Frank Frazetta, the very fine artist who just recently died, did his most famous cover paintings for. If you’d like to see more Frazetta art, check out the Unofficial Frank Frazetta Fantasy Art Gallery. The ones below I borrowed from there.





At the moment, Bitter Steel is only available on Amazon, but it should be available at Borders and Barnes & Noble soon, as well as at Wildside Press. I’ll be posting more about the book over the next few days.

Thanks for listening.
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My Reading Year

I’ve mentioned how I keep records of the books I read. Well, I date my “reading year” from October 14 to October 13 of the following year. That’s because my birthday is on the 14th so it corresponds to my actual number of years alive. I’m about to finish out the current reading period and thought I might share the results.

The 2008/2009 period was a good reading year for me and I read more than average. I estimated that I first started truly reading at around 7, so counting from that age I’ve averaged about 76 books a year. I believe the actual average should be higher because I didn’t keep records until I was a teenager, and didn’t keep accurate records until my 20s. But hey, the exact number isn’t that important.

For this past year, I’ve read 124 books. This includes 18 nonfiction works, almost all having to do with science, 15 westerns, 18 thrillers, 18 SF, and 17 fantasy. I’ve also read 11 young adult books, including the Harry Potter series, and then smaller numbers in horror, classics, and poetry.

In the past, I almost never reread books, but as I’ve gotten older I’m doing so more frequently. I only started a record column for reread books about 8 years ago, and this year I set a new record with 6. Several of these I reread in order to blog accurately about them for Forgotten Book Friday.

The Harry Potter books, especially the last five, were definitely among my favorite reads of this past year. Also notable was the graphic novel The Watchmen, which is by far the best graphic novel I’ve ever read (not that I’ve read many). My favorite mystery/thriller of the year was What Angels Fear, the first Sebastian St. Cyr mystery, by our own C. S. Harris. In SF, the Cap Kennedy series of Space Opera stories were an interesting discovery, and in fantasy it would be “The Best of Robert E. Howard series, although most of the stories there were rereads. In nonfiction, the best book I read was probably The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, which I talked about a lot on my blog.

So there you have it. Soon a new reading year will dawn, and the possibilities are…endless. Hurray!
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A Time to Hang Up Your Guns: Part 1

Ernest Hemingway killed himself when he thought he’d lost it. Robert E. Howard spoke of the same thing in letters before he put a bullet in his brain. Jack London drank himself into oblivion at least in part for the same reason. There are many other examples but these are ones I know something about.

All three of these men were writers, and all three believed their best years and best work lay behind them. Two of them killed themselves when that happened. The third might as well have. Whatever “it” was, their gift, their muse, their will, they all felt they’d lost it.

I do believe that artists, writers, painters, musicians, etc, can indeed ‘lose’ it. Whatever powered the majesty of their imaginations and creativity can disappear. I certainly don’t suggest that such folks should kill themselves, but I wonder if they should…quit. Should they stop writing, stop painting, hang it up? I wonder, will it happen to me? Will I lose it? Will I know it when it happens? Or has it already happened?

What causes creative people to lose it? I suspect there are many possible reasons. Age is one, and along with age, health issues. I find, myself, that I typically don’t seem able to concentrate for as sustained a period of time now as I did when I was younger. And physically, sitting four hours at a keyboard takes a bigger toll on me now than it used to. Ray Bradbury’s style has changed dramatically since he was younger. Does age have anything to do with it?

“Will” is another factor. Before you’re published, the drive to reach publication is intense. But once you’ve seen your name in print a few times, other motivations have to come to the fore. Those may be to produce bigger, more complex works, to increase your audience, or your markets. But what about Stephen King and Dean Koontz? What makes them keep writing? Both probably have enough money coming in without it, and both have seen their names in print, and on films, numerous times. Some will say that both King and Koontz have lost “it,” at least some quality that their work once possessed but which no longer does. But have they lost it, or merely changed their priorities? I’d love to hear them tell me, honestly, what they think about their own skills as creative writers, both now, and in the past.

I’m going to post a second part to this discussion in a couple of days, but for now I’d love to get your feedback on the topic. What is the “it” that some folks seem to lose? What causes them to lose it? And is it ever possible to get it back?
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The Cave Inside Us All

Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) , the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, of Solomon Kane, and Kull of Valusia, wrote of having been born out of his time. “…I am infinitely thankful that I am no younger,” he wrote. “I could wish to be older, much older.” He spoke in his letters of how he’d just missed the frontier days. Had he lived his thirty years a mere thirty years before, he would have been in the middle of the final settlement of the American frontier. Sixty or ninety years before and he would have been a pioneer.

Yet, he was a pioneer in his way. He was certainly the first in his home town of Cross Plains, Texas to make his living writing fiction. He was one of the first in the entire state. But I don’t think he ever saw that life as being as fulfilling as wresting his livelihood directly from untamed nature would have been. He wanted to have been born a barbarian, and not because he held an idealized view of the Noble Savage. He found civilization too filled with parasites to enjoy it. That is, the kind of people we see around us now who brought the current economic downturn upon us due to their own greed.

Howard is one of my favorite writers, and recently we’ve had the publication by Del Rey of two collected volumes of his work that really showcase Bob at his best: The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volumes 1 and 2, subtitled “Crimson Shadows” and “Grim Lands.” I recently finished these, mostly rereading stories that I’d read once upon a time.

At the same time as I was reading the Howard collections, I’ve also been reading The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley (1907-1977). Eiseley was a very different fellow than Howard in many ways, being an academic and educator. But Eiseley was an anthropologist, a man with an absolute passion and fascination for the past, which comes through in all his writing. And in that way he and Howard were much the same. Howard loved the study of history, mostly the written history of humankind. Eiseley was more interested in the earliest human world, before there was any history as we know it. He was interested in that time when humans were becoming separated from the animal world in which we evolved. Though, judging from Howard’s first professional sale, a story about cavemen called “Spear and Fang,” maybe they weren’t so different in that way either.

Just this morning I finished a short essay by Eiseley that made me think of Howard. Loren wrote of being attracted to items that are useless in today’s world, a large club-like bolt, a broken shard of blue glass that he spent time shaping into a kind of spear point. But they might mean the difference between life and death if you lived in a more primitive world. Eiseley too seemed born out of his time. Maybe he was even born out of his species; he wrote so intimately of the natural world.

What is it about some people that they live in this world but dream of others? Neither Eiseley nor Howard held idealized views of the wondrous past. They knew that life in the savage world is often nasty, brutish, and short. But something in that world attracted them, invoked them perhaps. Could it be that they both understood, better than most of us, the true nature of humankind? We are all old souls under our clothes.
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Book Roast and Found Poem

Chris Eldin has already done a lot for writers, including me, and now she is starting a Book Roast blog that promises tremendous excitement and fun. Although the opening page is up, I “believe” the program goes live and interactive on June 23 with the work of Bernita Harris, an excellent writer whose talent I’ve been touting for some time. If you love reading, writing and all that jazz, and want to support writers, stop by the Book Roast soon.

My only other piece to this post today will be to run another of Robert E. Howard’s “found poems.” In case you missed my previous comments on this subject, I think that Howard was a great writer precisely because he had so much poetry in his soul that it couldn’t help but bleed through into his prose. To show this, I’ve been for years taking paragraphs of his prose and formatting them as poetry. I don’t add any words to Howard at all, but I generally take out some function words that make the piece work as prose. And I also remove the punctuation. The following is taken from one of Howard’s Kull stories. I took out only “four” words from this piece.

KULL

Time strides onward,
We live today; what care we for tomorrow
or yesterday?
The Wheel turns and nations rise and fall;
the world changes and times return to savagery
to rise again through the long age.
Ere Atlantis was, Valusia was,
and ere Valusia was, the Elder Nations were.

Aye, we, too,
trampled the shoulders of lost tribes in our advance.
You, who have come from the green sea hills of Atlantis
to seize the ancient crown of Valusia,
you think my tribe is old,
we who held these lands ere the Valusians came out of the East,
in the days before
there were men in the sea lands.

But men were here
when the Elder Tribes rode out of the waste lands,
and men before men,
tribe before tribe.
The nations pass and are forgotten,
for that is the destiny of man.

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Cross Plains Return: Part 3

Day 3 of Howard Days began around 9:00 as I made my way to the Howard House and started buying various books, magazines, and T-shirts I’d been eyeing. Since I was flying and traveling light I didn’t pick up as much as I have in the past, but I still got some very nice stuff, including a bunch of Howard specialty items and some books from Angeline Hawkes and Christopher Fulbright. I’ll be posting about some of this material as I read it. I was also briefly interviewed by a group of young filmmakers for a documentary they were producing. In fact, there seemed to be two documentaries being filmed, and both groups were very polite and unobtrusive.

I had lunch with James Reasoner, an ex-REHupan and a fine writer with far too many books to his name to even imagine listing. He and I talked writing for a while and I apologized at one point since I know he is a full-time writer who works for hours ever day at his craft. He just laughed and said he was always happy to talk writing. Me too.

I also chatted at several points with Michael Scott Myers, a Louisiana boy who went out to Hollywood and done good. Michael wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay for The Whole Wide World, which brought Howard to life. The movie is based on a book by Novalyne Price Ellis called One Who Walked Alone. The book is mainly Novalyne’s story of her long-term relationship with Howard. She was the woman who he came closest to marrying, and their breakup, which occurred not long before Howard’s mom entered her final days of illness, certainly helped contribute to the stress Howard was under when he shot himself. Novalyne was one of Michael Scott Myers’ teachers in high school, and if you’ve never seen The Whole Wide World, which stars Vincent D’onofrio as Howard and Renee Zellweger as Novalyne, then treat yourself. It’s truly a fine piece of cinema.

On Saturday for Howard Days, the REHupans and other Howard fans, as well as many locals, are invited out to Caddo Peak Ranch for a barbecue. The owners of the ranch are wonderful hosts and always take a crew of hikers up the Peak, which is named for the Caddo Indians who used to live locally. Howard actually set a story on one of the two Caddo Peaks and spent quite a bit of time on the peaks himself, surveying the land. It was such views that probably gave rise to his creation of the landscapes that filled his tales.

Although I have climbed the peak every year for the past dozen or so, I decided to sit this one out. I had broken one of my ironclad drinking laws the night before and mixed whiskey with my beer. In fact, I had taken to pouring a capful of whiskey “into” my beers. This was a mistake, although one that I did not discover until the next morning.

Saturday turned out to be our earliest night yet. I hit the sack around 2:00 because Chris and I had to get up early the next morning to get back to Dallas and catch our planes. Lana met me at the New Orleans airport late that afternoon. I had a great time, although I surely was tired by the time I made it home. We had some fried chicken that we picked up on the way and I fell quickly after that into bed. It was a sleep without dreams that night. I’d earned it.

I’m sorry for the length of this series. I hope it wasn’t too boring, but I found I had quite a bit of information to impart. My next post will return us to our regularly scheduled blog material, although at Greg’s request, and because others found them interesting, I may post some more of my found poems from Robert E. Howard’s work.

Thanks as always for listening.

Cross Plains Return: Part 2

Day 2 of my Cross Plains journey began about 8:00. I normally have a hearty biscuit and gravy breakfast at Jean’s Feed Barn, but I wasn’t terribly hungry so I walked up to the Howard House instead. Some Project Pride folks were setting up and I and another Howard fan pitched in to set up the sign-in pavilion. I won’t tell you how much trouble we had figuring that out. The day’s temperature was already high but a nice breeze made it pretty comfortable.

Chris arrived at the house a bit later and we headed out to find the ruins of Camp Colorado. Howard had a keen interest in history and had written of the camp. Chris and I discovered a high fence with two strands of barbed wire along the top surrounding the place, and there was a house on the site with a freshly mowed lawn. But we didn't see anyone around. As we trod along the fence we found a game trail where animals had been going under the fence so we slipped under as well and took some pictures. (I’ll post those eventually.) Unfortunately, Chris twisted his ankle badly, and though he didn’t let it slow him down much he felt the pain for the rest of our trip.

One of the best things about Howard Days is getting to visit again with old friends that I typically see only once a year. Besides Chris, there was Scott Hall and his wife Kim. Scott is one of the two other “long-hairs” in REHupa. Coincidentally? Or not! We have very similar tastes in music, tastes that run decidedly toward the heavier end of the music spectrum. Scott brought along some new friends, Big Mike Myers, and Jody. Jody and I had some great semi-drunken conversation about evolution and I found he’d read many of the same books I have on the subject.

There was also Rusty Burke, who knows more about Howard than any living man, and Indy Bill Cavalier, the head honcho of REHupa. Bill brought his wife, Cheryl, who is quite a classy individual [although most anyone would look pretty classy next to Bill ;)]

There was Frank Coffman, a fellow academic and expert on Howard’s poetry, and Gary Romeo, a good friend who I can only describe as a liberal contrarian. Rob Roehm represented the California contingent of REHupa, and there was Mark Finn, this year’s guest of honor. Dave Hardy, a recent convert to REHupaism but a long time fan of Howard, brought along his wife and daughter. Mark also brought his wife. Rob brought his parents! Frank just brought a Hummer and booze. Amy Kerr, one of only two female REHupans, was hanging around, as was Angeline Hawkes, our other female member and a writer with a lot of notches under her belt. Angeline and her husband, Christopher Fulbright, who she often collaborates with, are the only married couple who are both members of REHupa. No, they didn’t meet through our august group.

A rather strange coincidence also occurred Friday. A guy came up and handed me a printed copy of web comic called “The Marsh God,” which I had been reading and enjoying, and which I had just commented on in a forum I haunt. The artist for the comic was named Miko and he had actually emailed me just before I left for Cross Plains about his interest in doing an illustration based on the Taleran books. I’d sent him some stuff, and now as I looked up at the guy who was giving me the printed comic I saw “Miko” on his tag. This was his first Howard Days and neither of us had been aware that the other was going to attend. So, it was a bit of “well-met in CP” for the two of us. Miko is a very fine artist and if you get a chance check out his website here.

Friday night at Howard Days there is a banquet put on by Project Pride for visitors and locals alike, and over 100 of us crammed into a small community center for great country fried steak and sweet cherry cobbler. There was also a silent auction of Howard related items, and a dramatic reading of Howard's fiction by Mark Finn. After that, most Howard heads returned to the Howard House for the "Cimmerian Awards,” which are voted on by readers of The Cimmerian Magazine, the most frequently published of the several small magazines that are regularly printed about Howard. I missed all but the tail end of the awards this year, but was glad not to miss what followed, the first annual “Robert E. Howard poetry throw-down,” where fans read their favorite REH poems.

I've argued that much of the secret to Howard’s powerful prose is the poetry that runs like a spine throughout it. To show this, I’ve been working for years on what I call “Found Poems,” where I take a paragraph or two from a Howard short story, remove the punctuation and a few function words, and put the words into poetic format. I read a couple of these, including the one below, and they were well recieved.

Dangerous suppleness
Of a panther
Cold as blue ice
Kite-shaped shield
Like a flash of summer lightning
Like the purr of a hunting tiger
He is mad
None molests him

Other fans read their favorite REH poems, too, and we turned several into drinking “songs,” an act of which I heartily approved and to which I joined in with gusto. Howard wrote a lot of poetry in his private letters to friends, which he had never submitted for potential publication. Toward the tail end of the night some of this poetry made its first appearance to a wider audience; some of it was quite bawdy.

Although everyone who read did an amazing job, the clear winner in my mind was Amy Kerr, who captured the dramatic intonations and the pauses precisely for best effect.

Sleep came sometime between 3:30 and 4:30 this night. I know I was feeling pretty old when I finally climbed into bed. But what a great evening to be a Howard fan.

To be continued:

Cross Plains Return: Part 1

I’m back from Cross Plains, Texas, which was home for Robert E. Howard throughout most of his life. Howard is best known, of course, as the creator of Conan, who in popular culture is often referred to as “the Barbarian.” I think I might take a few blog posts to tell everyone about my journey, and about Howard, who did far more than create Conan. I hope there’ll be a few tidbits here to enthuse the writer types who visit, and, of course, I learn more about Howard and about myself every time I make the journey. It helps sometimes to write those kinds of things down. Plus, there’ll be stories of beer drinking for the Heff’s who visit here.

My trip began very early Thursday morning, June 12, when the incomparable Lana Gramlich dropped me off at the New Orleans airport and I flew out for Dallas. I met Chris Gruber, a REHupan friend of mine who is an expert on Howard’s Boxing stories, in Dallas, and we drove down together. Cross Plains is 170 miles south and west of Dallas, but we didn’t take the direct route. We went through Dark Valley, Texas. We had a reason.

Bob Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, about forty miles from Fort Worth, but his family lived in Dark Valley at that time. The Dark Valley community consisted then of some fifty folks, but when Chris and I went through we found only a closed business, a cemetery, some fenced land upon which cattle and mesquite were being grown, and the creek from which the community got its name. We stopped at the cemetery and then walked out some of the local fields. Apparently, the Howard home in Dark Valley is no longer standing, but it was still a powerful feeling to walk over the land and to look along the rocky creek, which was mostly dry and drowsing in the hot June day.

Howard only lived in Dark Valley during his infancy but he later suggested that the valley had a strong influence on the darkness of his own personality, and he seemed to recall it as a somber and brooding place. I personally doubt that the somberness and darkness was ever in the valley, or that Howard would have remembered it anyway given how young he was when the family moved. When Chris and I passed through we found that Dark Valley is a very shallow depression along the creek, hardly a valley in the usual sense, and it was certainly bright in the sun, although I’ve been along enough country creeks in my day to know that the atmosphere can be somber in the shade where the trees overhang remaining dark pools of stagnant water. No, the darkness that Howard mentioned would much more likely have come from within than from without. I think a lot of writers have a bit of the same darkness.

From Dark Valley we continued on our way into Cross Plains, stopping at a town named Ranger to stock up on beer and ice. Cross plains itself is in the dry county of Callahan. You can’t buy beer or liquor, or officially drink it in the open, but despite this the local police tend to give the REHupan group some leeway as long as we don’t drink in public and make fools of ourselves. We do most of our drinking in the evenings in the courtyard of the 36 West Motel, the only motel in town, or at the open pavilion which has been built right next to the Howard house.

Once we got checked in, Chris and I had a few beers in our room while we talked about Howard’s work. A new beer that I tried was Tona, a product of Nicaragua. My favorite beers are mostly Mexican dark beers, such as Bohemia and Negro Modelo. Tona couldn’t match these two but it went down smoothly, without an aftertaste, and I liked it pretty well. After that we ventured into the courtyard to yak with some other REHupans and various other Howard fans who were staying at the 36 West, and then the group headed for dinner at a local place called Jean’s Feed Barn. We were by far the largest and most boisterous group there, and I know sometimes the locals don’t quite know what to make of the Howard fans, many of them long-haired and tattooed. But many of us have also made good friends among the people of Cross Plains, particularly among the group known as Project Pride, which is the local community group that purchased the Howard House, restored it pretty much as it was in Howard’s Day, and maintains it as a historic site and museum.

The first night ended for me around 3:00 in the morning. In the dark you wonder, what made Robert E. Howard? How did a small town Texas boy learn to write of lost ages and fabled cities? How did he create barbarians and dueling swordsmen and iron man boxers whose exploits still sing for so many readers of today? How much biology was involved? How much experience? Or was it, as Howard sometimes seemed to suggest as possible, the intrusion of past lives into the present? Is there a chance that some of us have lived before, in other times, other bodies? Could that explain certain dreams I’ve had? You’ve gotta wonder.

To Be Continued:
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Cross Plains Journey

I’m going to be leaving on a jet plane very early Thursday and will be getting home late Sunday. I probably won’t get to post again or check other folks’ posts until the following Monday. I’ll be in Cross Plains, Texas for the annual Robert E. Howard Days celebration and a meeting with some of my friends from REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association. That’s a fancy name for a group of amateur ziners who put together a private publication on Howard every two months.

Cross Plains is very small and I’ll be very busy so I doubt I’ll even have a moment to check email. That is assuming I could find a computer available there that was running internet. But I wish everyone in the blogosphere well while I’m absent. I’m sure the internet won’t come to a standstill, and I promise to catch up on everyone’s blogs when I return.

Today is a rather special day for those who remember Robert E. Howard. June 11 is the day that he killed himself. It was back in 1936, a Thursday morning in that year, and he’d just been told that his mother, who was in a coma and dying, was not likely to regain consciousness. Robert went out to his car, in the driveway of the small house in Cross Plains where I’ll be standing in about a day, and shot himself once in the head. He actually didn’t die until hours later, but he never regained consciousness either. His mother, Hester, died the next day and the two were buried at the same time on June 14. His father lived on for quite a few more years, and I always think of him around this time of year as well. Imagine losing your wife to illness and your son to suicide at virtually the same moment.

Robert E. Howard was gifted with a tremendous imagination, but it was hard work that made him a successful author. Not many of the pulp writers of the 1920s and 30s are remembered today. But Howard is far more famous and well known now than he was then. He, along with J.R.R. Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs, transformed the landscape of fantasy. They built what is today my favorite genre.

I mentioned the other day that there are differences between storytellers and writers but that some people combine the two abilities. Of the three, REH, ERB, Tolkien, I believe that Howard combined the two skills the best. Here’s to him.

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How I Once Became an Editor

Some of you might know that I'm an Assistant Editor for The Dark Man (TDM), the Journal of Robert E. Howard studies. Since I'm still swamped with work, and I apologise to all whose blogs I haven't been able to visit and whose names I've not yet had time to add to my links, I thought I would run for you today an editorial I wrote for the first issue of TDM after I became an editor. I'll let it speak for itself.

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I’m a writer, the natural prey of those nasty creatures we call editors. So how come I’m suddenly listed as an assistant editor for The Dark Man? How did I end up joining the ranks of my traditional enemies? I assure you that it isn’t my fault. I was trapped, I tell you, and it was one of those big traps, a bear trap. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a “Bearfield” trap.

As a member of The Dark Man review board, I thought my only duties would be to lend my name to the enterprise-—a name well known to almost half a dozen readers-—and to occasionally comment on the various pieces that crossed my electronic desk. I never thought I’d be involved in “whipping” a piece into shape the way that I’ve had editors whip my own work into something marginally less confused than what I’d submitted.

Then along came a submission to The Dark Man on the subject of Pike Bearfield, Robert E. Howard’s “other” comic western hero, and it was a piece I liked very much and which I fought to see included in the Journal. Ah, the price of shooting one’s mouth off.

I somehow got asked to shepherd the aforementioned Bearfield essay through the revision process and into print. Trapped! And it was neatly done, I do have to agree. (I’d suggest that I was hoist with my own petard but that sounds kind of dirty.) To avoid being skinned alive and called luggage, I accepted the role thrust upon me by my "Dark Man" colleagues, and that is how I came to be...an editor.

But, shhh! I haven’t told any of my writer friends yet that I’m now aligned with the enemy. They wouldn’t be happy if they found out, and you know how cruel writers can be. I’m sure my friends know plenty of hurtful ways to call me a traitor and a sell out. They might use words like Judas, Benedict Arnold, Quisling, or maybe even Metallica.

So let's just keep this between us.

Tagged and Random

I’ve been tagged by Danette to name five random things about myself. In keeping with my general policy, I will obey the commands of the tag but will resist tagging anyone else. So here goes:

1. Since it’s on my mind, I just sold a poem to Niteblade . It’s called “Recompense Reprise,” and is an homage/ode to Robert E. Howard’s poetry. Howard, of course, is my favorite writer and I’m a member of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, REHupa. I guess that’s a couple of random things about me in one.

2. As a kid I had a sparkplug collection. Hey, I grew up in the country and I played with sparkplugs. Anyone got a problem with that?

3. I love fried frog legs.

4. My first car was a maroon and white Malibu Classic. It outlasted three girlfriends.

5. I still like to read children’s or YA books sometimes. In fact, I’m very much enjoying Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH right now. I saw the movie many years ago and enjoyed it and found this book at a recent book sale and snapped it up. Glad I did.

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