Friday, Oct 29, at 10pm – 1am, join me and authors Lucy A. Snyder, Gary A. Braunbeck, Linda Robertson, Laura Bickle, Maurice Broaddus, Melissa Long, Seressia Glass, and editor Jason Sizemore for an urban fantasy themed party at the WFC convention! (Info on Facebook here.)  There will be booze and cookies.

Saturday, Oct 30, at 11am-1pm, I will be at a humongous mass author signing at the OSU Campus Bookstore 1598 N. High Street, Columbus, OH, 43201.  This is open to the public, so if you’re in the area stop by even if you aren’t attending WFC.  (Facebook info here.)

How humongous is it?  Here’s a list of attendees:

1. Ari Berk
2. Beth Bernobich
3. C.L. Wilson
4. Carol Berg
5. Catherynne Valente
6. Cinda Chima
7. Dan Wells
8. Darrell Schweitzer
9. Dave Sakmyster
10. Delia Sherman
11. Elizabeth Vaughan
12. Ellen Klages
13. Ellen Kushner
14. James Enge
15. Jess Granger
16. Jim Hines
17. Joe Haldeman
18. John (J.A.) Pitts
19. Laura Bickle / Alayna Williams
20. Laura Resnick
21. Linda Robertson
22. Lucy Snyder
23. Marie Brennan
24. Mary Robinette Kowal
25. M K Hobson
26. Paige Cuccaro / Alison Paige
27. S. Andrew Swann
28. S. L. Farrell (aka Stephen Leigh)
29. Sam Sykes
30. Seressia Glass

Hope to see people there.

Here are three of the most memorable anti-heroes in written SF/F, at least the three that come most readily to my mind when the question comes up.

First is Slippery Jim DiGriz of the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison. He is the classic example of the lovable rogue, a criminal who is more or less tricked into working for the good guys. Con-man, interplanetary criminal, smooth-talking and charming, and aside from drawing the line at killing people, he’s pretty much without a moral compass at all. In fact, in one of the early books, he goes into a long expository explanation of how robbing a bank is actually a perfectly fine thing to do.

Second we have Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock. If you want memorable, this guy is memorable. In fact, in the whole cannon of SF/F literature, Elric is one of the few characters where the word “unique” is an accurate description. A physical weakling, an albino who needs to take drugs to maintain his strength, emperor of a dying civilization; Elric is not just an anti-hero, he is pretty much the antithesis of any other typical sword and sorcery character. In any other fantasy series, Elric would be the antagonist (and he’d be a bitching one.) He also carries around possibly one of the nastier artifacts created in fantasy fiction.

Lastly, we have Severian from the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. The world he inhabits is strange and fascinating, and he is a rather dark guide. In a genre where there are sympathetic assassins galore, here we have a guy who tortures people as a vocation, and who’s point of disgrace is when he allows one of his victims to kill themselves. That’s kind of hard-core. Also carries a kick-ass sword.

Read the other contributions here.

The fact that she likes Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  Really.  This is cause for her to question someone’s mental stability and connection to reality, the fact that O’Donnell decides to praise one of the major writers of the 20th century for his treatment of women.

“Look at the significance that he gives to Eowyn, the Lady of Rohan,” O’Donnell said on C-Span in 2003. “She was a warrior spirit and, to me, that’s who I love. I mean, I aspire to be soft and gentle like Arwen, but realistically, I’m a fighter, like Eowyn.”

O’Donnell said she liked Tolkien’s outlook on gender: “On the one hand, there’s the attitude that’s normally on the conservative side — as a conservative woman, I feel I can say this — that stifles women. There’s almost the stereotypical attitude of, to be a true woman, you have to stay at home. And I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Why do you choose a career over marriage?’ Honestly, I’ve had only a few significant relationships, and they’ve broken up with me. And one of the things I’ve been told is, ‘If you weren’t so strong, you’d be married by now.’ ”

That passage is apparently worthy of Dowd’s mockery, more so than O’Donnell’s views on masturbation.  (Which my wife has had a field day with.  And which, in the video I saw, had a lot in common with a Playboy interview with a certain infamous ex-president, including use of similar language.  Of course, given the results of that guy’s election, it probably is a disqualification on its face.)  Apparently, if you are a fantasy geek of any stripe, you need not apply to the hollowed halls of seriousness that admitted this guy.

Worse, she decides to bring up C. S. Lewis:

“We’re rowdy, we’re passionate,” she told the enraptured crowd. “It reminds me of the C. S. Lewis Narnia books, where the little girl asks someone about Aslan the lion, who represents God, and she says with a little concern over such a fearsome lion, ‘Is he safe?’ And her friend says, ‘Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’ ”

Yep, that disqualifies her right there.

You know, in policy terms I probably have as as little in common with Christine O’Donnell as I do with Charlie Rangel. And I agree with all of the critiques of her on tactical grounds, as the woman has had a colorful history, and a lot of it has been in front of the TV cameras. I agree on a lot of the critiques of her on policy grounds.  (As opposed to the knee jerk critiques of her because of her scary religious background. Please remember the guy who first popularized the term “lust in my heart” during a political campaign.)  But just because you’ve decided to professionally despise the woman does not mean that dissing both Tolkien and C.S.Lewis does not make you a prime asshat.

And by the way, the above thesis was so frighteningly thin that Ms. Dowd had to downshift midway into the article and and start talking about how Obama is the first African-American President and those Tea-Party people are all mostly white. Thanks for the stunning original insight, I have been waiting with baited breath for someone to come up with that analysis.

Lastly, you don’t get to use the phrase, “We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy,” in an ironic fashion unless there are actually people out there that think you are part of the “Ruling Class Elite,” and after viewing the drainage from this intellectual abscess,  I think everyone is only looking on with sad bemusement.

Ok, I’m going to cheat a little here, because there was once a time when if you were talking a fantasy series, you were not talking “novels.” From the pulps up through the 1970s, if you were talking a series of anything, you were likely talking about short stories published in the genre magazines. And, if you’re talking overlooked work today, that whole class of fiction — from Jirel of Joiry, to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser — is probably almost unknown to most of today’s readers. Which is a shame, because much of what appears in print today draws its inspiration from this early stuff, directly or indirectly. And I’d like to draw attention to someone who may be to gritty noir urban fantasy what Tolkien is to the grand high-fantasy epic, and probably no one reading this knows who he is.

The author is Seabury Quinn, and the series is about occult detective Jules de Grandin. These stories, which began appearing in Weird Tales in the mid 1920s, featured an investigator who’s been called “the occult Hercule Poirot,” and were incredibly popular at the time. Popular enough that reader polls consistently had him beating such now-better-known notables as H.P.Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and C.L.Moore. And, throughout the pulp era, Quinn had more stories published than any other contributor. One-hundred-forty-nine stories between 1925 and 1951. (At least in words, more than enough to fulfill the three “novel” requirement.) While he may not have been as stellar an author as his contemporaries, his pair of occult detectives presages the X-Files, the Dresden Books, and any number of modern titles where we find the mixture of genre mystery or police procedural tropes with the supernatural in a modern setting.

Go read everyone else.

——————-
Subject: Blog to Save Realms!!

Dear Save Realms members,

Thank you for joining us. We’re off to a promising start with over 300 members in just five days. Now it’s time to up the ante. In order to gather enough support to save our beloved mag, we have to get the word out in a big way. That means blogging.

If we can all post a message about our efforts on our own personal blogs–be they at Word Press, LJ, etc., we have a much better chance of gaining the monumental support we need to make saving RoF a reality. If every one of us can reach just one new person and that person blogs about the movement, who knows how many new people we can recruit? Facebook & LJ are great, but we need to reach the industry in other ways. A viral campaign is necessary to our success.

Right now the goal is to get as many people behind us as possible so we can enter into talks with the people at Realms and Sovereign Media with a serious support base. Several solid ideas have already been suggested by various community members for how to keep the magazine running. All will require financial and word-of-mouth support from the community. With enough people however, our goal can and will be realized. At this time the most important thing is to express our communal desire to keep Realms alive and amass as big a following as possible. So please, if you have a blog, let your friends and fans know what we’re doing. Link them to this page (Save Realms of Fantasy Magazine) or to the Live Journal community (http://community.livejournal.com/save_rof/profile).

Mag saving strategies are still welcome and open to discussion. If you have an idea please post to the Wall or the Discussion Board. This effort has to come from us–but I know we can rise to challenge.

Now get blogging!
The Mods

• Journalists and Dragons: Stories of the Cleveland Portal

or

• Journalists, Dragons and Dwarves: Stories of the Cleveland Portal

I think I’m more partial to the second one.

UPDATE: Sheila didn’t like the word “Journalist” so the title will be:

• Dragons and Dwarves: Stories of the Cleveland Portal

The good news is that DAW’s going to re-issue my two Cleveland Portal novels, Dragons of the Cuyahoga and Dwarves of Whiskey Island in an omnibus edition due out August 2009. W000t!

The bad news, Sheila at DAW told me this yesterday, and she needs me to give her a title for the thing by Tuesday. And if you’ve followed my agonizing over the title for Lilly’s Song, you know this is a bit of a tight deadline for me… At least for a title.

Wish me luck.

I don’t know if I’m making a point here, other than perhaps the fact that even though we’re in a place now where a female VP candidate can freak everyone out more for her politics than her gender, we still have a situation where it feels unusual to have a majority female POV in a SF story that is otherwise not trying to make any points about gender politics.  We have plenty of strong female protagonists out there, but often they’re living in the same male-dominated universes that their male action-hero ancestors resided in.

Just a thought.

Also, related, while I’m a bit late to this particular party, I did want to mention my current favorite female character in the genre is Agatha Heterodyne, the titular character of Girl Genius, a comic series by Phil and Kaja Foglio. Been going on since 2000, won a buttload of awards, and is all online here.

First off, Anne at Bantam has given the ok to the outline I submitted for Wolfbreed #2 (titles, I need titles.) which means that I can go ahead with it as soon as I get the next DAW book out of the way. Second off, we are retiring the Valentine’s Night counter, since I’ve just wrapped up the first draft.

This is shaping up to be my most productive year writing since 1992, when I started doing this professionally. About exactly a year ago, I started writing Wolfbreed #1. I’ve since finished the novel, landed one helluva agent, found a new publisher, finished the first volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy for DAW, and now I’ve wrapped up the first draft of a third novel outside of any contractual commitments.

Busy as I seem to be, my goal of finishing volume 2 for both Wolfbreed and the Apotheosis Trilogy in the next 12 months doesn’t seem particularly daunting. Yea me.

1. I have trouble writing short, and I don’t feel I’m that close to the halfway point.
2. I can.

For those curious, I have returned to vampires. However this is going to be unrelated to the pair of Blood & Rust novels. I’m trying my hand at an intentional paranormal romance. One that kicks most of the late 20th Century’s contribution to the vampire mythos to the curb. No blood-drinking cabals conspiring in the darkness, no angsty goth heroes, and no supernatural vampire hunters of whatever dynasty.

My Muse didn’t like that. Like the attack that resulted in Wolfbreed #1, I was sitting, minding my own business, and my muse bitch-slapped me with an idea I just had to start on. As of right now, after about four days, I have nearly 10K words. It’s deja vu all over again.

I even went and added a counter for it.

Fantasy:

Romance:

Now there’s a blog post on the Juno Books blog that’s warning of yet another subclassing of paranormal cover art– The Butt Cover. Apparently, if you have an ass-kicking heroine in a paranormal urban fantasy, we need to see some ass. Consider yourself warned.