Archive for the 'Media' Category

Realms of Fantasy: All Women Writers Issue

Constance January 4th, 2010

Women In Fantasy issue announcement: 

Realms of Fantasy is planning a special themed issue for August 2011, the theme being women in fantasy. This theme will be addressed in all three departments of the magazine, i.e. nonfiction, art, and fiction. So we’re putting out the official word that we’re looking for submissions from the fiction writers out there.

1. For this issue the sign on the proverbial door says “girl writers only.” Sorry gents.
2. While being a woman submitting a fantasy piece to us is enough to get your manuscript considered for this issue, submissions dealing with gender, sexism, and other areas important to feminine speculative literature are particularly welcome.
3. If you’d like to have your story considered for this issue, stories should be postmarked no later than November 15th, 2010. This will provide enough time to find the right artists (ladies, of course) for the stories. I’ll provide periodic reminders about the submission deadline as we move along.

All right, that’s pretty much everything. If you have questions, please ask. We look forward to reading your submissions.

Wild Cards book give-away, just in time for the holidays and SUICIDE KINGS

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 3rd, 2009

A fairly simple announcement: To celebrate the launch of the latest Wild Cards novel SUICIDE KINGS (which I’m not in, but my character Cameo is, being written by Daniel Abraham) Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist is giving away five sets of INSIDE STRAIGHT and BUSTED FLUSH (the second of which I am in, writing Cameo’s story and borrowing Daniel’s character Bugsy).

Confused? You won’t be. Just go to this link:

http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2009/11/win-set-of-wild-cards-novels.html

15 Days of Deverry Party Begins Today!

Constance October 28th, 2009

 

 

The Silver Mage

 

 by renowned Fantasy writer Katharine Kerr publishes on October 29th in the U.K. (HarperVoyager) and November 3rd in the U..S. (DAW).

Heralds 15 Days of Deverry

 

The Silver Mage is the final volume in this fantastic Celtic inspired cycle of interbraided lives, personalities and events in the alternate world of Deverry, through eras and generations of Deverry’s historical and chronological time!

 

15 Days of Deverry is an online celebration of the successful conclusion of Katharine Kerr’s vision for this Celtic knot of inter-braided novels. The 15  Days stands for the 15 titles that constitute the cycle’s sequence.***

 

A community at livejournal, deverry15 , has been set up as a clearinghouse where links will be noted. If you post any Deverry related material on your blog, anywhere (not just livejournal), please send the link to: rhi.rose@gmail.com. She’ll be collating the links.

For further information, join the deverry15 community at livejournal or stay here on the DeepGenre 15 Days of Deverry.  Ask questions, join the discussion, and make additional suggestions at both sites.

15 Days of Deverry Party Favors:  Katharine Kerr will provide autographed copies of her books and a signed bookplate designed by Party Committee member, Mary Frey, as prizes in  3 different contests!  (Contests’ Details and Rules follow in a separate entry.)

There is yet more!  A three-way interview-discussion here on the DeepGenre site, conducted among Katharine Kerr, Kate Elliott and Sherwood Smith on what it is like to have spent a long period of one’s professional career writing in a world one has created,  the roman fleuve and how a writer brings such large and long projects to a successful conclusion.

We encourage you to post about your experience reading these books in addition to your your congratulations to the author and her grand vision. You can create entries about how and when you first read one of the books, what attracted you to the series, which of the Deverry heroes ranks #1 in the Hotness Factor,  the overarching themes and structure of the series – or anything else about the Deverry world and books that has affected you.  We hope you all will share your own unique views of Katharine Kerr’s achievement.

We’re very excited by the successful completion of this Grand Fantasy Vision, so we’re throwing this Big Party to celebrate!  All of you are special guests.  Please come!  Post often!  Bring your friends, your dog, your cat and your dragon too!

***Link Here to the Deverry Webpage and the list of titles in the cycle

 

Please check out Book View Cafe, for short fiction by Katherine Kerr and many other fine authors!

 

. . . The 15 Days of Deverry Party Committee:

Constance Ash, Mary Frey, Darcy Javanne Kramer,  Kate Elliott,  Sherwood Smith and Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein

Comicon ‘09 & Westercon ‘09 — My god, it’s made of swag!

Kevin Andrew Murphy July 29th, 2009

I’m now back in town after Comicon and Westercon before it, and it’s time for my annual con wrap-up.

In twenty years of Comicons, I have never gotten so much swag.  Yes, there was the year of pogs, the year of posters, the years of posters and bags.  But never before have I gone to a con, come back laden with more bags than I could reasonably carry (or take as my onboard luggage), and then realize I’d left two behind at my friend Albert’s.

I was told by dealers that they weren’t seeing many credit cards, but everyone was paying cash–a sign of the economy.  But it seems another sign of the economy that Hollywood is just throwing free stuff at people as promotion.  I came back with four free DVDs (one random one given to me by a little kid in the hall, another box set of The Rose, Hello Dolly and 9 to 5 I’d got as a door prize for being one of the few people to look at “The Middle”) then came home and found a Coraline DVD waiting for me, prize from a raffle I’d entered at Westercon.

But now that that’s all said, let me go through the days of the convention in order.  I flew down Monday early to visit, and while doing so, found myself sitting with the staff of Slave Labor Graphics, going down to staff their booth.  (Tuesday, I went to the museums in Balboa Park.)

Continue Reading »

Mary Poppins versus Cthulhu, a writerly parlor game

Kevin Andrew Murphy May 27th, 2009

I just attended BayCon, the San Francisco Bay area regional science fiction convention.  It was, as always, a good chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones, attend panels, and flex the brain muscles a bit.

While there, I invented a parlor game of interest to writers and fans in general.  It was inspired by this inspired blog post about matchups between heroes and villains to decide the eternal battle of good versus evil.  However, as the game evolved, it seemed a better name was needed than simply Good versus Evil or Heroes versus Villains.  Instead, taking the name from the most warped match-up that presented itself, let me present Mary Poppins versus Cthulhu.

The rules are fairly simple: You need two players, along with any number of judges and kibitzers to decide the fate of the battle for those cases where the contestants can’t agree.  Each player thinks up a hero or villain from the pages of history or literature, then on the count of three, says the name.  It is then decided which of them would win in a battle to the death, with all their powers and resources brought to bear on the problem.  Players alternate heroes and villains each round, and it’s of interest to writers because it gets you to think about characters strengths and weaknesses and the way things will logically happen in a plot. Continue Reading »

Giving it Away for Free

Kevin Andrew Murphy April 7th, 2009

Witch Way to the Mall

Witch Way to the Mall

This was going to be a small announcement that I’ve got a story coming out in Esther Friesner’s Witch Way to the Mall this next June, and Baen is offering five of the stories early, including mine (you have to click all the way to the end to find it, since it’s not linked in the contents), but, well, it’s sort of morphed into a rumination on copyrights and giving it away for free.

This was prompted by a short letter I got last night from Paizo, a gaming company I’ve bought from before and who has given me some very nice PDFs of their other games as free samples:

Dear Kevin,

Wizards of the Coast has notified us that we may no longer sell or distribute their PDF products. Accordingly, after April 6 at 11:59 PM Pacific time, Wizards of the Coast PDFs will no longer be available for purchase on paizo.com; after noon on April 7, you will no longer be able to download Wizards of the Coast PDFs that you have already purchased, so please make sure you have downloaded all purchased PDFs by that time.

We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads.

Sincerely yours,
The Paizo Customer Service Team

This has prompted a great deal of talk on the Paizo and Wizards boards and elsewhere, with a press announcement from Wizards saying they were shocked shocked! to find that people were violating their copyrights on the internet, and they’re now suing people as far away as Poland and the Philipines — this particularly ironic since a number of years ago, they themselves violated the copyrights of a number of authors, myself included, with the publication of the Dragon Magazine compilation CD.  But the fact that my very first professional sale (if not publication credit), which was reprinted by Wizards without my permission, was then pirated around the globe without Wizards’ permission?  I suppose I could fall into a fit of apoplexy that my words my precious words! were no longer under my control.  But since I’ve been giving that article away for free on my website for years, the mental chain is more: sauce, gander, world’s tiniest violin.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think Wizards has the right to pull those works they do hold copyright to from publication, but giving customers who’ve already paid for the work less than twelve hours notice is rather bad form.  Moreover, I think it’s inane to cut off electronic reprints of out-of-print books, especially when there’s a demand for them and the fans will have to chose between pirate networks and the absurd prices of antiquarian booksellers.  And when I say absurd, I mean absurd: Last night I went on to Half.com to get a book I wanted, and while I was there, the engine (which had remembered my previous searches) told me I could get a copy of  Wild Cards Card Sharks, which has my first professional fiction publication, for only $1.37.  This seemed absurdly reasonable, and since I’d heard they were going for much more (and I only have two copies myself) I decided to snatch it up, only to find that the price had jumped to $53 once I clicked on the link and it was absurd the other way.

I’m not going to pay $53 for a paperback.  Moreover, I don’t expect any fan to.  And it’s not like I’d see any of that money from the antiquarians in any case.  I’d rather the fans download it from Polish pirates, then buy something current (such as, for example, Busted Flush or Witch Way to the Mall).

Which I suppose brings us full circle: There are free stories–regardless of how they got there–and if you like them, you can buy more stories.

Lord Ooky Hellwrought’s Sixteen Unspeakable Utterances

Kevin Andrew Murphy March 25th, 2009

Lord Ooky Hellwrought’s Sixteen Unspeakable Utterances
(a Supplementary Lexicon for Lady Pixie Moondrip’s Random Craft Name Generator)

In her well-famed essay, to which I refer you for reference, the great loremistress lists the following thirty-one words as being the components of eighty percent of all craft names:

  • Wolf     Raven Silver     Moon     Star
  • Water     Snow  Sea     Tree     Wind
  • Cloud     Witch     Thorn     Leaf      White
  • Black     Green     Fire     Rowan Swan
  • Night     Red     Mist     Hawk     Feather
  • Eagle     Song     Sky     Storm     Sun
  • Wood

Aside from modern witches, Wiccans and neo-pagans, this list also holds true with the majority of witches and wizards in fantasy fiction, especially popular roleplaying games, and is thus of use and interest to the writers and readers thereof.  But with all due deference to the esteemed lexicographer, her rule breaks down in one crucial area: evil overlords and wicked enchantresses.

With the exception of the always serviceable “Black” and “Night,” few evil overlords or wicked enchantresses use more than one word from the above list in their craft names, seldom two, and never three.  The same holds true for the titles of books chronicling their black deeds.  However, this is not to say that the practitioners of the black arts are any more original than their white and off-white colleagues.  They simply draw from a second, but even more limited, word list.

After perusing my vast library of blasphemous texts and eldritch tomes (mostly the aforementioned fantasy novels and gaming supplements), I, Lord Ooky Hellwrought, have found the same sixteen soul-searing words repeated again and again.  Herewith, my addenda:

  • Bane     Blood     Bone    Curse    Dark
  • Death    Dire    Doom    Dread     Fell
  • Foul    Grim    Hell    Hex    Nether
  • Shadow

These words may be combined with those from Lady Pixie Moondrip’s original list in the same manner, or, for added effect, may be added to professional titles.  Dread pirates and blood ninjas can charge more than mere ninjas and pirates.  And while no one is much impressed by a merchant or thief, the same cannot be said of death merchants and shadow thieves.  (Lord Ooky Hellwrought notes that a few professions, such as hairdressers and proctologists, are beyond help.  Aspiring evil overlords and wicked enchantresses would do best to not list these on their resumes.)

Spoilers: or, The Joy of Reading and Viewing Without Preconceptions

Kate Elliott March 4th, 2009

Some folk cannot abide spoilers–it ruins a book for them–while others read for process not goal and therefore do not mind spoilers.  Now, it makes no never mind to me whether a person hates spoilers, or doesn’t mind spoilers, or checks ahead to see who lives and who dies because the anticipation is killing them.  As I say, let a person be the reader they want to be.

As for me, I personally prefer to read or view for the first time without knowing what is going to happen;  I like to experience the plot “in real time” with all the surprises, setbacks, revelations and shocks that may entail.  I enjoy the experience of my own reactions, and if I really really like a book or film I will read/see it again, which provides yet another experience, the experience of watching the known story unfold and anticipating or recognizing the way the narrative builds and twists.

Others will approach the reading (viewing) experience differently, and that’s as it should be. Continue Reading »

The Fox in the Dollhouse

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 14th, 2009

After attending Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse panel at last year’s Comicon, I was eagerly awaiting the premiere.  So were friends, and there was even a party with a showing of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog to get us in the mood for more Joss goodness.  And then….

Well, while I don’t want to give any spoilers, Fox has put Dollhouse alongside The Sarah Connor Chronicles in what makes sense as a scifi block, but had promos with Summer Glau and Eliza Dushku that, if the sound were turned off, looked pretty much like 976 commercials:  “SciFi girls want to talk to you.  Just call them.  They’re waiting….”

Regardless, there was talk at the party about how Fox had asked for revision up on revision so that the first few episodes had been turned into something other than what Joss was wanting.  Something with more cop drama and explosions.  But since I can’t really discuss the truth of this without spoilers, they’ll be there after the fold:

Continue Reading »

Memo to Hollywood: How to do (and not do) an adaptation

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 31st, 2008

I have just watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, a year after it came out (DVR is your friend, except maybe in this case) and I’m gasping in horror at how bad it was, and for no good reason.  You’ve got all the elements that would seem to make a great movie:  Beloved children’s classic as source material?  Check.  Lavish sets?  Check.  Gorgeous costuming?  Check.  Actors ranging from competent to excellent?  Check.  Impressive and appropriate special effects?  Check.  Script by a competent screenwriter?  Um, well, I understand they got the guy who did the adaptation for Trainspotting, which I understand was a decent movie, but….

First off, let me make one thing clear: Departure from the source material is fine.   The Wizard of Oz dumped the scene in the Dainty China Country from the movie adaptation because it was boring, extraneous, and painfully lame.  Glomming the Good Witch of the North and Glinda the Sorceress of the South together makes sense from a dramatic perspective, though making her a bubbly airhead was a bit much (although the MGM version does have her fans).  Having the Wicked Witch of the West be responsible for the poppies is fine for purposes of drama, and having them be foiled by snow as opposed to field mice is likewise fine for purposes of staging.  Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks do not contain Nazis, musical numbers, a young Miss Price, or magical football matches with talking animals–though all of these things are very fun in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a movie I adored as a child and had to thank for introducing me to the equally good (if significantly different) book.  And Alfonso Cuaron’s version of A Little Princess took numerous liberties with the original novel, including but not limited to moving the setting from London to New York, making Becky black instead of Cockney, and most significantly, having Sarah’s dad not be dead of bad investments in India but instead poisoned by mustard gas and MIA in WWI.

The difference here is that The Wizard of Oz, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Cuaron’s A Little Princess are all great movies.   The reason The Seeker isn’t is not because elements were changed, but because elements were changed for the wrong reasons and the wrong way. Continue Reading »

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