I’ve been tinkering….

Tomorrow afternoon (3:00 EST) and Monday night (9:00 EST) Paizo will be hosting a chat featuring all of the great names in their fantasy fiction stables. Also, I will be there.

You can follow the link to Paizo’s chat room from this post on the Paizo blog. You don’t have to register, just give your handle.

And if you really want to brush up on your Pathfinder who’s who, check out my interviews with Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, and James L. Sutter.

So far, these are the attendees:

Saturday 3:00pm EST
Dave Gross
Howard Andrew Jones
Liane Merciel
Erik Mona
Kevin Andrew Murphy
Steven Savile
Amber E. Scott
Bill Ward

Monday 9:00pm EST
Richard Lee Byers
Elaine Cunningham
Ed Greenwood
Dave Gross
J.C. Hay
Howard Andrew Jones
Liane Merciel
Erik Mona
Kevin Andrew Murphy
James Sutter
Bill Ward

For the last four weeks Paizo has been posting installments of a serial short I did for their Pathfinder Tales fiction line. As of yesterday, the entire story is now up, and you can read all four parts for free by following this link to the Pathfinder Tales web fiction section of the Paizo site. Here’s a bit more about ‘The Box:’

When a supposedly easy theft goes bad, Kostin Dalackz finds himself caught up in a deadly criminal conspiracy centered on a mysterious, magically locked box. Enlisting the aid of a diverse group of adventurers and rogues, Kostin strikes out to settle accounts — and re-acquire the twice-stolen property. ‘The Box’ is a journey through the seedy underbelly of the city of Magnimar, part of the Pathfinder world setting of Golarion.

Pathfinder Tales has a great group of talented writers contributing to their fiction line, and I’m thrilled to be in the company of some legendary names — once you’ve read my piece, definitely check out the rest! The Pathfinder world itself was a lot of fun to work in, and it’s a particular joy to see one’s characters illustrated. For ‘The Box’ the amazing J.P.Targete pulled out all the stops and produced four great illustrations.

Also — fantasy writers take note — judging from the feedback so far from this particular story, I think it’s safe to say that what the fantasy reading public really wants is more stories featuring badgers. Voles, shrews, weasels, opossums, lemmings, wolverines, beavers, mongooses, groundhogs and the like might also work, but badger mania seems to be trending upward right now, mostly I think thanks to this. Something to think about….

A post over at BG alerted me that Tangent Online has recently put up their Recommended Reading List for 2010, a list that includes some great writers of my acquaintance like John R. Fultz and Chris Braak. Black Gate itself was mentioned a few times as well.

Of course, being completely shallow and self-centered the very first thing I did was scan the list for my name. And it turns out, for the second year in a row, somebody over at Tangent liked one of my stories enough to put it on the list. Last year it was ‘How Antkind Lost its Soul’ from Kaleidotrope, and this year it’s a piece called ‘Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell,’ which appeared in Realms. Here is what Nathan Goldman said about the story in his Tangent review:

Bill Ward’s “Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell” follows a fairy tale format and tracks master warrior Heartless Gao through an Eastern adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. The first line hooks the reader, and from then until the story’s end, the reader is intrigued, if not transfixed, by Ward’s strange and compelling vision of the underworld. This epithet-laden tale would fail in most formats, but in the familiar form of a myth, it succeeds. Amidst a number of minor and clever commentaries (such as Hell’s hysterical bureaucracy) emerges a thoughtful discourse on the nature of what it means to be human, and the moments centering on this topic are no less exciting than Heartless Gao’s confrontation with Hell’s many demons.

Feels good when a story that is a ‘hard sell’ finally makes it in front of readers…and then some of those readers really seem to like it. And it’s fantastic to make this list aside so many great writers whose work I’ve long enjoyed. Glad to see that Tangent has consistently maintained its strong focus on shorter works of genre fiction over the years, and that it covers many of the smaller magazines and ezines in the world of indie publishing. Thanks Tangent!

Last week Jason over at RBE announced the ToC for the second Clash of Steel Anthology, Assassins. Looks like a great line up (and just get a look at that fantastic cover from Didier Normand!) My own story for the anthology is another in a series of adventures set in a fantastical pseudo-China, featuring a pair of Imperial troubleshooters called Shan and Bao that get into all sorts of Sword & Sorcery style predicaments.

* Erin M. Hartshorn ~ “Snake in the Grass”
* Ramon Rozas III ~ “Three Rules to Live By”
* Dayle A. Dermatis ~ “The Sultan’s Sons”
* Seth Skorkowsky ~ “The Blossom of Eternity”
* C. L. Werner ~ “A Blade for the Dead”
* Steve Goble ~ “Otrossius and the 13 Assassins”
* Carl Walmsley ~ “Homecoming”
* Robert E. Waters ~ “The People’s Avenger”
* Josh Brown ~ “Goldenbee’s Savior”
* Jonathan Moeller ~ “Artists”
* John R. Fultz ~ “A Fool in the Court of the Idiot-King”
* Bill Ward ~ “Shadow of the Demonspawn Emperor”
* Phil Emery ~ “Endgame Assassins”
* Alter S. Reiss ~ “Difficulties of the Eight Quarters”
* Bruce Durham ~ “Dark Assassin”
* Wil Dan Collins ~ “Citadel of Screaming Spires”
* Robert Mammone ~ “Blood Fire”
* Christine Lucas ~ “The Last Dues Owed”
* Craig Comer ~ “The Blood of Khalid Al’Tahir”
* J.M. Martin ~ “Blind Ambition”
* Christopher Heath ~ “Azieran: A Penance, of Sorts”

Since RBE received a lot of good stories for this open call, they are also, for the first time, publishing several e-anthos starting this month and counting down to the upcoming release of Assassins. These ‘eSsasins’ anthologies will contain four stories each arranged around a theme (Sorcery, Ruse, Shadows, Revenge) and sell for only $3.00. Glad I just bought a Kindle.

A gang steals a dangerous designer drug in a bid to control the streets of New Old Philly, a demonically-possessed warrior battles hellspawn in a post-cataclysmic world, and a victim of the inevitable zombie apocalypse writes a final letter to his ex-wife. Seems the gods of genre have blessed me with a perfect trifecta of science fiction, fantasy, and horror appearances in the last few months — and so I must do their dark bidding and spread the word through the interwebs.

First up is the UK’s Murky Depths, a richly illustrated quarterly with an edgy and contemporary aesthetic. Murky Depths lucky number thirteen just rolled off the presses, containing my cyberpunkish piece ‘Named in Blood,’ awesomely illustrated by Paul Drummond. This is another story where I have fun with first person voice, and play around with some near future slang. Marks my third appearance in Murky Depths, and you can read about the others here and here.

That re-jigged disposey deck I had back in the days we were on the rise was long replaced by a sweet interlaced Kuztom Sliik that had me data-jacked in style, and I had ’grams enough to wiggle through most gaps in the system. Now, I’m no expert, but I had long since figured out that nothing stays secret for long once it’s networked . . . and what that means is you don’t have to be the guy that can beat the source security to get your peek, you just have to be the one that can beat the guy who did. Usually that’s some Mad Hack running the Shit Impenetrable, and you might as well try to sneak a peek at God’s balls as to get through their codes, but sometimes you get lucky enough to find premium data in the hands of those who can’t protect it. And sometimes you’ve got a backdoor.

And of course Jason Waltz’s Rogue Blade’s Entertainment keeps on rolling like the S&S juggernaut it is, having just launched a new anthology — the first in a new series — Demons: A Clash of Steel. For those of you that remember a trio of fantasy anthos from Carnifex press entitled Clash of Steel, RBE’s latest issue is a resurrection and enlargement of that line. Clash of Steel anthologies are denoted by black covers, and aim for more raw action and heroic fantasy badassery. I never appeared in any of original the Carnifex anthologies, my story for Demons, ‘By Hellish Means,’ being part of the fresh crop of pieces added to the book. It’s the story of the last days of a world overrun by the denizens of hell, where the only hope for human survival lies in the actions of a warrior-woman possessed by an ancient enemy.

Yrisa vaulted the last step, arriving at a landing and the temple’s colonnaded entrance. She spun to confront her pursuers; blade held easily before her, limbs poised in readiness as she had been taught. The first of the shadowy beasts to lope to the top of the stair was the one she had maimed, a demon driven mad with rage. She dispatched it quickly, plunging the dwimmerblade hilt-deep into its chest and ripping outward as the thing’s body dissolved into hissing mist. The remaining three were more careful, and looked at her now with keen appraisal. No mortal could have done what she just had, and some measure of comprehension dawned on the demons. They checked their headlong, rolling charge and instead advanced in cautious unison.

She felt the stirring within her that battle always engendered, the force she could not allow to the surface, that thing to which she was wedded. She was the last of her order on this overrun world, this Hell on earth, and she had only survived because the stolen power within her was greater than that of any Bride who had ever dared tryst with the sons of Hell.

To fight Hell, Mother Superior had said, one must use hellish means.

The shadeforms tore heavy paving stones from the stair and flung them at Yrisa, before clattering up the escarpment in a unified assault. The dwimmerblade blurred before her in defense, gonging a rich bass note with each deflected rock, and Yrisa sang her own song, sweet and high, a song of ritual battles and warrior-women, of sacrifice and of death. The demons closed upon her –

– and were blown back into the stuff of smoke and night with three swift strokes of the enchanted weapon.

Alone, atop the temple steps, with the tomb-hush of night settled upon the lands and the last knife-edge of red in the west to illuminate the world, Yrisa looked out over the dead city of Arghoz Lok that sprawled ruinously beneath her and wept.

To round things up with a bit of horror is a flash fiction story in the form of a letter in the Letters From the Dead anthology from The Library of the Living Dead Press. Edited by Mark M. Johnson, Letters From the Dead picks up on the notion of all those letters to loved ones, journal entries, missed meetings, and final goodbyes that form the epistolary detritus of a world being rapidly devoured by the living dead, and celebrates it with a collection of just that sort of thing. My own story (“document number twenty”) is about a bitter man who finds a second lease on life in the midst of the chaos — and a new talent for violence — but the old ghost of his failed marriage continues to warp his thoughts even as the end of the world, in the form of an undead horde, liberated him from his former self.

It was as if my whole life had led up to this moment. Dad and all his hunting trips and visits to the firing range, me in tow. My love of history, King Arthur, the Crusades, and World War II, remember? “We know who won,” you said, “why sit and read endlessly about a war fifty years done?” The weight lifting you said made me look like an oaf, the running, and even the landscaping job I took after the divorce. And those horrible movies, of course, my favorites. “People coming back from the dead is a stupid idea.” You said that and I remember.

How could anyone have known?

I am a new man. I have saved lives, meted out justice, done things you could never imagine. The rules are different — the world is different. If you could have seen me, a modern-day Grail Knight armed with Mossberg and Sig and chrome-plated hatchet. I did all of it for you, carved a path sixty miles to your doorstep, to the home we once shared.

And you were not here.

Now, given that one day apes will rule over us and hunt us for sport, I think the best course of action would be for everyone out there within blogshot to buy a copy of each of these sterling publications so that we can enjoy them while we have the wit and skill to do so. The gorillas and their nets are just around the corner, and there’s just no betting on a Cornelius or Zira to save our asses. So read, drink and be merry for tomorrow an orangutan just might be lobotomizing you to better accord with his notions of science and religion. Just saying.