The great thing about interviewing Howard Andrew Jones is that it is impossible to run out of interesting things to talk about. That’s because Howard has been busy. Busy writing stories, busy preserving the legacy of an unsung founder of historical adventure, busy editing Black Gate Magazine. And, oh yeah, busy writing and selling novels — his first two, the Dabir and Asim origin story The Desert of Souls, and Plague of Shadows for Paizo’s new Pathfinder fiction line, are both out now!
A Conversation with Howard Andrew Jones
Your Dabir and Asim stories are some of the most popular to be featured in Black Gate Magazine. For those readers perhaps still unfamiliar with them, what can one expect from a Dabir and Asim tale? More specifically, what is in store for readers that pick up Dabir’s and Asim’s first novel-length adventure, The Desert of Souls?
Mystery, adventure, swashbuckling swordplay, two brave friends standing against things man was not meant to know… to further sound like a radio announcer, there’s all this and more! I think my two favorite descriptions about their exploits come from John O’Neill and Kevin J. Anderson. O’Neill described their tales as “something like Sherlock Holmes crossed with the Arabian Nights, except Watson has a sword,” and Kevin J. Anderson wrote that the novel read “like a cross between Sindbad and Indiana Jones.” There’s a strong sense of the exotic, because I like to take readers to strange and colorful places, be it a haunted tower in the Baghdad night, or ancient ruins. I had a lot more room to spread out in the novel, so the readers are introduced to more figures from Dabir and Asim’s world, including the brilliant Sabirah, Dabir’s one true love, and the caliph himself.
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….
This post originally appeared at Grasping For the Wind in March 2010, and was written in response to one of John Ottinger’s Inside the Blogoshere questions: How do you organize your library?
Around a month ago I went through a major overhaul and purge of my collection, something years overdue. Space was definitely becoming more and more of an issue for me as my shelves had come to be packed two or three deep in places (and just what was behind that outer layer?), and stout towers of hardbacks and trades had begun to grow on the floor in front of my bookcases. What shred of organization was left from my last resorting — which happened to be at a time when I bought and installed yet more shelves — was being obscured and diluted by new purchases. What I needed was not only a rethink of where certain things should be shelved, but a culling of the herd.
Anyone with a serious book buying habit knows that, realistically, they will never be able to read everything they buy. It’s a sobering and unwelcome fact that only a fraction of all those great used book finds from the library or thrift store or local indie shop — all those exciting impulse purchases — cannot be gotten to in a normal human lifespan. So, either you become a firm believer that the Singularity will come along and grant you some sort of extended lifespan (possibly turning you into a book-reading cyborg), or you get real and get rid of some of the stuff you’ve accumulated over the years.
Recently I wrote an essay about the dangers of too much ‘realistic thinking’ in fantasy fiction — When Realism Isn’t Real — Conan the Jazzerciser. In that article I used an example from Poul Anderson’s Conan pastiche Conan the Rebel to illustrate my point. The following post, which originally appeared at Black Gate, is a brief look at Anderson’s ‘On Thud and Blunder’ essay and his realistic approach, and tells the other side of the ‘realistic thinking’ dichotomy in fantasy fiction. In particular I look at how fantasy fiction as a whole has moved on from the time of Anderson’s original writing, and now features a new set of pit-falls and follies.
. . . writers who’ve had no personal experience with horses tend to think of them as a kind of sports car.
It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.
The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star:
Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Probably this is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win. Such literature is not inherently superior to the introspective or symbolic kinds, but neither is it inherently inferior; Homer and James Joyce were both great artists.
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This post originally appeared at 
It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can 
