Swords Against Boredom

I thought I’d start using this nifty logo my brother Clark created for me as a signature tag at the end of my posts about sword-and-sorcery writing. It links to my author’s page, and will help make my writing posts here easy to identify right away if you are scrolling through the blog.

And … it’s such a nifty logo I just wanted to use it to dress up my blog.

– Steve

Descriptive passages … I love them and I hate them.

I love them because, often, the very best sentences in a story are those that help set the scene. Writers turn their imaginations loose in trying to describe a sunset, a mountain, a rushing stream, a castle.

Why?

Because all those things — and most every other piece of scenery you might want to include in your story — have been described a bazillion times before. Knowing that, most writers will really hone in on those descriptive passages, looking for a fresh way to describe something.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t — which brings me to why I hate descriptive passages. Often, the writer just works too damned hard to make it work and it all just clogs up the story. Read more »

A publisher friendly to sword-and-sorcery fiction recently put out a call for flash fiction — stories under 1,000 words.

OK, I thought. I write sword-and-sorcery. I write tightly. I can tell a lot of story in a small amount of words. I’ll give this a shot.

I had an idea. A simple plot, vivid characters. Piece of cake.

I sat down to write. I figured I’d just tell the tale, finish somewhere a tad beyond 1,000 words and simply pare it down to fit after writing it. I wrote tightly, skipped a lot of description I might otherwise have added. Then I checked the word count.

Almost 2,000 words — twice what I needed. Read more »

Just on the off chance you’re not too busy stuffing yourself with turkey, dressing and pumpkin pie to drop by this blog today …

Happy Thanksgiving.

Take sometime today to think about all the good stuff, and enjoy it. The bad stuff will still be waiting for you on Friday … so ignore it today. Swim in blessings today.

– Steve

A quick look at my submissions sheet shows:

• Five stories of mine will be published in the coming months. Calthus, Spider John, Hissu the cannibal and the Faceless Sons all will make appearances in one place or another. And I have a sort-of historical ghost story coming out, too. I feel pretty darned good about all that. It’s at least a sign that the eight stories I’ve had published since September 2005 weren’t a fluke. Read more »

I thought I’d list a few of the writers I think have influenced my work, and try to explain why. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Fritz Leiber: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are my favorite fantasy characters. Larger-than-life and yet essentially human, they roard and rumble through adventures that seldom resemble those of any other writer. Leiber was interested in everything, and he infused his stories with it — history, philosophy, religion, science, poetry, art, geography. Read more »

This Associated Press story interests me as a writer who tries science fiction now and then …

NEW YORK (AP) — The Internet ranks behind only television as the leading source for science news and information, but most users won’t trust what they read online blindly, a new study finds. Read more »