Tag Archives: Bill Ward

Tales From the Magician’s Skull Premieres

Tales From the Magician’s Skull
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Goodman Games
Bedsheet size magazine, $14.99

If you’ve followed this blog, you may remember me mentioning the Kickstarter for this publication.  Well, it’s out now, and the second issue is in production.

I think the editor Howard Andrew Jones and his team have set the bar pretty high with this inaugural issue.  It’s modeled after the old pulp magazines.  I think this approach is a success.  The illustrations, fan club index, and the editorial by Jones all complement the most important aspect of the magazine, the stories. Continue reading

Brackett and Bradbury: “Lorelei of the Red Mist”

Planet Stories - Lorelei of the Red MistThis is a unique item.  The only collaboration between two great science fiction authors, Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury.  Here’s how it came about:

Both authors were living in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s, and both had been working hard to develop their craft as writers.  Both were regulars in Planet Stories at the time.  They were friends who had both been mentored by Henry Kuttner.  They used to meet once a week to read and critique each other’s work.

no good from a corpseBrackett had sold some detective short stories as well as one novel, No Good From a Corpse.  The novel caught the attention of movie producer Howard Hawks, who decided he wanted Brackett to work on the screenplay for his next project.  She was approximately halfway through a novellette she was writing for Planet Stories that was set on Venus (More about Brackett’s Venus in a bit.) when she got a call from Hawks, or more probably his secretary.  Which is how Brackett launched her screenwriting career by coauthoring with William Faulkner the script for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.  How freakin’ cool is that? Continue reading

In the Deep and Dark December

[cue Simon and Garfunkle]

I’m not a huge Simon and Grafunkle fan, but I couldn’t help but steal the title of this post from “I am a Rock”.  Here are my reading/writing/blogging plans for the last month of the year.

Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett

The big thing is that Leigh Brackett’s birthday is next Monday, December 7.  It’s her centennial, and I’ll be focusing a lot on her work this month.  I’m not the only one.  Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward will be discussing “The Moon the Vanished”, one of her novellas set on a swampy Venus next Monday on Howard’s blog.  Click here for details and join the discussion.  I’m not going to be discussing that particular story here, but I will take some detailed looks at some others.  I’m probably going to start with “Lorelei of the Red Mist”, which she began and Ray Bradbury finished when Howard Hawks offered her a job writing the screenplay to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with William Faulkner.  You can get electronic copies of both stories in Swamps of Venus from Baen ($4), or get the Solar System bundle for $20. Continue reading

Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Start Conan Read Through

If you aren’t reading Howard Andrew Jones’ blog, then you’ve been missing some good posts.  He and Bill Ward have been reading through works by major fantasy authors for about a year now and discussing them.  They started with a couple of collections by Lord Dunsany and then moved on to Swords Against Darkness and Swords in the Mist, two Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser collections by Fritz Leiber.  Each week they’ve discussed the story they’ve read and invited anyone interested in doing so to read along with them.

Today Howard postedComing of Conan a wrap-up of Swords in the Mist and a discussion of their next project.  This will be The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.  Today’s post was mostly about Conan, not so much about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.  Next week they discuss Howard’s essay “The Hyborian Age” before launching into the stories themselves.

If you’re a Howard fan, or just a Conan fan, you should check it out.