This post has nothing to do with sword and sorcery, fantasy, historical adventure, publishing, books, or anything else commonly covered here.  I’m going to kvetch because Murphy has been with me.  It’s more legally and morally acceptable than going postal.  So if you want to skip this one, I’m fine with that.  You won’t be missing much.  Really.

So over Friday I take the car into the shop for some major repairs that I expect to set me back to the tune of four figures (that I don’t exactly have but still cheaper than another car).  I take my wife back to work and return to the office.  I’d finished checking the lab grades for one of the courses, compiled them based on lecture section rather than lab section, and was about to send the grades to the lecture instructors when a small mob of students showed up with grievances about about one of the TAs.  They were a polite mob, having left their torches and pitchforks at home, opting for dialogue.  Long story short, after the Grievance Committee left, I notified the lecture instructors that I would be adjusting the grades for one TA and grades would be delivered later.  This headache has continued all week, isn’t over, and shows signs of expanding.  All I can say about this matter is that a few graduate students will be getting detailed memos explaining that they will be working more closely with me next semester than they’re going to enjoy, following the list of detailed job duties to the letter, and sign here please to indicate that you acknowledge the consequences of departing these guidelines.

My car was ready to be picked up Tuesday, and at considerably less than I thought it would cost me.  I paid for the repairs and left the car there to be picked up later.  In spite of having numerous super powers, driving two cars at the same time isn’t one of them.  The problem?  One of the elders at my church had passed away unexpectedly over the weekend.  I was supposed to take a meal to the family at 5:00 so they could get to the visitation on time, and they live in a small town about 20 miles away.  I’d arranged to drop my son off from school at my wife’s work, and the two of them would walk to a sandwich shop nearby and eat.  I should get back about the time they finished eating, would pick them up, and go collect my car.  Everything went according to plan until I pulled up to the family’s house to drop off the food.  I heard a loud hissing as I stepped out of the car.  I fervently hoped I had parked on top of a large snake that wasn’t averse to cold weather.  No such luck.  I’d hit something (could even see the puncture).  By the time I’d taken the food into the house, the tire was flat.  While I was changing the tire, people started showing up from the community to pay their respects to the family.  Awkward.  Needless to say, once I found a place to air up the doughnut to full pressure, I was a little late picking up my wife.  I’d called her, and she was very understanding.

Our church has a number of small groups that meet throughout the week, and we host one.  Last night was supposed to be our Christmas party, which I had been looking forward to.  We’ve been having some trouble with the heater not coming on when it’s supposed to.  When I came home at noon to change clothes for the funeral, the temperature was in the low 60s in the house.  I called my HVAC guy, who is in the process of moving to a city a couple of hours away.  (Long story.)  He was in town, and agreed to come over later when he finished some stuff.  The repairs took longer than anticipated, spilling into the party time.  He was almost done when a delicate part broke, and no one in town had a replacement.  I spent the rest of the evening helping him try to find someone with the part so we could have heat last night.  (We didn’t, but we will tonight.)  From the laughter coming from the next room, I assume everyone else at the party was having a good time.  I certainly wasn’t. 

Let’s not even get into my misreading the science fair timeline, telling my son a major component he hadn’t started on wasn’t due yet, and discovering just before the party it was due this morning.

Between everything happening that was unanticipated, I haven’t gotten much accomplished this week.  I’ve not even started on the edits for the lab manual, never mind getting enough reading done to do any blogging.  And it will be the weekend at the earliest before I can work on finishing that story I have to submit this month.  Work on the Sooper Seekrit Project (number 1, that is) has ground to a halt.

Now this sounds like a lot of bitching and moaning, and it is.  Everything could have been a lot worse.  I’m not out nearly as much money as I thought I would be, nights don’t get that cold here, and I was able to throw a party for my friends that they enjoyed and see hear them have a great time.  I have family, friends, a roof over my head, food on the table, stable employment, plenty of reading material, and a great online community.  Not a lot to complain about when I really think of it and compare myself to most people, certainly most people in other countries.  This week has been a pimple of life.  Pimples seem bigger than they are, but once they’re gone, you hardly know they were there.  That’s this week.  So up yours, Murphy.

If you’ve actually read this far, thanks for letting me vent.  Now i need to get back to work, which in this case is waiting for the repairman. 

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #14

It’s been a while since I looked at an issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly (here and here), so we need to rectify that.

The current issue went live last month.  I’m a little behind on my magazine reading, but I’m catching up.  The problem is that there’s so much quality short fiction being published online.

HFQ is no exception. Here’s what the current issue holds.

“Days End at the Three Eels” by Al Onia is a tavern story of a different sort.   A tired mercenary spends a night carousing and ends up at the Three Eels, where he meets a slave girl who’d been left for dead in the desert after having been injured, now working as a serving wench, and an old wizard.  Before he leaves he will have impacted their lives in a way neither expect.  There was a nice twist at the end I should have seen coming.  All the clues were there.

S. Boyd Taylor’s “A Song for the New King” was more of a vignette than a story, but it’s a nice meditation on the creative process.

We see the return of Khraen, the undead general, in Michael R. Fletcher’s “Death and Dignity“.  Khraen first appeared in Issue 10’s “Death at the Pass“, where we saw his resurrection by the hand of the necromancer Leben.  In this story, Khraen is pursued by a wizard and his slave sorcerer across the frozen north.  Khraen is very much cut from the mold of the brooding antihero.  There’s a great deal of meditation on freedom and choices in between the combat in both of these tales.  I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Two poems round out this issue.  First “The Swordswoman” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a bleak poem in which no good deed, if not unpunished, at least goes unacknowledged.  The second poem is a more hopeful selection, Barry King’s “Shadakar“.  I thought these poems were better than average.

On the whole, a solid issue.  Heroic Fantasy Quarterly continues to publish solid, adventure oriented fiction.  Many of the authors are new comers, and I have a feeling in a few more years, if these authors continue to write and make names for themselves, HFQ will become known as the place to find the new up and comers in the fields of sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy.  If you’ve not read this publication, all of the issues are online for free, so check them out. 

Beneath Ceaseless Skies celebrates its fourth anniversary this month.  To mark the occasion, the current issue (105) is a double issue, with the first and third stories available now and the second and fourth on October 11.  But of course if you have a subscription, you already have all the stories, hint, hint.

Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

Richard Parks leads off with “Three Little Foxes”, the latest installment in his series about Yomada Monogatari, the Japanese ghost hunter.  These tales are smart, sly, and a joy to read.  This one is no different.  Here Yomada is asked to investigate three ghosts who are haunting the garden of a prominent courtier.  Of course, things are not exactly as they appear.  The more I read of this series, the better I like it.  The good news is that next year Prime Press is bringing out a collection of the Yomada stories while PS Publishing will publish a Yomada novel.

“Cursed Motives” by Marissa Lingen examines some of the ways in which the power of a curse can be a blessing.  It’s a clever tale about a princess with the power to speak curses who is shipwrecked with her governess on an island when two castaways from an enemy kingdom wash ashore in a lifeboat.  At the heart of this one is the old axiom about being careful what you wish for.

The third story is “Luck Fish” by Peta Freestone.  SPOILER ALERT:  I have some real problems with this story, and to discuss them, I’m going to have to give away much of what happens.  Skip down to the next story if you don’t want to read them.  The setting is reminiscent of Africa, which was a nice change from the usual fantasy setting I usually read, and Ms. Freestone puts her words and sentences together at a professional level.  Unfortunately, exotic settings and pretty words alone do not a story make.  The situation is this:  Long ago the goddesses of the moons (there are three) hid fish underground to protect them from the heat of the sun god.  The fish eggs hatch when it rains, and the villagers run out and collect the fish, which they dry for food during the hottest part of the year.  The problem is that the rain only falls one day a year.  The plot is this:  Masozi is best friends with Themba, a girl who happens to love him, but he is in love with the village beauty Manyara and oblivious to Themba’s feelings towards him.  Children become adults with permission from their parents when they are allowed to travel to a festival.  Manyara pledges her love for Masozi, but when she becomes an adult and his father forbids him to, it’s so long, boy.  There’s more lovesick teenage angst, the nature of which you can probably guess.  Boy, I’ve never seen this plot before.  (I’ve really got to find the sarcasm font on this keyboard.)  Obviously there’s a market for this sort of thing, or else we wouldn’t be up to our armpits in glittery vampires.  It’s just not the subgenre I want to read.

There’s another problem I have with this tale, and that’s the logic.  If the fish come out of the ground when it rains, and it only rains once a year, why doesn’t someone just pour water on the ground anytime they want fish?  Themba even suggests this early on, but no one else seems to have thought of it, and Masozi dismisses her suggestion.  Of course, at the end of the story, when Masozi is sitting on the ground outside his hut feeling sorry for himself and crying, a tear (a single tear, mind you) hits the ground.  The result is a fish squirms out.  This defies all logic.  If you can get the fish to come up by pouring water on the ground, it should have been done before.  Is the whole village so dense that someone can’t think of this?  Why hasn’t Themba tried it already since she did think of it?  That whole part made no sense to me because I just can’t buy that no one had tried to draw up the fish that way.  While I realize some of my objections, particularly to the romance, are matters of personal taste, I’ve come to expect better than this from BCS.  END SPOILER.

Fortunately, the best story is the last one; my liking of it more than offsets my dislike of the previous one.  “Unsilenced” by Karalynn Lee starts out like many other fantasies we’ve seen, with an unprepared girl assuming the reigns of empire upon the death of her father, but it soon moves in fresh and new directions.  This story reminded me very much of Patrica A. McKillip’s work, and she’s one of my favorites.  This was a complex, moving story about the ways we destroy what we love by trying to hold onto it.  The characters, the young Empress and her brother as well as the mages, are fully flawed and fully realized people.  There’s a depth and complexity to the story, the themes, and the characters that you usually don’t see in short fiction.  It’s one of the strongest stories I’ve read in a while, and I’ve read some good ones this week.  See previous posts for examples.  I expect this one to be in at least one Best of the Year anthology next year and hopefully on some award ballots.

While not the strongest issue, I still think the fourth anniversary issue of BCS is a good one.  You should check it out, especially the Parks and Lee stories. Congratulations to Beneath Ceaseless Skies on reaching this milestone.  May the magazine reach ten times that many.

Well, if you felt the earth tremble last Saturday, it was because my wife and I looked at a house and both thought it was perfect.  She’s come into a bit of a small inheritance, and it’s allowed us to look for bigger lodging a few years sooner than I thought we would be able.  Ever since moving to West Texas we’ve been living in a small house, and by small I mean almost half the size of the house we lived in previously.  We’re only moving three streets over, but there’s a major through-street directly behind us, so it’s a much nicer and quieter neighborhood.

We made an offer yesterday and received word a few hours ago that our offer had been accepted with some nice additions thrown in.  Like the workbenches in the shop building and a freezer, something we weren’t expecting.  Since we offered less than they were asking, we were a little surprised they took the first offer.  Not that we’re complaining.

I mention this here because the closing date in the contract is on or before the 15th.  There may will be some days during the move when I’ll be offline.    Short moves are sometimes the most hectic, since we’re going to try to do this in an organized manner rather than throw everything in a van and unload it as quickly as possible when we get there.  That means I’ll be able to set up the library in an organized manner with everything exactly where I want it.  (I promise to post pictures.)

But if I seem to drop off the earth for a bit, there’s a good reason.  Emphasis on good.

It is with great sadness that Adventures Fantastic/Futures Past and Present learned today of the death of Colin Harvey.  He passed away of a stroke at the age of 50.  He was far too young.  Angry Robot Books has posted this remembrance.  I’ve only read one of his novels, Winter Song.  It was one of the first books I reviewed.  I loved it and was hoping he would return to that universe.

He will be missed.  Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Kate.

My trip was longer and more tiring than I expected.  It was work, not pleasure, and by work I mean manual labor.  Anyway, I worked on some posts in the evenings while gone, but don’t have them ready to go yet.  One of them is a rather lengthy interview I’m still transcribing.  That one will probably run in at least 2 parts when I get it ready, maybe three.  I didn’t get a lot of reading done, but what I did accomplish, I’ll write about over the next few days.  Until then, consider this notice that new material will be going up soon.

Just a note to say that I’ll be away from a computer for the next week or so.  As a result, I probably won’t be able to get any new posts up, although I will work on some.  Look for them next week.  Sooner if I can manage it.