Sword-and-sorcery updates: Howard Days, Flame and Crimson review

Headed to the hallowed homestead of REH...

A few items of note on the sword-and-sorcery front.

I’m headed to Howard Days! Yesterday I “locked in” with a non-refundable plane ticket and car rental. 

No turning back now. It’s official. Boston Logan to Dallas Fort Worth, April 27-30.

I’ve even got lodging lined up: I’ll be staying at an air BnB in Cisco with a couple dudes whom I’ve corresponded with, but never met in person: Deuce Richardson and Ken Lizzi. My wife is making me download a tracking app on my phone in case I wind up gagged and bound in the trunk of a car. 

Kidding, of course. I’ve spoken with Deuce on the phone and collaborated with him at The Cimmerian and now on the blog of DMR Books. He seems like a trustworthy fellow. Ken is an author with a website of his own who secured lodging for the three of us.

But I suppose if you don’t hear from me after April just assume I’m buried in the desert somewhere in the immediate radius of Cross Plains.

I plan to document the trip here on the blog, as this might prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip (or not). I’ve very much wanted to attend Howard Days for years, since I first heard about it via The Cimmerian. But cost and time commitments are formidable obstacles. 

I dropped $580 on airfare and another $335 on the car rental. Fortunately I was able to apply a lot of points to remove some of the sting. Three nights at the BnB split three ways looks to be another $160. 

That puts me over $1,000 and I have yet to buy beer, food, and books and other mementos. I figure I'll wind up $1,500-$2K in the hole.

But I imagine it will all be worth it when I set foot in the Howard homestead, which some have described as a near religious experience. I get to meet many of the personalities that I’ve only ever read accounts from, or seen in clips on YouTube. And see the place where it all started.

The theme for this year is 100 years of Weird Tales (first issue March 1923) so I look forward to the panels and programming, too. Weird Tales was the medium which published the majority of Howard’s stories and allowed him to earn a respectable income that outstripped his unsuspecting neighbors (until the fickle Depression Era checks ran late and unpaid obligations accumulated).

Much more to come here.

Flame and Crimson received a nice review on the website of the Grumpy Wizard. 

The review was kind and generous (and, not without thoughtful critique). There was a lot more in it than a typical Amazon or Goodreads review—both which I still deeply appreciate, but longer form essays are where I live.

Head over and read it. I particularly liked this observation:

I consider Flame and Crimson a case study in how the creation of a new forms distribution can cause massive change in an artform. It’s a lesson we should pay attention to in an age of rapid change in distribution and creation of media.

S&S was born in the pulps and I believe it is at its best when it bears some of the hallmarks that heritage (i.e., shortish, pulse-pounding action, and the weird). Unfortunately, today there is no comparable market to Weird Tales, though many are trying. WT not only paid its top authors a livable wage, but was permissive and experimental with form, and served as sounding board and ideas exchange between authors and fans. Genres not only grew, but were born in its pages. Today it still seems like most authors are writing multi-book epic fantasy, which holds little appeal for me.

Also this:

Always there is tension between the stasis of too much Law and the formlessness of Chaos! Too much of either is damaging and destructive. It is difficult but ideal to find the balance between a narrow and restrictive vision and one that is overly expansive. The best work within a genre is created by artists who explore the boundaries of its universe without straying into shapeless dimensions.

There is a tension of form in genre fiction. When you write for a commercial market you are faced with the pressure of reader expectations vs. authentic expression. Like the Grumpy Wizard, I enjoy fiction that pushes edges, but remains something recognizable…

… Along with stuff that is unrepentantly S&S. 

In the end, what matters most is not the boxes you check, the genre you work in, or the boundaries you cross, but the quality of the writing. 

Anyway, thanks Grumpy Wizard, for the non-grumpy, thoughtful discussion of F&C.