You ever wonder how my gaming group gets those wonderful landscapes like the Pillar of Anguish or Atoll-10? You ever drooled over pics of fully-painted miniatures? Well, if that's something you're interested in then you're in luck! My group's resident mad scientists, Darren and Jason, have started a blog about how to create landscapes and paint schemes for RPGs. It's called Terra Bellum: Land of War, and it's shaping up to be an awesome site.

What's more, they hope to expand it beyond the scope of "just" landscapes to include maps, world building, and even constructing scenarios around the pretty bits and bobs. Go check it out! Me, I look forward to seeing how exactly they build those wonderful toys* . . .






*Which reminds me: I need to get and post pics from our current set-piece conflict, the Last Stand of the Ash Brigade. You really have to see it to believe it . . .

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” — Oscar Wilde

In a few hours, my inner chronometer will roll over once more. Forty-one will give way to forty-two, and I imagine I’ll wake up in the morning feeling exactly the same as I did this morning. Lately, though, birthdays serve only to make me a bit more introspective. How has the last year gone, I ask myself. What were its highs, its lows, its losses, its triumphs? Most of all, I ask myself what I can do to make the upcoming year better.

My sister, bless her heart, has a life plan she’s kept since she was a teenager. It serves her as a roadmap to a life best lived, full of goals and plateaus and – well – plans. She has followed it as faithfully as any such document can be followed, and is the happier for it. Me, I prefer the wind-blown leaf approach. As a teen, I’d make a game of wondering where I’d be in this year or that. Would I be famous? Rich? Happy? In jail? But I never sat down to draft a concrete plan.

I had something of a leg-up over some of my contemporaries in that I have always known what it is I wanted to be: a writer. For twenty-eight years I’ve plugged away; some years were feast, others famine. I’ve gone from writing really bad fantasy in the 80’s, to really bad cyberpunk in the early 90’s, and somehow stumbled upon a decent niche writing historical adventure. There were many years in this span where the only thing that kept me going was blind stubbornness. I would be a writer – and only a writer – or, by God, I’d be nothing at all!

So, on the cusp of forty-two, I reckon myself touched by Fortune to be doing this thing I love. This past year has been as trying as any in the early days . . . perhaps moreso because I’ve seen what I can do when not forced by circumstance to stand idle. Circumstance, however, can only take a portion of the blame for this past year’s miserable output. I recognize I could have written another book or two in the small hiatus I’ve taken – that’s what any other writer worth his or her ink would have done. I chose to brood, though. To spend an inordinate amount of time pondering the sequence of events that brought me to a standstill. Most of you, Gentle Readers, won’t have a clue what I’m talking about; I’m not sure if I’ll ever commit it to the page (despite it being a perfect object-lesson for up-and-coming writers).

As I write this, my hiatus is drawing to a close. A few weeks should find it squared away and me working furiously on a truly kick-ass project for Medallion while at the same time getting things back in motion on Lion of Cairo. And I know, for future reference, that if events conspire to forestall me in my chosen field, I am be best served by working on totally different projects for a while. To be sure, a hard lesson learned. I’m just glad I’m still here and breathing and able to learn it . . .

Edit: This is embarassing . . . I'm not forty-three at all. I'm only forty-two (2009 - 1967 = 42). Woohoo! Let the party begin!

I spend so much time here on the blog extolling the virtues of REH that I sometimes forget to credit one of my other great influences: Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994). KEW was a writer of great versatility whose work ran the gamut – from sword-and-sorcery and dark fantasy to horror and screenplays; more than that, he was an editor of note (the Year’s Best Horror anthologies, the Berkley editions of Conan) and ran a small publishing house (Carcosa Press). And, he had an MD in psychiatry.

Wagner is, perhaps, best known as the creator of Kane, an immortal who was one of the first of the race of Man, cursed by the insane god that created him for introducing violence – and free will – to Paradise. And so all would know him, the god gave Kane a mark: the glittering blue eyes of a madman. Kane cannot die save by violence, of which he is the consummate master. He is neither hero nor villain, though sometimes the whims of Fate cast him into one role or the other; his greatest nemesis is the sense of ennui that arises from his cursed state . . . and unlike vampires, Kane cannot slumber in the earth to make the passage of time at least marginally bearable.

Anyone wishing to write of the immortal condition should read the Kane books and stories as a matter of course. Perhaps then they might understand that immortality would most certainly strip its victim of his or her very humanity. Kane is not like us. He is alien, his perspective measured through centuries rather than decades. He craves power – temporal, magical, spiritual – and if it means laying waste to whole kingdoms in order to seize that power, then so be it. Truly, I’ve yet to read of an immortal character as compelling, as frightening, and as real as Kane.

KEW was also a great fan and early partisan of Robert E. Howard’s. He wrote two excellent pastiches: Legion from the Shadows with Bran Mak Morn, and The Road of Kings featuring Conan; he had been slated to write the tale of Conan’s rise to the throne of Aquilonia, The Day of the Lion, but another writer was given that particular story (and proceeded to arse it up). KEW also wrote several drafts of what was to be the third Conan movie. Between his pastiches and his essays on REH, it is clear Wagner understood the man far better than anyone before him. KEW, not L. Sprague deCamp, should have been the custodian of Howard’s literary estate.

Unlike my other influences, I actually met Karl Wagner in 1987, at DeepSouthCon 25 in Huntsville, Alabama. He was in the Dealers’ Room, talking to noted fan Rusty Hevelin, when I finally screwed up the courage to shuffle over and ask him for his autograph (in my paperback copy of a Kane collection, Night Winds). I had a million things I wanted to say, but I barely stammered out “thanks!” and scurried off.

Now, if I had the chance, I’d shake his hand and tell him thank you for writing stories that filled my imagination with wonder . . . stories that continue to delight and inspire me to this day.


Resources:

East of Eden: A website devoted to Karl Edward Wagner and maintained by his nephews and his childhood friend, John Mayer.

The Dark Muse of Karl Edward Wagner: a memoir by John Mayer.

Wagner's bibliography page at the Internet Science Fiction Database (ISFDB).

First, a word of clarification: the man pictured to the left IS NOT Conan of Cimmeria. It’s an imposter who calls himself “Conan the Barbarian”. How can you tell the difference? Well, the Cimmerian, Conan, has a square-cut black mane and smoldering blue eyes. The fellow to the left does not. Also, the Cimmerian is highly intelligent (he speaks a number of languages, though with a barbaric accent), cunning, a savage fighter and as staunch a lover of freedom as you’re ever likely to meet. That guy to the left is a moron: a grunting, bumbling, barely-literate fool whose main claim to fame is that he pushed a giant wheel in a circle for much of his youth . . . as a slave, no less!