Old Growth Memories

I'm reminiscing now about hikes, since I'm holed up here at home for the holidays. I really am going to take some time off in January and/or February to go hiking.

The following photos were all taken on a bushwhack hike I made with my pal Andy Kunkle in late May of this year. We drove over to the Pisgah National Forest near Old Fort, North Carolina. This particular section of forest was the very first plot of land to be declared National Forest property. Hiking in, you can tell why it was chosen. For reasons of chance and topography, large patches of forest here were never logged, or only selectively logged. Much of Mackey Mountain and the surrounding ridges and coves are home to old growth forests. These days, the forests are mainly hardwoods, but up until very recently there were also big expanses of grand old hemlock trees here, also.

And the biggest of the trees remaining are poplars, also known as the tulip tree (for its springtime blossoms). In fact, the Yellow poplar/Tulip poplar is not a true poplar at all, but is instead closely related to the magnolia family. Tulip poplars grow pretty fast for a hardwood, they grow straight and tall, and they reach impressive size for an eastern tree. While they're no match for the truly huge monster trees of the west such as Jeffrey pines, Redwoods, Sequoias, cedars, and such, they are among the largest species here in our half of the continent. Only cottonwoods and sycamores and and buckeyes and (formerly) hemlocks rivaled or exceeded them in volume.

Today, if you're out in a southeastern forest and you encounter a grove of very large trees, more than likely that grove is of Tulip (or yellow) poplars.

It was in search of just such groves that Andy and I headed up into the watersheds at the foot of Mackey Mountain/Green Knob in the Pisgah National Forest. We hiked up the steep slopes and indeed we located the big trees that we were told were there. I love walking around in classic southern Appalachian cove hardwood forests. While there, you are surrounded by life, by green, by fresh air and rich soil and clean water. If you're lucky, you'll spy some wildlife in these forests, but even if you find yourself alone there, you'll be richly rewarded for the exertion.

Big tree Bob at the base of a huge poplar near Old Fort NC.

Andy Kunkle dwarfed by a monster poplar.

A towering hardwood along the watershed.

The forest floor is alive with all sorts of flora and fauna.

The earth, like a leaking sponge, gives up the fresh water it has filtered.

One tiny human amidst Nature.

Sensoria

I'll be appearing in March at CPCC's Sensoria 2012.
They asked me for a brief bio to post here and there in some of their publications. So this is what I sent them:

Bio

James Robert Smith was born in Georgia in 1957. Currently he lives in North Carolina with his wife and son and three cats. He works full time in his day job as a laborer and in the evenings as a published author. He has sold more than sixty short stories to a host of magazines and anthologies. Smith has also written for various comic book publishers, including Marvel Comics. His first novel, THE FLOCK, was published in 2006 by Five Star Books and reprinted in 2010 by Tor/Forge Books. The film option to that book was picked up by Don (TRANSFORMERS) Murphy through Warner Brothers and is making its way to the screen. His second novel, THE LIVING END was published in 2011 by Severed Press. His third novel, THE CLAN (a sequel to THE FLOCK) was also sold to Tor Books and is forthcoming later in 2012.

Upcoming novels and collections include HISSMELINA a Lovecraftian horror novel set in the mountains of North Carolina, FOUR FROM MANGROVE a collection of sword and sorcery tales, A CONFEDERACY OF HORRORS a collection of Smith’s horror stories, and THE LOST CHILD a novel of the supernatural (also set in North Carolina).

His websites can be viewed at www.jamesrobertsmith.net and www.hissmelina.com and http://tilthelasthemlockdies.blogspot.com/.

Taken in the Pisgah National Forest on a hunt for old growth forests. I got hit really hard with poison ivy on this bushwhack. Which is my fault for not wearing the legs on my convertible pants. This was in the very first block of forests ever created for the National Forest system we now know. It protected a large expanse of old growth trees on and around Mackey Mountain. Of course the hemlocks are now all dead due to the invasive hemlock wooly adelgid, but the hardwoods are still there.

Stir Crazy, Stir Crazy

Whenever I can't get away to the mountains or down to Florida to swim and paddle in one of the glorious freshwater springs, I tend to get really, really stir crazy. I've never made it a secret that I don't like crowds and I don't enjoy living in a city. I can only stand so much, and then I can't stands no more.

So for the past few weeks I've been daydreaming constantly about getting loose from Charlotte and into the woods. One place that's on my list of probables is one of the parks Carole and I most enjoy:


Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia. Recently, it was announced that this area is now under consideration as for National Park status. It will be called (if it happens) The High Allegheny National Park. Of course energy corporations and timber companies will fight it to the death. They will do anything and everything--up to and including murder (of that I have no doubt)--to keep this dream of a new National Park from ever becoming reality.


But if any place in the eastern USA deserves National Park status, it's this area. Let's hope it comes to be.


In the meantime, I'm thinking maybe a January or February trip is in order. And hopefully, as this past February, Carole and I will encounter deep snow and we can go sledding on the sled run inside the park.


We'll see.

Embiggen these photos, but especially this one. Taken from the western end of the park.

Self-portrait at Lindy Point, this past February.

Very close also to Lindy Point.

What Miss Erosion and Mr. Gravity do to the mountains.

This the Blackwater Canyon Lodge where we like to stay. Carole standing on the other side of some friendly does who are obviously into pandhandling.

Bears Do What They Do

I love photos like this one. (It's from a Pennsylvania newspaper's photo contest.) This illustrates how animals are all independent with unique personalities. From everything I've read and heard, bears love bird seed. If it's left around they will eat it. This particular black bear decided to take the whole feeder with it to a private place to dismantle and consume the innards. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as if there will be much to enjoy by the time it hits the woods.

Today's Mailbag

Since the latest flurry of publicity for me and for my work as a writer, I've gotten mail from a number of different sources. Two that really thrilled me today were from Bubbie Fatt of B. Fatt & Lazy Movie Reviews, one of the funniest sites on the Internet. And I got one from my Congressional Representative, Sue Myrick.

B.Fatt emailed me because I post at the site and he was touching base.

Sue Myrick because of the recent newspaper article about me. As it happens, I do write to her often, to try to get her to vote on legislation the way I want. No luck there, so far, but she and her office have always been responsive and civil. Which puts her in the company of the most responsive legislators whom I've routinely written over the years. I could always count on a response from the following elected officials:

Senator John Edwards.

Senator Jesse Helms.

Representative Sue Myrick.

Which brings me to a story about Rep. Myrick:

I used to deliver mail to a World War II aviator named Captain Killen. (Great name for a military character, and yes I filed it away for future use.) His wife had recently died and he was having trouble transporting her body. Forgive me, as I've forgotten some of the details, but either she had died while they were visiting in Italy or had died here and her wish was to be buried in Italy. Either way, he was having fits getting her body transported from point A to point B.

One day after he had told me of this difficulty, I was delivering mail to him when he stopped me to talk (as he almost always did). "Guess who I was just speaking to on the phone?"

"Who?" I asked.

He had gotten in touch with Representative Myrick. She knew, of course, where to go to get this done for Capt. Killen, but on this she needed some extra help. She needed someone with some clout, and she got it. So Captain Killen had a conference call that included himself, Congresswoman Myrick, and the late Senator Ted Kennedy who was able to get the final piece of the puzzle to fit to get the body of Mrs. Killen to its final resting place.

So there it was: he'd just gotten off the phone with one of the best known elected officials in North Carolina, and one of the best known in the nation. The two had put their heads together to help out this World War II veteran in his time of need.

That's what I call bi-partisan cooperation.

Thanks, Cap'n Killen!

Writing Zombies

Well, here I am knee-deep in zombies. I thought that it would be a while before I wrote another zombie novel, but...well, zombie happens.

The new books--a trilogy--will be much more traditional zombie novels. Lots of gun-play and gruesome battles.

I'm having a good time writing the initial volume and the words are flowing along. I'm hoping to complete the first one within the next few weeks.

This is the best zombie makeup I've ever seen. Subtle, but really chilling.

Until I deliver the new books, you can still find my original zombie tome, THE LIVING END at your favorite online bookseller.

People Ask the Darndest Things...

Soon after I sold my first novel I'd get requests from folk I know--and sometimes from strangers--asking me to help them write a book. No shit. As if I don't have enough to keep me busy as it is. Mainly they were in the category I'd always heard about but never thought I'd meet:

I'll come up with the ideas and you do the writing.

Right.

Now, I'm not listing these people within the very small group of other writers with whom I've collaborated. That's another issue entirely and worth a long essay in and of itself. But that's not what I'm talking about now.

After I'd sold my next novel and then a third these people kept popping up. I know why they pop up, but I can't explain why they would suppose I would find that their ideas could be as intriguing to me as the ones that occur to me without their input. I reckon it's their egos at work. Or maybe they're just dense. I can't say, exactly.

When the news broke that I'd optioned THE FLOCK to Don Murphy and John Wells through Warner Brothers, things got even worse. People I hadn't spoken to in years phoned me up to tell me that they, too, had a great idea that would make a fantastic movie. And sometimes before I could object or turn the conversation they would commence to telling me their great idea in all of its glory (not!). Adults would act like adolescents, spilling out ridiculous tripe as if it were spun literary gold. I would sit and listen or, if I was on the phone, I'd get back to what I was doing, checking from time to time to see if they were still babbling. Sometimes this would go on for a LONG time before I could cut myself loose.

If I was lucky they wouldn't want to tell me too much about their great idea, but instead would ask me to put them in touch with my agent. Or to give them the phone number and email address of the producers who'd optioned my novel.

I'm telling you that I'm not making this stuff up. It happened and it continues to happen.

These guys--most of them are men, but a few are women--would tell me about how they were tired of making their living doing whatever it is they do, and that they want to get into the big money by selling their ideas to Hollywood.

Oh, well. I guess I shouldn't complain. This does mean that I have reached a modest level of near-success that makes me the target of the pained desperation of some poor souls. That's why I'm just generally quiet when they do this embarrassing thing. I try not to let on what fools they're making of themselves and how much of my time they're wasting. It's all rather sad. I try to explain to them that there's nothing I can do to help and that I'm not going to put them in touch with agencies or producers or screenwrights, and that I can't help them write anything myself because I'm far too busy with work that's all mine.

It happens.

How about this? I'll come up with the ideers, and you do the writin'!

Congaree National Park, February 2009

I thought I'd post a few photographs that I took while on a field trip with the folk from the Native Tree Society back in February of 2009. On that day we visited the Congaree National Park to view a number of the National champion trees that grow within that park.

I'll let most of the photos speak for themselves. I downloaded them at full resolution, so click on them to see them at larger, more detailed size.

When we started the hike, the temperature was well below freezing. I strongly suggest that any visit to Congaree National Park be in cool or cold weather, as the mosquitoes and ticks are vicious and in the billions there.

Between a big tree and a bigger tree.

This forest is astounding. One of the finest tree canopies I've seen.

This one is a world champion.

As we headed out from the day-long hike, we had occasion to use a fallen giant as a bridge across a body of water.

One-week only Sale!

One-week Christmas season promo on my novel, THE LIVING END. Grab an ebook version of it for only 99 cents!

Horror novelist Joe McKinney had this to say about the book:

Not since Philip K. Dick have I a read an author who so convincingly paints the social milieu of his story's world. Plus, he gives us zombies. Bravo! Your book blew me away. --Joe McKinney, author DEAD CITY

THE LIVING END: A Zombie Novel by James Robert Smith, author of THE FLOCK. From Severed Press.

Joe Dodge Lodge

Way back in 2007 Carole and I traveled to Maine and New Hampshire. The main part of our trip was so that I could climb Mount Washington with Sam Baucom, the husband of one of Carole's best friends, Bobbie Baucom. Like me, Sam is an avid hiker, but since he also runs marathons he's in a lot better shape than I am.

While we were in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, we stayed at a place called Joe Dodge Lodge. We don't have many places like Joe Dodge here in the South. The Lodge on Mount LeConte is similar, as is the Len Foote Hike Inn. However, Joe Dodge is a bit more civilized than those places, in that you can access it via auto.

Carole and I totally enjoyed our stay there. The rooms are very basic...but after a long day's hike, they're more than adequate for a tired body. The best thing about the stay is the food. Meals are mainly served family style in the huge dining room and the quality of the food is exceptional. They also serve vegetarian meals for those who don't eat meat. I wasn't into the whole vegetarian scene when I was there, but the next time we go I'll have plenty to choose from at meal-time.

And we will return. We had such a great time that we want to stay once again at one of the lodges run by the Appalachian Mountain Club up there.

This is the dining room at Joe Dodge. Separated by a short walk from the main part of the lodge.

And the main lodge with the White Mountains looming on the skyline beyond.

Our basic room at Joe Dodge Lodge.

Since our southern peaks don't have a tree-line, you don't see any scenes like this one south of the Mason and Dixon Line.

How Anthologies Work

For some reason I've never quite figured, the way many publishers handle anthology payments is that they pay the editor the entire funds budgeted for the book, and the editor pays the creators for each story. This is not always the case, but often.

Subsequently, because the publisher has treated the editor as a kind of sub-contractor on the project, any royalties earned are forwarded to the editor who is then obliged to send a pro-rata share to each author, depending on the percentage of the book contributed by each author. For instance, if it is established by contract that an author will receive 10% of the royalties earned because his story encompassed 10% of the anthology, then if the editor is given $2,000 to disburse among the contributors, that author would receive $200 in royalty payments.


Some years back I sold a story to the anthology CHILDREN OF CTHULHU published by Del Rey Books and edited by John Pelan and Ben Adams. For whatever reason, of the two editors, Pelan was given control of the purse strings on the book. I was initially paid for my story, but have to this date never received a penny earned in royalties. This despite the fact that the book is still in print after a full decade and seems to be a perennially good seller for Del Rey Books. I've inquired to find out why I've never received any royalties, but no good answer has been forthcoming.


Of the two editors of the book, the only one I speak to is my pal Ben Adams who has always stayed in touch with me. He, too, has never seen a penny out of the anthology's royalties, despite being the co-editor. I've been told that all such funds are forwarded elsewhere. Del Rey has never bothered to clear this up with me, so I have no idea where. Neither does Ben. I've never been able to get in touch with John Pelan about it.

I have only co-edited a single anthology in my days as a writer/editor. That was EVERMORE for Arkham House Books. Before her death, I was told by April Derleth (the publisher) that she thought she owed us some royalties, but she never made that clear. Since her death I've not heard from the folk who are in charge there now. I was happy when Arkham House actually cut each check for the authors in that volume, so I assume they'll do the same when (and if) the book earns out royalties.

Other anthologies of which I have been a part have paid out royalties regularly and with perfect accounting. Especially when I sold to anthologies handled by the late Marty Greenberg.

Will I ever be made aware of, or receive royalties from CHILDREN OF CTHULHU? Who knows?

Ridgepole Mountain

Years and years ago I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail to get to a point where I could bushwhack to the summit of a mountain named Ridgepole Mountain. The old story when I was a kid was that Ridgepole Mountain was originally supposed to have been in Georgia. That is, the northern boundary of Georgia was to have been struck slightly north of where it ended up. However, the local Cherokees were in an agitated state and the surveyors tasked with marking the northern boundary were afraid to proceed, so they just picked a convenient spot and called it the northern boundary of the state.

Therefore, as all good little hiking Georgians from the days of my youth would say, WE WUZ ROBBED!

Robbed of what?

Well, apparently we were robbed of some 5,000-foot peaks. That was the buzz along the trail when I was a kid. If only those surveyors hadn't been such scaredy-cats, then we'd have some fivers in my native state. And I would always think about what would have happened if Ridgepole Mountain had become our highest point. Instead of Brasstown Bald having a road carved onto its slopes and all the way to the summit; instead of Brasstown Bald having its top leveled and a huge brick and concrete visitor's center lodged on its high point, then all of those crimes would have been committed against Ridgepole Mountain.

And what is Ridgepole Mountain now? It sits in the middle of a relatively enormous (by eastern standards) wilderness. There is nothing built on its summit. There are no roads gouged into its flanks. It sits in a sea of green, just one more 5,000-foot mountain surrounded by other 5,000-foot mountains.

Hiking on Ridgepole Mountain and the surrounding untouched wilderness, I'm always very happy that those Cherokee braves scared off those European surveyors.

Off in the distance there is Ridgepole Mountain. I took this shot from a mountain called Pickens Nose, named for the Revolutionary War general, Andrew Pickens (whose life served as the fictional basis for the character in the film THE PATRIOT). In real life, Pickens was a stealer of Cherokee land and killer of that nation's people.

This was, as near as I could figure through line of sight, the actual summit of Ridgepole Mountain. There is no visitor's center here. No road. No cars, no trucks, and other than me that day, no people. Just a great southern hardwood forest. It also has the highest bear population density in the southeast.

I found this really excellent campsite on the way to the bushwhack to Ridgepole. It's not far off the Appalachian Trail. Another neat feature of this campsite is that just a few feet away is a sheer cliff that plummets many hundreds (maybe over a thousand) feet.

Just beyond those shrubs is the edge of the cliff. Since I was all alone, that was as close as I dared go.

For contrast, this is what could have become of Ridgepole Mountain if it had ended up in Georgia instead of North Carolina. If it had been Georgian territory, it would have been our only 5,000-foot peak and would be ruined, as the summit of Brasstown Bald is ruined...

Instead, this is the extent of the engineering done on the slopes and ridges of Ridgepole Mountain. You can thank the Cherokee warriors of many generations gone...

Some Old Hike Photos

All of these photos were taken, I'm pretty sure, in 2005. I did a lot of hiking in 2004 through 2005, all of it solo. Back then I didn't know anyone else who hiked or backpacked and so I took a lot of such trips by myself. Sometimes Carole and I would camp at a nice National Forest campground and she'd stay at the campsite while I climbed mountains or wandered around hunting for waterfalls and big trees.

I took this self-portrait on the last camping trip we went on without our travel trailer. The evening I took this, a big black bear came into our campsite and dismantled it hunting for food. After that, we vowed to get a hard-sided travel trailer, which is one of the main reasons we ended up buying our Casita. (I think the name of this waterfall is Mooney Falls. Near Standing Indian Campground in the Nantahala National Forest here in North Carolina.)

This was taken near the summit of Whitetop Mountain, the second highest mountain in Virginia and one of the few peaks in that state to stand over a mile in elevation.

This is my Sound of Music pose. This was taken in late November and it was hellishly warm that day. About 80 degrees even there at about 5400 feet above sea level.

Nantahala Lake. Not really a hike, but a paddle. Carole and I took the canoe out on the lake. This was on the same trip when the bear raided our camp.

I took this one on what I like to term: The Hike that Nearly Killt Me. This is on a patch of the Black Mountain Crest Trail. It's probably the toughest trail in North Carolina. I've hiked it a number of times, and every time I do it I end up in bad shape. Leg cramps, sore joints, exhaustion. On this trip I did the trail in halves by camping at Deep Gap in the middle of the trail, but the second day was a hike out to the northern terminus, then back to the Gap to pack up my stuff, then out to the southern terminus. I thought I was gonna die by the time it was over.

Mah Blawg

It's difficult for me to do a blog on writing when I'm actually too busy doing that. I took on a project with a deadline, so that is going to severely limit my time blogging. I'll try to figure a way to work it into the mix.


I'm also unable to add much to posts about new hiking and camping destinations because I haven't had the time to do either of those things. When the new year dawns I'm going to take a few days to hit the trails.

So here are a couple of photos from December of 2009. That was the last time that Carole and I drove up to Sparta NC to buy a fresh Christmas tree from a tree farm. We haven't put up a tree in a while. It's just not the same with no child around.

On the way back to Charlotte we stopped at Stone Mountain State Park and I hiked up the climber's trail to the base of the cliff where I could get some photos of climbers scaling the cliff face. One guy was an instructor and he was trying to teach some chick how to climb. Maybe it was his current girlfriend and he was making an attempt to get her into his hobby.Or it could be that she was just interested in climbing and had paid for a climbing lesson. Whatever it was, one thing it wasn't was going to fly.

Here's a shot of the instructor and his female student. I could hear them clearly from my post where I scrambled up the rock face by way of friction climbing. When it got too steep for that I just stopped and took photos of the climbing parties (there were several). The teacher was trying like heck to get the girl to just stand the fuck up. She would not, could not do it. All she could do was crouch there hugging the granite face. She just was not a good candidate for technical climbing.

I can still hear his calming voice as he tried to coax her to stand up so that they could continue the climb. He was very patient and very calm. All I wanted to do was scream up at her, "STAND THE FUCK UP! JUST STAND THE FUCK UP AND YOU CAN WALK TO THE NEXT FUCKING LEDGE YOU FREAKING SISSY!"

Zombie Time

I had considered writing a sequel to THE LIVING END. I still have it plotted and I may write that novel at some time. Its title is THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH, but I have so many other writing projects on my desk that I can't see my way clear to work on that one just now.

In addition, I signed a new contract to produce three zombie novels. These will be something a lot different from my own vision of the zombie trope. They're grounded firmly in the Romero-esque world of zombie fiction, which to my way of thinking is the only way to treat zombies.


Some authors have produced stories and films where zombies aren't dead, merely infected with a disease. That's not my take, at all. Others have produced the undead as super-fast so that they're like Olympic sprinters with a bad attitude. That's not my take, either.

And, of course, there are those who have zombies that eat things other than living humans, that develop the ability to reason, that come back to life within instants of having been infected and killed. That ain't my idea of the basis of a zombie tale, either.

George Romero and John Russo laid down the rules back in 1968, and I'm stickin' to those, even if their creators veer from them from time to time. The zombies are all but mindless. They're slow and implacable and can only be stopped by destroying their brains. If you're bitten by a zombie, you might have a few days, but you're going to get very sick and you're going to die. And no matter what kills you, unless your brain is destroyed, you're going to come back as a zombie, too.

Those are the rules.

Look for my three-book series (written as Robert Mathis Kurtz) coming soon.

They'll Steal My Ideer!

Many is the time I've heard young (or new) writers worry about the submission process.

"They'll steal my idea!"

You'd be surprised how many writers (or, actually, wannabe writers) worry about this. There are a lot of things that young writers should worry about, but this is very low on the list of such things. Grammar, punctuation, plot, ability. These are things that they should worry about.

That said, in the many years that I did submit my work, I suspected that one of my plots was stolen (at a comics company), and one was all but confirmed as stolen (at a magazine). I'll just talk about the one for which I have the most evidence. (And, no, I won't name any names. It's water under the bridge, even as pissed as I still am about it.)


Back in the 1980s and early 90s I was writing like mad. I would rarely go a week without writing a new short story, and I kept the Postal Service busy in sending out my manuscripts to magazines and anthologies far and wide. (This is one thing that I do really like about the digital age--online submissions.)

There was a particular market that I was often trying (without success) to crack. It was a horror magazine and I really wanted to get my name on their contents list. I would send stories there with some regularity. I'd heard that they had a new first reader/assistant editor who was also a writer, so I sent him one of my stories. It had a neat plot that boiled down to this:

What if everyone in the country who owned a gun was suddenly overcome with the urge to use it to shoot someone, anyone?

I've always had difficulty with titles for my stories and struggle as I might, the best I could come up with for this one was "One of These Days". I sent it out to the mag, specifically to the new assistant editor.

After a while, the story was returned, with a note from the assistant editor (I still have it). It read, "This one is pretty good, but it lacks a certain impetus, so I'm passing."

Fair enough. Unlike many other writers I've always appreciated the time an editor takes to read my work even if they don't accept it for publication. I've always had a thick skin that way. You really need that to be a writer.

Well, imagine my surprise when, a couple of months later, I get a copy of the magazine. In it, there's a brand-new story by that very same assistant editor. That story's basic premise? If you guessed 'what if everyone in the country who owned a gun was suddenly overcome with the urge to use that gun shoot someone, anyone?', then you are correct! To add a very special insult to the injury was a note on the editorial page by the publisher explaining how the author/assistant had come to the publisher with this great new story that was so good that the publisher delayed the deadline to include it in the issue. I'm positive it was written about a day or so after he put my own story back in the mail to me.

Shit does happen.

Putting Together a Collection

After HISSMELINA hits the Internet via trade paperback and ebook versions, my next project is the fantasy collection, FOUR FROM MANGROVE.

For years I have been publishing short stories all based in, or around, an iron-age city-state called Mangrove. So I took what I consider to be the finest four short stories and collected them for publication in a single volume.

The four stories that I selected were: "A Child of the War God", which is set the earliest in the one thousand-year history of Mangrove; "Deadly", another one in an earlier version of the nation; "One Curse, One Blessing", which was the first Mangrove story that I ever sold and which was always my intent to expand into a novel at some future date; and "The Krang", the most recently written of the quartet and which takes place in what I consider to be the height of that state's position as an empire.

Early on in my days as a writer I wanted to compose mainly fantasy fiction. This was, of course, part of an urge to try to achieve something like the emotions I felt upon reading the works of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Karl Edward Wagner. But in the days when I wanted to work in that format I always had a literary agent. And each time I would mention the subject to my agent (whomever that might be at the time) I was dissuaded from pursuing the matter because "fantasy is a hard sell". And they'd steer me back toward horror. (Yeah, I know...LOL!)

And so, of course, this has led me to the conclusion that the ebook format could very well be the liberating influence that so many writers have concluded. The verdict is still out on that matter, in my opinion. I won't have my first ebook reader until Santy Claus arrives at my house on Saturnalia. However, it has released me to finally place my fantasy fiction (at least some of it) out there in a format other than a single short story sold here or there over the course of many years.


Along with Howard and the likes of Karl Wagner, Frazetta inspired my love of fantasy fiction.