Sword-and-sorcery and heavy metal are among a small handful of my great passions. I write about these and other related topics on my blog, The Silver Key (https://thesilverkey.blogspot.com/). Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (2020, Pulp Hero Press) is my first book. I'm working on a second book, a heavy metal memoir.
I’m talking about Alaska of course. My wife and I are embarking on a 10-day land-sea cruise to celebrate our 30th (!) wedding anniversary. We’ll be joined by another couple who also have much to celebrate—one recently retired after 30 years as a public school teacher, while the other recently earned her PhD.
We’ll be hitting coastal cities I’ve only ever read of in books—Skagway, Juneau, Ketchikan—and exploring Glacier Bay and Denali National Park. My old man asked me to pick him up a hat from the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau. It was one of John Wayne’s favorite hangouts.
Don’t expect an issue next week unless I get inspired in the hot tub. Grizzly bear survival tips welcomed.
I really like this YouTube channel. The host is a fan of heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, J.R.R. Tolkien, all the same stuff I love, and that got the show into my algorithm, but I subscribed because the host is funny, engaging, on-topic, and most of all passionate about the books he reads.
And he actually reads them, which not all Book Tubers do. And pairs them up with cool S&S graphics and a bit of metal.
Give a couple of his videos a try and maybe you’ll end up a subscriber, too.
Don't be a hoarder...
The Dragon Sickness
A new short essay/thought piece up on the main blog. The Dragon Sickness is a malaise from our oldest myths and remains very relevant today, as it is an inextricable impulse and part of the human condition. Here’s how two different writers—David Drake and J.R.R. Tolkien—handle it in their stories.
The death of reading is the real enemy
I read heavily from a very young age. Comic books, role-playing game manuals, magazines, and of course, books—horror, fantasy, adventure, military SF, science fiction, whatever grabbed my attention. I was lucky enough to have lived before social media and the internet and reading was a principal form of entertainment for many.
Sure, I had an Atari 2600 and role-playing games and Axis and Allies competing for my time, but reading could and often still did win.
Today reading is under assault from much more formidable opponents. Bottomless doom scrolling, streaming short-form video, porn (there’s the myth of progress again).
In a new piece in The Atlantic “The Age of Reading Is Over,” staff writer Rose Horowitch argues that we are living in a “postliterate world” where fewer and fewer adults read books of any kind, and examines whether civilization can survive this era.
The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of, Horowitch writes; she warns that the “decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.” It’s not as if we no longer know how to read—in fact, we’re likely consuming more text than ever, in the form of emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. But Horowitch argues that we seem to have lost the desire to read book-length works, and with that are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. Horowitch writes that “things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids.”
Active, sustained reading does something very different than passive, shallow consumption.
The real danger for those who love reading isn’t coming from the right or the left. It’s from a culture that has devalued the act of reading itself and exposure to runaway technologies that we don’t understand. We’re being subjected to a social experiment that so far appears to do nothing but increase anxiety and sew discord.
This weekend I finished making edits to chapter 10 of the heavy metal memoir work in progress. I’m incredibly happy with the writing, which is finally where I want it to be. It’s been difficult but I’m there. Next up: Chapter 11, the last.
Then on to production. I’ve got the cover/back cover/spine fully designed. I need to figure out how to get the pages designed/laid out in Kindle Direct Publishing, of which I have some experience, but not much.
My deadline remains early September, I REALLY want to have it done for this major/ridiculous occasion.
Address X'ed out because I can't invite everyone.
August will be a busy month.
In an Arcane Arts exclusive, here’s the first reveal of the TOC.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Metal in spirit
Chapter 1: Maiden voyage
Amplifier: Master of Puppets: Metal at its Zenith
Chapter 2: And concert halls
Amplifier: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II
Sword-and-sorcery and heavy metal are among a small handful of my great passions. I write about these and other related topics on my blog, The Silver Key (https://thesilverkey.blogspot.com/). Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (2020, Pulp Hero Press) is my first book. I'm working on a second book, a heavy metal memoir.
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts I’m sure I’ve got some writers in the Arcane Arts readership. If that includes you, here is a bit of advice if you eventually find yourself writing a memoir. A memoir is a story, not a chronicle. It has to obey the same laws of good storytelling you find in a novel. Plot, character, conflict, resolution. I’ve finally figured this out, fully. Because I am the main character I’ve had to work through some heavy shit about myself and my relationships....
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts I’m back from a sorely needed week+ vacation up north at our family camp in Andover, NH. Lots of pontoon boat rides, long walks with my wife, copious amounts of beer, good fellowship … and some sword-and-sorcery, of course. In the last issue of Arcane Arts I briefly recapped the June 20 online conference Afterlives of World Building: The Legacy of Robert E. Howard, in which I was asked to serve as a panelist. You can now view the recordings of the...
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts I’m taking a long-overdue week off from work. My wife and I are up the family seasonal cottage on Highland Lake, NH, and MAN do I need this. Weeks of accumulated stress and computer tunnel-vision have left me mind-weary and spiritually numbed. But that didn’t stop me from talking Robert E. Howard. On Saturday my wife and I hosted a dozen guests for the afternoon, but I closeted myself in the loft, logged onto Zoom, and participated in a panel session...
