Dispatches from the silver key

Arcane Arts

What is best in life?

Arcane Arts, your weekly dose of sword-and-sorcery and heavy metal. Two things I find best in life, at least.

Let’s get to it.

Heavy metal memoir: It’s crunch time

A professional editor is worth his/her weight in gold. But be prepared to be humbled by their work.

Earlier this year I contracted an editor to edit my heavy metal memoir work in progress. Not a copyedit, but a line edit for flow, voice, and readability. And for his overall opinion on the book from the perspective not of a friend, but a professional.

This weekend the files came back. Eleven chapters and an introduction, marked up with tracked changes and studded with comments.

2500 words of additional commentary and evaluation, praise and critique. Plenty of that.

Long story short, I have work to do, of the painful sort. Cuts, additions, rewrites. Fixing parts of the story that are unfinished, unearned.

But I will have it done by July-early August. I’m giving myself a little wiggle room, but not much. On Sept. 19 I’m hosting a heavy metal party with a live band at which I’m planning on handing out a few free copies of the book to a handful of (lucky?) party-goers.

It must be done by then. And so the big, difficult, final push is on.

Channeling Theoden aka., Bernard Hill...

The foreign language of “Somewhere in Time” solo

Although I love heavy metal music I’m no musician, just a fan. I do however I enjoy watching guitarists both perform and explain their craft.

If you’re of a like mind you might enjoy this Youtube video from the Licks of the Beast breaking down Adrian Smith’s "Somewhere in Time" solo. A great song off my favorite Iron Maiden album.​

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I don’t understand half of what the dude is talking about, the casual references to “Locrian mode,” descending scales and pull-offs, and descending E minor scales and C power chords. It’s like listening to a foreign language and trying to intuit what is being said, but loving the sound of the words, and slowly piecing together the meaning. Fascinating.

I don’t know if Adrian Smith is my favorite guitar player but he’s certainly in the top 5. I prefer his melodic, creative, but still “fitting the song” solos over the guitar theatrics of a Steve Vai or Yngwie Malmsteen. That will be a list for another day.

Night Winds blowing in Cross Plains

Jay Hardy shared some pics of Night Winds, his new hand-assembled sword-and-sorcery fanzine, on Facebook. I’m reposting them here.

I’ve got a couple essays in it: “Solomon Kane Against Injustice” (reprinted from The Solomon Kane Sketchbook, which Hardy brought to Howard Days in 2025) and a new piece, “The Small Press Origins of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane.”

Hardy is bringing copies of Night Winds to Howard Days in June and I’m due to receive a contributor copy in the mail. I love that these labors of love continue to exist.

Speaking of Howard Days, my computer sent me automated memories of my 2023 trip to Cross Plains, reminding me of how much fun I had and how much I need to get back one day. You can find a link to my after-action report here.​

Here are a few pics that haven’t seen the light of day prior.

Watch out, I'm an academic

MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, is organizing an online conference on the legacy of Robert E. Howard, sponsored by The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. Recently a student organizer reached out to me with an invitation to participate in a panel titled “Scholarly Approaches to Robert E. Howard.”

I accepted. An honor! The conference is entirely online and takes place June 20^th from 10:00 am to 6:30 pm Mountain Standard Time. The panel I’m on kicks off the conference.

I don’t know any further details but I’ll share them as they come out.

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A viral post on Stephen King and REH

I continue to work my way through Stephen King’s The Stand (did I mention the book is long?) and jotting down observations as I go. A casual Robert E. Howard name drop got my attention, so I wrote up a post on The Silver Key, padded it out with a few of King’s historical observations on REH (mostly positive) and sword-and-sorcery (mostly he think the subgenre is shit), and pressed publish.

It took me less than an hour, dashed off a Saturday morning over coffee.

What I thought was a throwaway post wound up getting picked up and cross-posted on Reddit, to both the Conan the Barbarian and sword-and-sorcery forums. Which in turn drove a boatload of traffic to the blog.

As of today the post has racked up almost 1100 views, easily my most-viewed post of the year. I guess it should come as no surprise: Popular author courting controversy=irresistible. And love or hate it, Reddit draws eyeballs.

Kane as Cain

I’ve mentioned the Breakfast in the Ruins podcast before. It’s one that’s stayed in my rotation. The show is mostly Michael Moorcock related but also branches out into sword-and-sorcery.

​Last week the host issued part 2 of a conversation on Death Angel’s Shadow, reviewing a collection of Karl Edward Wagner stories including "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul," "Cold Light," and “Mirage.” It’s a fun episode, balancing insightfulness with fannishness and an irreverence I enjoy.

Ursula LeGuin once wrote something to the effect that the difference between literary fiction and fantasy is while the former depicts conflict as internal or interpersonal strife, the latter shows you monsters. For example, in Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov wrestles with the evil of selfishness, whereas in The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien give us Smaug.

So too in Wagner’s Kane. Wagner drops many hints that Kane is the Cain of the Cain and Abel legend. God accepts Abel’s offering of his best livestock but not Cain’s inferior produce, and a jealous Cain kills Abel—the world’s first murder. God places a mark on Cain to identify him with the act but also protect him from being killed by others, confirming that even though he sinned, he remains under divine protection.

The story has become a literary motif, but in Wagner’s hands he’s firmly instantiated in the body of a six foot, 300-pound warrior-wizard, life weary, cursed. But also immortal.

As the host of Breakfast in the Ruins points out, “Kane” is "Cain," a byword for the terrible things that happen in his universe, a symbol of all the wrongdoing in the world. I like this.

It's a reminder of why need the release and escape afforded by fantasy, to grapple with our demons on the page. As LeGuin also said, "People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within."

​Listen to the episode here.​

Are you a fan of Locrian mode? Let Brian know what the hell this means.