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...
12 days ago • 4 min read
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...
19 days ago • 4 min read
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts Metal is vast. Metal is diverse. Metal is sprawling. The number of subgenres is staggering … more than 70, are you kidding? And to be honest, a little stupid. Drone metal. Funeral doom. Djent metal. The finer points of classification make sword-and-sorcery vs. heroic fantasy look like high school debate club. And so I don’t think it’s possible to write an absolutely definitive history of heavy metal. And even if you could, who would be interested in...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts It appears we might be getting King Conan after all. Heroic Signatures made the announcement in its newsletter, and it looks authoritative—or as authoritative as it gets in the volatile, fickle world of movie-making. I don’t actually want to talk about that right now, though I’m sure I’ll have much more to say later. I do want to talk about negativity. Jim Zub, writer of the current Conan comic, posted the news with enthusiasm on his Facebook page....
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts Interesting fact: Ronnie James Dio was raised in New York, but born in Portsmouth, NH. Less than 30 miles/30 minutes from my home, practically my backyard. I’m tickled to live so close to the birthplace of arguably the greatest voice in heavy metal history. A man of whom Bruce Dickinson once said, “He was the world’s shortest singer apart from me, but he sang his ass off, and sang rings around me, and always will.” Pretty high praise coming from...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts I am behind--behind! on everything I want to read. Resigned to the fact that I shall never read everything I want to before I perish. Maybe Plato was right, I shall be born again … and therefore have another life in which to reduce my TBR. But I don’t want to stake my future on that possibility. What if I were to be reincarnated before the invention of the printing press? So I’ll just keep chipping away. I didn’t get much reading in over the Memorial...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts Here we go, another issue of Arcane Arts. Today I’m bringing you the usual dose: sword-and-sorcery, heavy metal memoir updates, and three videos I find interesting—and suspect you might as well. Howard on fire... Revisiting Queen of the Black Coast My reading tends to follow a stress-relax pattern. I alternate between non-fiction and fiction, difficult works of fiction I feel obligated to read followed by page-turning adventure in which I just want...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Dispatches from the silver key Arcane Arts I don’t sail, but here’s something all sailors know: You can’t steer directly into the wind. To get where you want to go you have to zigzag. Tack one way until you start getting off course, then tack in the other direction. Eventually you reach your destination. Life is like that too. You can’t just plow ahead into the storm without swamping your craft. Balance is the answer. This is one of a very few hard-earned bits of wisdom that’s stuck with me,...
2 months ago • 4 min read
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...
2 months ago • 5 min read