This week, Barry Reese, Bobby Nash, and Mike Bullock discuss working on obscure characters, particularly for the upcoming Pulp Obscura anthology line and then toss out their bucket list anthology dreams for everyone to share.
The 2011 Crossroads Writers Conference and Literary Festival starts at noon on Sunday, October 2, in downtown Macon, Ga. The festival, which includes children’s activities, a writing marathon and some unique offerings, is free and open to the public with readings by many of the conference’s writers.
Two special guests reading at the conference include best-selling novelist Joshilyn Jackson, who was recently named a 2011 Georgia Author of the Year, and Melissa Fay Greene, who was just inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame.
Other writers from all over the country include best-selling writers such as Rick Moody, comic book scribe Gail Simone, poet Idris Goodwin, Jay Parini, Southern writer Terry Kay, screenwriter-turned-novelist Jeffrey Stepakoff, Adam Davies and sci-fi author Jack McDevitt.
Georgia talents include Macon’s own Tina McElroy Ansa, mystery novelist Nora McFarland, comedian writer Ad Hudler, pulp fiction writer Barry Reese, memoirist John Jung, Steampunk novelist Emilie Bush, and many more.
Writer of stuff Peter David’s home is on the south shore of Long Island, right in the path of Hurricane Irene– and despite an evacuation order, he’s decided to stay. And even crazier, he’s decided to liveblog it, as long as power and connectivity holds out.
Go visit him there. And hope Peter stays dry and keeps his house in order.
At the very least, it’ll be good research if he ever gets to write Aquaman again.
With the kind permission of Anthony Tollin and Mike Gold, this week’s column is an adaptation and condensation of an introduction I’m writing for a forthcoming edition of Mr. Tollin’s repackaging of the original Shadow novels. No formal recommended reading this time, but the volume in which the much longer version of what’s below will appear – Shadow #19 – will be on sale in the latter half of June.
Let us, for just a little while, indulge our wish that the great mythic and fictional heroes did and do exist. We are told – and remember, we’re in believer mode – that a diligent historian named Maxwell Grant was privy to the life and thoughts of a mystery man who, though he was probably born Kent Allard often assumed the identity of Lamont Cranston, one of those gentlemen of wealth and leisure who seemed to proliferate in the 30s, the years of the Great Depression, and become almost extinct after World War Two. We are assured that many years ago, while traveling in the Orient, that he acquired certain extraordinary skills – they might even be termed “powers” – and that these aided him in the activities of another of his personae, the relentless and dreaded nemesis of crime known only as The Shadow.
Now, let us entertain a hypothesis. It’s possible, perhaps even probable, that our eastern sojourner, during his investigations, came across reference to Indra’s Net, perhaps while thumbing through a yellowing old volume he found in a bookshop located in a winding Calcutta alleyway. (Would the book have been written in Hindi? Likely. Would Mr. Allard have mastered enough of that language to read it? Again, likely.) Being the ever-curious investigator he had to have been in his salad days, Mr. Allard would have made further inquiries regarding this “Indra’s Net.”
Here is what he might have learned:
In Svarga, the realm of the god Indra, there is a network of gems arranged in such a manner that if a person looks at one of them he sees all the others reflected in it.
