A Video Chat and Look Behind the Scenes with Skull & Friends
To you undeserving mortals I have granted a rare glimpse behind the veil of secrecy at my most peerless of publications, Tales From the Magician’s Skull. The lowliest of my minions, the larvae called ‘interns,’ were tasked with this honor, but recently each met their own destruction in most hideous and foolish a fashion. And so the task was entrusted to my more powerful servants. To that end, the Darksome One, Joseph Goodman, and He-of-the-Curved-Sabre, Howard Andrew Jones, have assembled a host of fell scholars and scribblers to discuss the ways of sword & sorcery. Harken, then, as your sanity is blasted by the Crookedly-Made James Enge, your limbs jolted with sufficient voltage by the Archivist of the Emerald Plague, J.C. Hocking, and your very atoms scrambled by the Dread Cymist, Seth Lindberg!
The friends of the Skull had a fun and freewheeling discussion during our latest get-together at Spawn of Cyclops Con, which you can watch right here. Topics included what we look for in a submission and the shifting styles of fiction editors have seen over time. What’s the difference between stories with a ‘Monster Manual’ feel to them, and less codified, sense-of-wonder-inducing pieces? And how about treating “action as character,” setting the stage with an establishing shot, or considering if there really is a successful template to pulp fiction. Was the secret to productivity by the great pulpsters of yesteryear a lack of mid-day scam phone calls?
And more besides; a quick reading discussion, how authors make their own surprising discoveries during the writing process, and the truth about Howard’s dirty ducks!
