https://www.blackgate.com/2022/08/14/making-weird-fiction-fun-grilling-dorgo-the-dowser/
We have an ongoing series at Black Gate on
the topic of “Beauty in Weird Fiction.” Usually we corner an author and query
them about their muses and ways to make ‘repulsive’ things ‘attractive to
readers.’ Previous subjects have included Darrell
Schweitzer, Anna
Smith Spark, Carol
Berg, Stephen
Leigh, Jason
Ray Carney, and John
C Hocking. (See the full list at the end of this post).
I’m excited to corner Joe Bonadonna this round. When his
Dorgo character grilled/interviewed
me in 2017, the questioning began with:
Who the Hell are You?
JB: Who in the Nine Circles of Hell do you think I am? Quasimodo?
Doctor Frankenstein? You mean you don’t know who I am? Have you never heard of
me? Why, I’m famous the world over! Joe Bonadonna, I am. (I could never settle
on a pen name, so I stuck with the name I was given at birth.)
[Aside by SE: To clarify, he often writes about Quasimodo
and Dr. Frankenstein for Janet E. Morris’s Heroes in Hell series
(Perseid Press). Here’s Joe Bonadona’s official Bio.]
Joe Bonadonna is the author of the heroic fantasies Mad
Shadows — Book One: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser (winner of the 2017
Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy); Mad Shadows — Book Two: The
Order of the Serpent; the space opera Three Against The Stars and its sequel,
the sword and planet space adventure, The MechMen of Canis-9; and the sword
& sorcery pirate novel, Waters of Darkness, in collaboration with David C.
Smith. With co-writer Erika M Szabo, he penned Three Ghosts in a Black Pumpkin
(winner of the 2017 Golden Books Judge’s Choice Award for Children’s Fantasy),
and its sequel, The Power of the Sapphire Wand. He also has stories
appearing in: Azieran: Artifacts and Relics; Savage Realms Monthly
(March 2022); Griots 2: Sisters of the Spear; Heroika I: Dragon
Eaters; Poets in Hell; Doctors in Hell; Pirates in Hell; Lovers in Hell;
Mystics in Hell; and the forthcoming Liars in Hell; Sinbad: The New
Voyages, Volume 4; Unbreakable Ink; the shared-world
anthology Sha’Daa: Toys, in collaboration with author Shebat
Legion; and with David C. Smith for the shared-universe anthology, The
Lost Empire of Sol.
In addition to his fiction, Joe has written numerous
articles, book reviews and author interviews for us, Black Gate online
magazine. Visit his Amazon Author’s page or
his Facebook author’s page, called Bonadonna’s Bookshelf.
Dorgo… it is Time to Grill You! Or Am I Grilling Joe? Tough
to Tell, Since Dorgo Feels like a Natural Extension of You. Supernatural,
Dark Fantasy Rarely Feels so Fun as it Does in the MAD SHADOW Series. Tell us
Your Approach to Making Dark-Worlds Fun to Explore.
Dorgo is on holiday, so you’re grilling me. I hope I turn
out well-done. Dorgo is indeed an extension of myself; my better half, you can
say. His voice is my voice, his sarcasm and sense of humor are my own. I’ve
read very little fantasy written in first-person, so I took a page from Raymond
Chandler’s notebook and wrote all but one Dorgo tale in first-person.
First-person allows me to make his stories more personal and, hopefully, more
universal. Speaking to your question about how the “Supernatural, dark
fantasy rarely feels so fun as it does in the Mad Shadow Series,” I
must first thank you for that. I approach my writing the same way I approached
writing music, which is much the same as Bruce Springsteen often composes: I
toss everything I’ve ever heard, seen, read and experienced into a blender,
crank it up and create what I hope is my own unique concoction.
I try to make it fun because my favorite books, those that
inspired me or just simply entertained me, were and still are fun to read.
From The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings, from
de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd
and Grey Mouser series, I had fun reading those. And it was
so much fun to discover Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle” and
all his other Conan stories, not to mention King Kull and Solomon Kane. Stories
and storytelling should be fun to read and write. If not, they’re like dry
textbooks or novels where the authors spend more time preaching their own
personal gospel than they do trying to entertain. As the Boss sang, “We
learned more in a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school.” And
that’s the truth. Fiction can be educational, in its own way. You learn by
reading.
I just let my imagination run free and try to rein it in
when something I really like strikes me as usable. My work, no matter what the
genre, is a merging of everything I know and like. It’s no secret that Dorgo
was inspired by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, as well as by Fritz Leiber’s
work; comedy often played a huge role in Leiber’s stories, especially in his
wonderful Lean Times in Lankhmar. In fact, if not for that story
and a few others, I might not have written my two most light-hearted tales of
Dorgo the Dowser, from the first volume: The Secret of Andaro’s
Daughter and The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum, which can
be read for free, right
here. Although there is plenty of darkness, murder, magic, and
weirdness to go around, the comedic situations and what laughs come from the
characters, their dialogue and their antics, make these two of my favorite
stories. I also give credit to David C. Smith and Ted (T.C.) Rypel for being
the first of my “mentors” and for helping me whip that first volume into shape.
[SE aside; I’ve reviewed all the Dorgo Books (Book
3 most recently on Black Gate). I described the first two as Mystery
for the Horror Fan; Cozy Gothic Noir... they’re a great mashup of
Horror/Fantasy/Film Noir. In Television terms, this would appeal to fans of
the X-files, Supernatural, or Grim. Being a
collection of tales, each serves as an episode. Expect: necromancy,
mythological creatures — especially the hybrid horned creatures (satyrs,
minotaur, etc.), pitted against our protagonist who is motivated to set things
right (and make enough money to eat… and perhaps a sustained glance at a
beautiful woman).]
You Have a Knack for Making Weird/Dark Fantasy Accessible to
Adults and YA via Collaborating with Authors (i.e., David C. Smith and Erika M.
Szabo). Fill us In on How You Write for Such a Broad Audience with Other
Authors.
There really isn’t much to “fill in.” Most writers know that
adult and YA audiences can be drawn into any sort of genre, if the characters
are engaging and the storyline exciting. JK Rowling succeeded in that with
her Harry Potter series, and certainly Tolkien,
as well as Frank L. Baum and Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, to
name a handful of authors. They wrote for everyone. Take Waters of
Darkness, for instance. David Smith and I knew what we wanted to
write, knew what to do and how to write it, and without consciously thinking
about it, we just wrote what we wanted to write. Personally, I aim for a wide
audience. I don’t write sex scenes for my own work, although I have done some
“ghost writing” in that area for a few friends. I don’t go for excessive “foul
language,” either. Too often that can destroy the suspension of disbelief.
As for the two children’s books, I had an idea for the first
one, but no idea how to go about it. Erika M. Szabo, who has written a boatload
of children’s books, took me by the hand and guided me along the way. We chose
universal themes and characters we felt our readers could relate to. We used
humor and a sense of adventure, too. We added subtle lessons for kids, as well.
She reined me in on the action scenes, keeping me from going my usual, bloody
and body-strewn way. She told me what we could say and what we could not say in
a children’s book. We had a lot of fun writing the first book, and I learned a
lot: keep it G-rated or PG-13, at most. We had so much fun, in fact, that Erika
came up with the idea for the second book, and we ran with it. The key, for me
was creating a world of magic and wonder, and letting our imaginations run
free. As with David, Erika and I concentrated on telling good, solid and fun
stories, doing our best to write something that was as unique as we could make
it.
There really isn’t much more I can tell you. We just wrote
the stories we wanted to tell, wrote them the way we wanted to tell them, and
kept our audiences in mind at all times. We just wrote or overwrote,
in many cases, and then started whittling away during the editing process. I
usually write much more than I use: better to write something that is not
needed, than it is to need something that hasn’t been written. I don’t believe
in padding a story with unnecessary world-building and description. Describe
what’s important to the plot: what can be done in three pages can often be done
better in three paragraphs. In this, learning how to write screenplays is a
most valuable tool.
That’s all I got. All I can tell you.
Going with the Theme that You Make Dark Fantasy Accessible,
Let’s Talk About Having Fun in Hell!
You’ve been writing for the Heroes in Hell series
for a long time (that’s the satirical, dark fantasy that explores the
juxtaposition of deceased people across time)! Your Doctors
in Hell short story “Hell on a Technicality” is hilarious. A death
panel (including Aristotle and da Vinci) convenes to discuss the nature of the
soul and body in the preposterous case of Doctor Victor Frankenstein, who has
had his brain switched with his creature Adam’s. So now Victor’s mind finds
itself in his creation’s body… and vice versa. How else better to discuss the
nature of a soul in hell then to work out this mess. The death panel erupts
into an outrageous furor. You have recurring characters of Victor
Frankenstein and his creature-creation, as well as Quasimodo. Tell us why you
teamed up with these hellions and your approach.
Thank you. I tried to make that story both hilarious and
meaningful. The death panel evolved out of the dark-comedy “Undertaker’s
Holiday” (originally titled “The Undertaker Takes a Holiday,” a play on the
play and film, Death Takes a Holiday) Shebat Legion and I
co-wrote for Poets in Hell, which also featured my first story for
the series, “We the Furious,” or WTF, as Janet Morris’ husband Christopher
called it. Shebat and I came up with the idea for a fandom convention in Hell —
InfernoCon. Of course, as in all cons, there’s a panel discussion. Now, knowing
that Doctors in Hell was the next volume in the series, Shebat
and I created a panel of doctors, as a sort of prelude. But Janet wanted us to
use poets, so I changed the characters. I later recreated the panel of doctors
for “Hell on a Technicality” and thought it would be a riot to have their egos
get in the way of what they were trying to decide: if Adam Frankenstein and
Galatea, two damned souls who were not sired by men and born of women did,
indeed, have souls.
It was Janet who, knowing my love of movies, suggested I
write about Victor and Adam. She also suggested I reboot the Hellywood film
industry first created by Bill Kerby back in the original series, in the 1980s.
(Kerby wrote the screenplay for Bette Midler’s The Rose.) So
hence, my storyline for “The Pirates of Penance,” featured in Pirates
in Hell. Anyway, while doing research, I discovered that there was a Doctor
Johann Konrad Dippel, an alchemist and a vivisectionist obsessed with
reanimating the dead. He was born in Castle Frankenstein and was practicing
medicine in Geneva, Switzerland when Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Doctor
John Polidori were travelling through there. Aha! No doubt Dippel inspired the
creation of Victor Frankenstein. So, my using a fictional character, which is
allowed, was justified by there being a real-life counterpart.
While I pretty much stick with Mary Shelley’s novel, I use
Colin Clive and Boris Karloff as “role models” for Victor and his Creature.
Deciding that Doctor Frankenstein needed a hunchback assistant in keeping with
the films, I looked no further than Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Doing research on Hugo’s novel, I discovered that around 2002 or so, workmen
doing some remodeling at Notre Dame Cathedral knocked down a wall and
discovered a small room which contained the bones of a hunchback. I also read
that there was, indeed, a similar bell ringer of Notre Dame during Hugo’s
lifetime, and he possibly knew the hunchback. While I use Quasimodo and his
King of Fools persona for comic relief, I also endeavor to infuse him with
pathos and humanity. I use Charles Laughton as my role model. Thus, I get to
write about two beloved films, Frankenstein and The
Hunchback of Notre Dame. My approach is to have them interact more as a
father and son, with Victor playing the eccentric, often hysterical and
somewhat mad father-figure, and Quasimodo as the hapless, lovesick, innocent
and childlike son. I think the two characters make a wonderful team, and I have
fun with both of them.
How do You Define Beauty in Art/Fiction that Appears to be
Repulsive (Weird/ Horror)?
Jeez, that’s a tough question to answer, Seth. I’m not even
sure I can put my thoughts on this into words. I guess the best way is for me
to go back to my childhood. Horror films never frightened me. I was always
fascinated by and sympathetic to the “monsters.” I understood them. I wanted to
be one of them. I always found a beauty and poetry in the best of the old
Universal Classic Monsters, in the “grotesqueries” of characters and creatures
like Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of
Notre Dame, etc.
In spite of having grown up and hung out with hundreds of
kids, I always felt somewhat of an outsider, never quite fitting in. I never
even once considered myself cute or handsome; I saw myself as being part of the
gallery of the grotesque. In fact, back in 1970, when I was a young hippy and
got my first apartment, my landlady’s kids called me Halloween Mask Man, a
sobriquet I embraced. I even wrote a poem and later put it to music: Halloween
Man. I was proud of that title. The “creatures” in, let’s say, H.P. Lovecraft’s
stories, have a beauty all their own: yes, they are weird and repulsive, but
that does not turn me off. I find it all intriguing and, in its own way, quite
attractive. Take the metamorph from Alien. So ugly, it’s beautiful
in its shape and design. An intriguing lifeform.
Like many kids, I loved and still love dinosaurs, dragons,
aliens and mythological creatures. I like centaurs and minotaurs, mutants and
monsters of all sorts, for example, and I see the beauty in even the evil ones.
Even Medusa I find beautiful in her ugliness; knowing her backstory, her
history, generates sympathy in me. She was cursed by Athena, and her
transformation into a gorgon is what made her evil. I feature Medusa in a new
story I’m working on for Janet Morris’ Heroes in Hell™ series,
and I portray her as aristocratic, heroic, noble and honorable, and of great
inner, soulful beauty. She is not the monster history has made her out to be:
that’s all a lie.
Understanding the repulsive is to see their beauty, to see
beyond their physical appearance and even come to like them. Beauty is in the
eye of the beholder. What I consider repulsive, with no redeeming qualities
such as beauty, is what we have in the real world: racists and rapists, haters and
murderers, people who lack compassion and tolerance and understanding, people
who lack kindness, courtesy and manners. People who have no sense of honor and
loyalty. People filled with hate for what they don’t understand and thus fear —
fear of “the other” I guess all this is the best answer I can give you.
Do You Find Beauty in Your Weird Fiction? Dissect an
Example.
Well, I really don’t consider myself a writer of “weird
fiction.” Certainly, there are plenty of elements of the weird, of horror, in
my stories. It’s difficult to cite and dissect any one example. My human
characters are often the weird ones, the ugly ones. Let’s go with my Dorgo the
Dowser tale from Mad Shadows-Book 2: The Order of the Serpent — “The
Girl Who Loved Ghouls.” This features a witch, what I call one of the Wikku,
who lost a son when he was a little boy, and now she’s become the surrogate
mother and protector of a small tribe of ghouls, who are an endangered species.
The ghouls are friendly and noble; they pose no threat to
the living. Now, there’s a nobleman with an Oedipus complex who, for his own
political agenda, is framing the ghouls for a series of murders he is
responsible for. He and his men are racist, violent men who find torture and
murder to be their daily bread. He’s allied himself with a lost clan of
semi-human cannibals who escaped to Dorgo’s world when their own world was in
its final death throes. They are an ugly and repulsive race that is having
breeding problems, and are thus dying out. This nobleman has promised them
“fresh blood” in order for them to propagate and keep their race alive: namely,
by giving Dorgo to their queen, with whom she will mate and produce a new breed
of her species.
But these creatures are in no way as ugly or repulsive as
the nobleman and his four murderous, racist henchmen. As I often write about,
human beings are the monsters — i.e. Doctor Frankenstein is the real monster,
not the innocent Creature he created, then ignored and abandoned, thus
destroying its childlike innocence, which turned it into a thing bent on
revenge.
The beauty in my story comes from the ghouls, from their
kind hearts and pure souls: they are an intelligent species who just happen to
feed on the dead, and not a pack of mindless, savage beasts. They are, to put a
slight religious spin on it, God’s innocent creatures. They are the real heroes
of this tale.
What Scares You? Is it Beautiful?
No, it’s not beautiful. What scares me is people.
Books and films have never scared me; they are fiction and therefore not real.
Reality scares me. War and violence. Look at what’s going on in our country
today and across the globe. Ugliness, blind hatred, intolerance, misogyny,
racism, violence. People can be seen as beautiful in their physical appearance.
But far too often, it’s all superficial: beauty may be skin-deep, but ugliness
goes to the bone. Their hearts and souls are ugly and repulsive. Kindness and
compassion are fading from our world. Maybe it’s just my inborn cynicism
talking, but that’s how I feel and what I fear. I’ll say no more on this lest I
climb upon my soapbox and bore you and your readers to death.
Does any Formal Training or Experience Motivate your
Writing?
No formal training, really, other than writing classes and
such. I mean, I was “trained” to be a printer and a musician by trade and
avocation. But my imagination and my experiences are what motivate me.
Experiences of all kinds: my family and our history, the people I meet, the
relationships forged or broken, friendships and love affairs, the movies I
watch, the books I read, the music I listen to. All these provide motivation as
well as inspiration. I often take movie titles or song titles and write my own
stories to fit. I will even do a wordplay on a title. Take the Heroes
in Hell™ series, for instance. In Pirates in Hell, I
have a story called “The Pirates of Penance.” For Lovers in Hell, I
wrote a macabre love story filled with gallows humor that I called “Withering
Blights.”
For Liars in Hell, I titled my story
“Hell’s Bells.” I also played with a variation on “dragon’s hoard” for Janet
Morris’ Heroika: Dragon Eaters — and titled my story “The
Dragon’s Horde.” For the final story in my Mad Shadows – Book 1: The
Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, I “gakked” (stole) the title from an old
Robert Mitchum western called Blood on the Moon, because I thought
it fitting for my werewolf tale and did not want to destroy the mystery by
having “werewolf” or “wolfman” in the title. (Well, I guess I just destroyed
the mystery!) Life experiences are always part of my stories, whether obvious
to the people who know me, or subtly portrayed; there’s a lot in the subtext.
One can find inspiration and motivation in every facet of life, which I know is
just preaching to the choir of writers and other artists.
Discuss Cinematic Writing! What are Some of Your All-Time
Favorite Films and TV Shows?
Ah, another tough one to answer, simply by virtue of the
question having many answers and opening up many windows. I always try to avoid
picking favorites, the way parents avoid naming a favorite son or daughter. So,
if you don’t mind, I’ll skip the “favorites” part of this interview; God only
knows, I’m going to be long-winded. There a handful of films from the 1930s
which have inspired me: Frankenstein (1931), King
Kong (1933), Beau Geste, and Gunga
Din. Later films, such as The Vikings and The
7th Voyage of Sinbad (both from 1950), Spartacus and Jason
and The Argonauts (both from 1960 or so) influenced me, of course.
And there is something of Ray Harryhausen in just about all my stories.
I would like to mention Alfred Hitchcock, however. Having
read a biography on the master, I was struck by his discussion and explanation
of the “McGuffin.” This is the device around which most of his films revolve.
It doesn’t matter whether the McGuffin is microfilm, wine bottles filled with
uranium or some other artifact, relic or whatever. What matters are the
characters, what each of them will do, to what lengths they will go to in order
to get their hands on the McGuffin: sell it, keep it, destroy it, use it in
some fashion. It’s the study of these characters and their actions. This is
also how Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon works: the
falcon isn’t really important, in and of itself, the story is all about the
characters who are itching to get their hands on it. Stories are about
characters, about people. You can have the most ingenious plot ever devised by
mortal man or woman, but if you don’t have solid, realistic and engaging
characters, all you have is a plot in search of a story.
You have written articles for Black
Gate wherein you describes how cinema informs your style.
Prior/in-addition-to writing, you were a rock guitarist, songwriter, and even a
board member of the Chicago Screenwriter’s Network. You compose as if you write
for the camera, and your mind has been influenced by the masters.
Yes, and I’ve also written another article for Black
Gate on my cinematic inspirations — Celluloid Heroes,
which will pretty much give your readers the whole picture, no pun intended.
Terrible Inspirations: Can You Discuss How Writing Fiction
can be Used to Explore? Heal? How Does One Approach Revisiting Tragedy in Art?
The haunting dedication to Mad Shadows I sets
the stage for the themes of many of these stories: the dedication was extended
to your parents and to “Mary Ellen Pettenon and the other 91 children and 3
nuns who became angles too soon in the Our Lady of Angels School Fire, December
1, 1958.” I learned soon after that you are a long time Chicagoan, who was in
the same school system and if your birthday was a few months different, you
would have been in the building that caught fire. In the book, we learn early
on that Dorgo is an orphan, and many of the plots/character-motivations are
based on family ties.
Yes, my date of birth “saved me.” I was down the street in
one of the two houses that were used for kindergarten and three first-grade
classes. However, if the dice had landed a different way, I might have been in
the fourth first-grade class that was on the main floor of the
building that burned down. I was lucky, and I was blessed. As far as Dorgo
being an orphan is concerned . . . I did not know any orphans when I was a kid.
Sure, I knew kids who had no mother or father, but I did not encounter any
orphans until I was out of high school. Charles Dickens was the inspiration for
my making Dorgo an orphan. It just felt right. I think being in an orphanage
and then running away at the age of fifteen to become a mercenary is what
widened his worldview, what made him an enlightened soul without one racist or
prejudiced, bigoted bone in his body. He is the embodiment of what I strive to
be, the angel of my better nature, so to speak.
[Aside by SE: Joe’s first story to appear in Heroes
in Hell (“We The Furious,” in Poets in Hell), he placed
the kid who started the OLA school fire in Hell, although he did not refer to
him by name, just his actions].
As for how writing fiction can be used to explore and heal,
and revisiting tragedy in art goes . . . I offer no advice, can’t tell anyone
how to approach it. You just do it: you write what you know, what you feel,
what you’ve experienced and how it affected you. There is a scene where one of
Dorgo’s companions holds the hand of a dying man. After the man passes, the
companion, a young, good-natured youth, looks at Dorgo and says that he was
holding his mother’s hand when she died, and that’s how I witnessed my own
mother’s death. Writing that helped me move pass that dark moment in 2001. In
my The Man Who Loved Puppets, Dorgo has to save a group of
children whose souls had been stolen. They were still alive, but just barely,
and had this witch’s plot to resurrect her dead sister come to fruition, those
children would have died.
To make it more personal, one of the kids, a little girl,
was the daughter of one of Dorgo’s friends and former lovers. The little girl
is based on Dave Smith’s daughter Lily, who was about four or five at the time:
I used her mannerisms and the way she talked, her personality, to infuse my
character with life. All that evolved out of that tragedy of my childhood, when
I was six years old and learned that not just old people die, kids can die,
too. The loss of an ailing father in my Blood on the Moon echoes
the loss of my own father, who died of cancer in 1999. Just writing those
scenes was a catharsis, a way for me to come to terms, after so many years,
with the deaths of my parents, both of whom always believed in my writing gift
and also supported and encouraged me in anything and everything I wanted to
try, to do. I was extremely blessed with the parents given to me. I could not
have picked two better parents, two decent and loving parents, had I been given
the choice.
I explored my beliefs, my Catholic upbringing, my thoughts
and ideas about God, faith and religion in Mad Shadows – Book 3: The
Heroes of Echo Gate. Faith in God, and the absence or loss of that faith
are at the heart of the novel. We learn all about Dorgo’s faith and how he views
Life and a Higher Being. While he remains steadfast in his beliefs, he does
have questions and doubts. In one scene, set the night before the first battle
begins, he has a long discussion with a chaplain who had once been a mercenary.
I feel this scene is one of the more insightful and heartfelt scenes in the
story, as it conveys my own personal belief system, my own doubts, my own
questions and theories. As I always tell people: I do not write for the head; I
have no great knowledge or wisdom to impart, and nothing I can say has not
already been said by others more skilled and wiser than I. I am not that
ego-driven or presumptuous to think I can change anyone’s minds. I write not to
make you think, I write to make you feel. I write for the heart.
Any Current or Future Endeavors We Can Pitch?
Well, in a story I’m working on for a future Heroes
in Hell™ volume, I borrowed the title from an old war movie, “From
Hell to Eternity.” But having signed an NDA (a Non-Disclosure Agreement),
that’s all I can say about it. I also have a new Dorgo story in the works that
I call “Rainbow Demon,” which was inspired by a song by Uriah Heep. I would
very much like to do a fourth and final volume of Dorgo the Dowser tales: Mad
Shadows – Book 4: The Return of Dorgo the Dowser, which follows
closely on the heels of book three, The Heroes of Echo Gate, and
Dorgo’s return home after the battle which is a huge part of that book.
I think a “quartet” of novels is enough: I don’t want to
lose the magic of Dorgo’s stories; I don’t want him or his adventures to grow
stale and repetitious, which happens with so many series. As you know, the
first volume consisted of six separate adventures linked together by Dorgo and
some recurring characters. Volume two is more of a novel — three novellas tied
together by theme and certain plot elements that all come together in the last
story. Book three is a three-part novel. If I do a fourth volume, I would
return to the format of the first: six or seven separate adventures, ending
where I started.
I’d also like to do a sequel to David C. Smith’s and
my Waters of Darkness, and we have discussed it. Another dark,
old-school, action-packed but character-driven Sword and Sorcery tale. However,
we haven’t been able to come up with a good storyline, and Dave is busy with
other projects, and I won’t do it alone. I have a prologue of sorts written for
a second sequel to the two children’s Heroic Fantasies I co-authored with Erika
M. Szabo, but again — no storyline that pleases us both has emerged.
Now, I’ve always wanted to do a Sword and Sorcery version of
John Wayne’s Red River, which is about a
cattle drive. I’ve got a title, “The Goblin Herd,” and it will feature a new
character, Thibron the Skulker, who was first introduced in my story, “The Vampire
Tree,” which was published in Savage Realms Monthly, in
March 2022. I have a few characters lined up and I’m taking notes. The hard
part is coming up with the incidents involved because, while inspired by Red
River, I do not want to use the same plot. I have another Thibron tale in
mind, set around a pair of strange jewels called “The Eyes of Bipty,” but
that’s all I have, thus far. Other than that, and writing the occasional
article for Black Gate, that’s about it. Real life situations, the things one
must attend to, take up a lot of my time.
I hope to keep writing for Heroes in Hell™ for
as long as I can. Writing for that series is very hard work, but it’s also so
much fun and so rewarding. Janet Morris forces me to “up my game,” to stretch
my boundaries, to break out of my box, and I think my stories for her are among
the best I’ve written, not only in plot and characterization, but in prose
style, as well. And the best part is, as long as we (the other writers and I)
stick to the arc she gives us and follow the rules of Hell, almost anything
goes. Our imaginations are free to run wild. Janet has become a major
influence, and a wonderful teacher and mentor to me, and my writing has
improved under her guidance.
So, that’s it, Seth. I’ve run out of words. But I do want to
thank you for this wonderful opportunity to express myself. It’s been fun, a
real pleasure and an honor. You rock!
You Rock, Joe! Long live Dorgo!
#Weird
Beauty Interviews at Black Gate
- Darrel
Schweitzer THE
BEAUTY IN HORROR AND SADNESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DARRELL SCHWEITZER 2018
- Sebastian
Jones THE
BEAUTY IN LIFE AND DEATH: AN INTERVIEW WITH SEBASTIAN JONES 2018
- Charles
Gramlich THE
BEAUTIFUL AND THE REPELLENT: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES A. GRAMLICH
2019
- Anna
Smith Spark DISGUST
AND DESIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNA SMITH SPARK 2019
- Carol
Berg ACCESSIBLE
DARK FANTASY: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL BERG 2019
- Byron
Leavitt GOD,
DARKNESS, & WONDER: AN INTERVIEW WITH BYRON LEAVITT 2021
- Philip
Emery THE
AESTHETICS OF SWORD & SORCERY: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP EMERY 2021
- C.
Dean Andersson DEAN
ANDERSSON TRIBUTE INTERVIEW AND TOUR GUIDE OF HEL: BLOODSONG AND FREEDOM! (2021
repost of 2014)
- Jason
Ray Carney SUBLIME,
CRUEL BEAUTY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON RAY CARNEY (2021)
- Stephen
Leigh IMMORTAL
MUSE BY STEPHEN LEIGH: REVIEW, INTERVIEW, AND PRELUDE TO A SECRET CHAPTER (2021)
- John
C. Hocking BEAUTIFUL
PLAGUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN C. HOCKING (2022)
- Matt
Stern BEAUTIFUL
AND REPULSIVE BUTTERFLIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH M. STERN (2022)
- interviews
prior 2018 (i.e., with John R. Fultz, Janet E. Morris, Richard Lee Byers,
Aliya Whitely …and many more) are on S.E. Lindberg’s
website
