Sword and Sorcery

I've been a fan of the sword and sorcery genre ever since I picked up a copy of the Lancer edition of CONAN THE USURPER at Barber's Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth sometime in the mid-Sixties. Barber's, by the way, was a great bookstore that sprawled through several floors of an old building, with new books on the ground floor and used and rare books upstairs. The kind of bookstore you don't find anymore, in other words. Barber's has been closed for quite a while, and I believe all the inventory was sold to Larry McMurtry for his store in Archer City.

But to get back to sword and sorcery, I've been reading the stuff for forty years now, and there's a fine e-zine devoted to it called Flashing Swords, edited by my friend Howard Jones. There are several issues on-line, each featuring sword and sorcery stories by both new and well-established writers in the genre. The website also has a section of very good articles about the genre and the authors who have written in it. Check it out and read some good stories.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow to those of you who celebrate it. Other than turkey dinner and maybe some football watching, I expect it'll be a pretty normal work day for me. Sometimes I take holidays off from the writing and sometimes I don't. Since I'm trying to finish up the current book this weekend, this will be one of the years that I work on Thanksgiving.