Glen Cook: Best Hack Writer Ever

While I've been hard at work on my Saruman chapter, I've also been reading The Instrumentalities of the Night by Glen Cook. Cook is, probably, my most favoritest hack writer, and I'd actually forgotten just how good he can be. I'm currently reading the fourth and final volume of the series. Interesting story about that. Two years ago, book IV earned the great distinction of being the only book I've ever "pre-ordered" -- and that includes the full hardcover price. Seriously, years went by with me on pins and needles as I waited for him to finish. Then . . .

 . . . .then the book arrives, I get about 60 pages in, and . . . blah. I just put it down. It wasn't bad, but that was exactly the time when I'd begun studying for my Preliminary Exams. I was so excited to start that nothing off-list could entice me. So the book went to the shelf, and I let Cook simmer on the back-burner.***

 Then, a few weeks ago, I found an out-of-the-way peer-reviewed fantasy journal, and I thought, "Huh. I still got an old conference paper on Cook, which I'd been holding on to until he finished the series. Now maybe I can re-vamp that paper, add some length, and get an easy publication out of it."

 So that's what I plan to do: finish my Saruman chapter, then spend a week or two polishing up the Cook paper. In the meantime, I'm finishing up Book IV and wondering how I ever managed to put it down.
***See what I did there? Just a little academic blog humor -- "let Cook simmer on the . . . " Okay, well, maybe you had to be there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall
Read more

A Good Week For Publication

So, wow. The Journal of Tolkien Research has just published my article, " Harken Not to Wild Beasts: Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus ." What astounds me is that I finished the piece only two weeks ago and already got back the peer reviews. Of course, no real reason WHY the review process has to take months, but it just usually does. Kudos to the anonymous reviewers, great praise upon them, for working so quickly. I might even more appreciative of their promptness than of their kind remarks; I barely had to do any revisions to the article. The process went so fast, in fact, that the publication barely feels real. One of the great advantages of an online open-access journal, too, is instantaneous publication. As I'm learning with the several other articles I have in circulation, the publication process generally takes even longer than the review process. Anyway, this has been a good week. I finished my review of Harry Potter essays, and the edito
Read more