“Two novellas, bound in one book. Mongol-inspired Sword & Sorcery. A claustrophobic, pressure-cooker siege, and a caravan striking out under an open desert sky. Orhan the Snow Leopard and Goatskin the nomad. Dariel Quiogue and Bryn Hammond.”
― from the Backerkit page for Double-Edged Sword and Sorcery
I'm excited by a new project from Brackenbury Books: Double-Edged Sword and Sorcery. Oliver Brackenbury is the editor of the New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine, of which I enthusiastically reviewed the first few issues in November 2023, for The Skiffy and Fanty Show blog. ("Last year, I became aware of a debut magazine called New Edge Sword & Sorcery, which aimed to revive the “outsider protagonists, thrilling energy, wondrous weirdness, and a large body of classic tales” of this old subgenre of fantasy with a focus on inclusivity and diversity (of both characters and creators).")
Do you remember the old Ace Double Books, dear reader? I do! My SFF-loving daddy had quite a few of them. These were the old two-books-in-one paperbacks, bound together head-to-toe style so that you'd finish one short book, reading through to the middle, then flip it over, and read a whole new story, usually by a different author. This way, each of them got their own front cover and equal billing. (This was back when genre books were usually short, not the typical doorstoppers of today.)
After following NESS #0-2 with two more upcoming issues of NESS and an anthology of spicy/romantic S&S stories, Brackenbury is bringing back the doubles format with a book that comprises two novellas stuck together head-to-toe, with characters who've caught readers' interest in the first few magazine issues. They're both centered on Asian adventurers, but Dariel Quiogue's Orhan the Snow Leopard and Bryn Hammond's Goatskin the nomad are very different characters, written engagingly but in very different styles. I'm looking forward to seeing more of each of their journeys.
The project successfully crowdfunded at over $9,000 raised as of Wednesday, including an extra Orhan story for all crowdfunders and bookmarks for all physical copy backers, plus some poems coming from Hammond if about a dozen more backers join. The stretch goals are colored spray edges (like old-fashioned paperbacks) at $10,600, and a two-page art insert between the novellas if the campaign reaches $12,800. The Backerkit campaign concludes on Saturday, and I'd really like to see it get a little more support.
To that end, and because I like talking with writers and editors about the craft, I emailed questions about the project to Brackenbury, Quiogue and Hammond. Please read on and enjoy, share if you're so inclined, and back the project if you have the funds and interest. (Answers have been very lightly edited for format, e.g. making everyone's dashes the same style.)
Oliver Brackenbury, editor, NESS, DESS and more
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| Oliver Brackenbury, photo by Ardean Peters |
Q: How did you come to select a Mongol-inspired Sword & Sorcery theme, and these two authors and novellas in particular, for this book?
A: In short, because it's a fascinating culture & period of history, Asian set S&S is almost always rooted in Chinese or Japanese historical inspiration, and because it allowed me to pair two authors I love in one book, writing characters I'd seen people react strongly to in our magazine, each exploring basically the same setting in their own unique way.
In detail, it was an organic product of how the magazine began, and grew into book publishing.
The magazine started with a sweat equity prototype issue #0, available free in digital and priced at cost in soft/hardcover, and the table of contents was drawn almost entirely from a single online community where a bunch of us had strong feelings about how to take Sword & Sorcery into the future.
This included two authors who set their stories in Mongol-rooted settings yet write with totally unique voices: Bryn Hammond writes the nomad Goatskin having adventures in a more fantastic version of our world, while Dariel R.A. Quiogue writes the deposed warlord Orhan the Snow Leopard's adventures in a secondary world heavily rooted in the same setting & time period ― that of Genghis Khan.
Bryn is a respected, published scholar of historical non-fiction about that period, while Dariel is an amateur student of the era with over ten years experience writing fiction set in it. Bryn writes in a awe-inspiring, poetic, Weird-with-a-capital-"W" style, while Dariel specializes in pulse-pounding stories that astound with their action. Both can bring the full spectrum of Sword & Sorcery to a tale, but those are some of their specialties.
As part of the crowdfund we actually did a short story panel discussion livestream where we analyzed one Goatskin and one Orhan story, getting deep into what makes them worth reading'.
But yes, having organically lucked into working with two knowledgeable, skilled authors ― and great people ― writing with complementary voices in a similar setting, Mongol S&S made perfect sense to me for this pairing of novellas.
To the novella format itself, many have correctly said before me that the pacing, episodic nature and other genre elements of Sword & Sorcery make it ideally suited for shorter tales. Wanting something more "Book" than a short story or novelette, which are much harder to get reviewed or even read, to me the logical format then is a novella. Bind two of them together in a Double and hey hey, you've got a wordcount that contemporary Fantasy readers without a prior investment in the genre might feel more comfortable with.
Q: My father had a bunch of old Ace Doubles, which I remember fondly. What fun to read a short, snappy story, turn the book over, and then read a whole new story! Have you encountered many old Ace Doubles yourself? Is that what gave you the idea for packaging your second Brackenbury Books publication this way, or was it more because of the practicality of printing two novellas in one blow? Or some other reason?
A: I'm lucky enough to live in a large city with a vibrant second-hand bookstore scene, so I've come across a decent amount of Ace Doubles in the flesh and have added a few to my personal library. I very much had them in mind, as well as some contemporary riffs on the format in other genres such as Shortwave's horror novelette pairings in the Split Scream series. So yes, I was indeed inspired by them.
However, there was also absolutely some practicality in play. Brackenbury Books is barely two years old, a real baby of a publisher, the idea of saving money on printing while making the more economically lucrative traditional printing more in reach was an appealing one. Being able to, once the print run is paid off, deduct expenses from the full sale value of the book makes a big difference in both what profits the company makes and how much we're able to pay our authors in royalties. With print-on-demand you're always starting from the value of the book minus printing cost, since there is no print run, just eternally printing...on...demand.
But yes, it's also just fun! Art direction is one of my favorite things in publishing, so getting to commission two original covers and two full page interior illustrations doubles my enjoyment for sure. Add in the creative reasons given in my last answer and doing a double felt like a no-brainer.
Q: Does the tête-bêche head-to-toe flip printing make production a lot more complicated than just giving both books the same orientation, one after the other? (But it’s cool that this way, both authors/stories have equal weight/promotion, with two full covers, one on each side.)
A: Blessedly it's as simple as laying it out normally, rotating and reversing the page-flow of one half, and voila! Shout out to my talented friend & collaborator Nathaniel Webb, who does our most excellent layout & design.
Q: You've hit the basic funding goal with a few days to spare; congratulations! The stretch goal of spray color edges also seems feasible; does that have any functionality like making the books last longer, or is it just aesthetically pleasing? Also, the stretch goal of two pages of full-color illustration inserted between the novellas is desirable, much nicer than the cigarette ads, etc., I would see in the middle of some Ace Doubles, but is it realistic to hope for the kind of last-minute surge in backers that it would take to make that happen?
Heck, as I finished typing this answer a kind backer who was already pledged for a hardcover just upped their pledge by another $40; not buying anything extra; they're just showing they want us to succeed as much as possible. With that kind of positive energy being directed our way, who knows what we might achieve?
Q: This is the second Brackenbury Books publication (as opposed to New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine). The first was the Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes anthology, which easily funded successfully on Backerkit in July. Do you feel like you’re starting to establish a solid foundation as a new publisher, or is there no such thing?
A: I feel like I should knock on wood before I answer that definitely this year giving us three for three in successful crowdfunds, with the first at just under 200% funding, the second at 151%, and the third looking to land somewhere comfortably north of 100%...it ain't bad, that's for sure! My goal is very much to make this what I do for a living, to eventually be able to have paid employees, and further increase what we're able to do for our authors & artists. This year feels like a solid step toward all that.
Q: Has BH&B-A been delivered to backers yet? And are NESS #3&4 still on track for the revised November fulfillment?
A: Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, our spicy/romantic S&S anthology, is still being edited, as we expected it to be at this point. Everybody involved is working hard to get the anthology and the magazine issues to our backers before the year is over, and we'll keep people updated if anything prevents that. To the magazine in particular, the printer has been paid, their presses are hard at work, and issues should be put on the boat to cross the Pacific before the month is over. How the waves, and US customs, treat us is outside of my hands, naturally, but we'll keep people updated if any delays occur. Honestly, considering everyone involved is doing this in their spare time, not as their job, I'm quite proud of what we've been able to accomplish so far.
At the table where I write this, there sit final proofs of NESS 3&4, unbound but otherwise finished softcover editions. Flipping through those, seeing the assembly of what's only been so many disparate files on my computer until now, gives me faith that whether our backers get the issues sooner or later, they'll feel it was worth the wait.
Q: What’s next for you, Brackenbury Books, and/or NESS?
A: After we finish this crowdfund, I reckon...a nap. In my madness I chose to raise a puppy through its first year of life in the same year I expanded the magazine into a book publishing business, so for me sleep has definitely become something other people get to have.
But, beyond the steadily fulfilling the year's crowdfunds, work has already begun on 2025's issues of the magazine, and rough plans for publishing some S&S novellas next year - two of which will be second volumes in episodic series kicked off by those in the Double - are taking shape. Other than the magazine and the novellas, it all comes down to me sitting with a pile of index cards, one for each potential publication, and really figuring out what else we can accomplish next year.
We shall see what that is!
Bryn Hammond, author of the Goatskin the nomad stories (and more)
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Bryn Hammond
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Q: What led to your fascination with sword-and-sorcery and to your specializing in stories set in the Asian steppes?
A: Sword & sorcery is a style of fantasy I enjoyed when young, and I happily got neck-deep when I found there was a revival going on. There was a stack I liked about New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine and the ideas of the people behind it: not just its conscious pursuit of ‘a wider swathe of humanity’ than traditional sword & sorcery was famous or infamous for, but I was in sync with much else. Oliver [Brackenbury] and I saw eye to eye on a certain joy that we feel belongs in sword & sorcery, a life-affirmation, if I have to use those words, that isn’t so nasty, short and brutish. The magazine, crucially for me, isn’t tongue-in-cheek about its subgenre, it’s straight-up sincere. The community drew me in, further than I meant to go …
Before that I’d been self-publishing historical fiction that isn’t terribly commercial but that I invested heavily of myself in. That’s set in the Asian steppes, which I had been attracted to too far back to analyse why. One of my early memories is getting my hands on Anna Comnena’s Alexiad young, and being entirely won over by her Turkic antagonists. It’s a Byzantine history of the 11th -12th centuries, and they have a lot of run-ins with Seljuq Turks, straight off the steppe. That was certainly a milestone in my steppe craze. Another was going straight for the Attila and the ‘Zingis’ (Genghis) parts of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I can’t remember which I stumbled over first, in my teenage years.
Q: Goatskin is often irritated by people but has learned a lot about different cultures in her wanderings. She’s enough of a leader to be deferred to as a respected caravan guide. She’s very complex, far from the naivete one might expect from her rural background and the rustic clothing that generated her nickname. How did you come up with this intriguing character?
A: I’d say she’s mostly irritated by settled folk who condescend to her as a nomad from a people of goatherds, or she’s irritated by those who hire her, when they don’t know how to live in what they think of as the wilderness. But also she likes to be alone, solitary wandering is her preference. I wrote her that way as a woman who thinks of myself as a loner, mostly, who shares that preference for solitude.
And I’m conscious of how women, when they are dropped into adventures to feature, are often grouped, given company ― like when the Doctor in Doctor Who suddenly had several companions when she regenerated as a woman for the first time. As if she can’t hold a story down with one other. I think of Rebecca Solnit who writes magnificently on walking, and put that in light of recent discourse on women walking in public spaces, in isolated places. Walking has been so necessary in my creative life, and in my practical life since I’m a woman who lives alone and doesn’t drive. Goatskin gets to wander as freely as Conan does, on her own, and that’s important to me.
I wanted her to be an intelligent person who has listened and learned, although not literate – she’s from an oral culture, and she dodged education in the schools that assimilate and convert her people. In the same vein, I make her bandit girlfriend, a commoner, a ex- villager, notably philosophical. This is quite deliberate.
Q: In the two Goatskin stories that I’ve read, “The Grief-Note of Vultures” in NESS #0 and “Sister Chaos” in NESS #2, I appreciate that although there’s plenty of action and combat, Angaj-Duzmut (Goatskin the nomad) solves some problems creatively and some through talking, rather than just facing everything head-on with her weapons. What’s your process for putting Goatskin into predicaments and figuring out resolutions?
A: Yes, I’m never going to be a swords-first writer, clobber them on the head and that resolves your plot. For one thing, my monsters tend to have a case, and Goatskin is as likely to learn a sympathy for them and she might end up on their side. If I have a pattern, that’s it. I start with the monster and its meaning, what I want to say by that piece of weird, and work outwards from there to how Goatskin encounters it, what changes for her, what she takes away.
Q: I also appreciate the warm and sexy relationship, on- and offscreen, between “Duzzy” and the many-named bandit leader. But will readers find out whether it’s a committed partnership, or if other entanglements are possible when Goatskin is off on her own solo adventures?
A: It might be spoilery of another story to answer that one. I have a novelette out early next year in an anthology of sword & sorcery & romance, Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, again from Brackenbury Books. It’s set early in their friendship, and her girlfriend drops the c-word on her, commitment.
But I’ll say she only asks for a loose commitment, no clause to exclude other flings ― she specifies she won’t hassle Goatskin about those. Obviously she’s had far more experience than Goatskin and has been fairly casual in the past. Still, it’s her bandit girlfriend who seems most tenacious of a partnership, sometimes, as may come across in Waste Flowers.
I’ve wondered about this question myself. It hasn’t happened in the few stories I’ve done, but in the one I’m plotting, subsequent to Waste Flowers, it’s an issue. That’s a bit of a tease of an answer.
Q: Will readers ever learn why Goatskin left her mountainous homeland, whether it’s just wanderlust or if she has some more urgent, personal reasons in her backstory?
A: There’s a glimpse of this in Waste Flowers. Both Goatskin and her bandit girlfriend are forced to look back and ― with different levels of reluctance ― reveal the old stories as to why they had to leave their home mountains or their village as girls of fourteen or fifteen.
Q: I enjoyed the weirdness of the creatures Goatskin encountered in the stories I’ve read so far. Will we see more of these oddities in Waste Flowers? Are some of them drawn from specific Mongol legends, or more generally inspired by stories from the steppes?
A: There are certainly more of these oddities in Waste Flowers. Most of the weird I’ve written so far, or mean to write in future for the Goatskin tales, does come from the Mongol imaginary or adjacent cultures, is based on or at least sparked by a Mongol conception. My monsters ― although ‘oddities’ is better ― try to throw light on a piece of that world, too. I want them to function as part of my world-painting, to contribute to an understanding of world view, not to be random. I guess it helps that my monsters tend to have a point.
Q: Is your scholarly work (Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe; and Secret History of the Mongols) a resource for your fiction? Does anything flow the other way, from the creative toward the academic, such as what topics you choose to research and study?
A: [amendment: my Voices is about the 13th-century text, the Secret History of the Mongols]
They go hand-in-hand. Voices was commissioned by Simon J. Cook at Rounded Globe, because he liked my historical fiction: he encouraged me to write a novelist’s-eye view on interpretation of primary sources, in this case the Secret History of the Mongols. My blog posts which sometimes burst their seams originate in research for my fiction, but one becomes committed, beyond the novels, to historical investigation for its own sake. I began to care as much about how Mongols are written in our history, about the historiography of it. I have ambitions to do a reception history of Chinggis in English.
Q: Please share a little about your Amgalant novels.
A: Amgalant closely follows the Secret History of the Mongols, which is the chief Mongol source on the life of Chinggis Khan. It’s a history told with epic flourishes, a painstakingly honest history assembled from communal memoirs, back to those who knew Chinggis Khan. It’s oddly intimate. It’s strikingly humane in its focus, as in concerned with human things. It’s strong on speech and on interaction, like a novel itself. It dips into the style of oral epic to lend its subject grandeur, but only at finely judged moments ― not to obscure the reality.
This fascinating text I set out to put into a novel version, being as faithful as I can to its matter, to its style, and to its positions ― its angles on the story, the things it cares about.
Q: Can you say anything about whatever works you’re developing now?
A: I’m writing a second Goatskin novella. Oliver Brackenbury has said in public that he’d like to follow up next year with another instalment from both Dariel and I, if this crowdfund goes well. However it ends up being published, I’m irrevocably engaged in the next, titled What Rough Beast?, which I hope is a leap beyond Waste Flowers. It’s even more personal a story for Goatskin.
Daniel Quiogue, author of the Orhan the Snow Leopard stories (and more)
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| Dariel Quiogue |
Q: What inspired you to focus on what you call “Forgotten Asia” stories? What drew you to the Sword & Sorcery subgenre in general?
A: My fascination with Sword & Sorcery started first, when my sister gifted me one weekend with a copy of Conan the Swordsman (by Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg & L. Sprague de Camp) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Fighting Man of Mars. It was the very same year Star Wars came out, so I developed a taste for swashbuckling adventure tales in exotic settings early on ― I was ten years old at the time. That dovetailed with early introductions to Homer’s The Odyssey and Herodotus’ Histories, Arthurian tales – Boorman’s Excalibur came out only just a few years after – and at the time, our TV stations would show sword and sandal films every Holy Week. So I had a taste for historically-flavored adventure.
As I started writing and playing fantasy role playing games, I noticed the dearth of material with Asian inspirations that were not Chinese or Japanese. From Araby and Asia Minor to Xinjiang, from Siberia south to Ceylon and Southeast Asia, there was a yawning void ― and being Southeast Asian myself, I thought, hey, this could be my field.
Q: One of the two novellas in Double-Edged Sword and Sorcery will be your Walls of Shira Yulun in which your hero Orhan is “trapped in a besieged city” while striving to keep an old promise. Crowdfund backers will also get a loosely related digital exclusive Orhan story, “The Shaman’s Blood Price.” I see that you have another story coming in NESS #4; will that be another Orhan story? What fascinates you about this character?
A: Yes, my story in NESS #4 is also an Orhan Timur story. I think there are two main reasons that make make this character so fascinating and easy to write for me. Number one, he’s got a powerful, clear-cut and constant motivation – he’s been overthrown by his own sworn blood brother, that’s a really serious breach in Mongol culture, and he wants revenge; at the same time, his former blood brother is always scheming to get rid of him, so he’s always in danger. At the same time, I get to contrast that long-term motivation with his more human side, the two are often in conflict, and he’s often in situations where his pesonal code will cause him to torpedo his own long-term goal.
Second, he has a very wide playing field to have adventures in ― practically all of that West to East gap I mentioned earlier in talking about Forgotten Asia. So I can have Orhan Timur adventures set anywhere from my secondary-world equivalents to Persia, the Tibetan highlands, Northern India and of course the steppes. In that regard he’s like REH’s Conan, he can wander across most of his known world, though I’d say he’s different in that his wanderings are more driven.
Q: In “The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” in NESS issue #0, Orhan is alone, recently betrayed and deposed, although he eventually makes a sort of alliance. In “The Demon of Tashi Tzang” in NESS #2, he’s alone again, but receives aid from some unexpected people. If he is ever to regain power, he’ll need to build some lasting support. Will Orhan eventually start building and leading teams, or will your stories keep focusing on Orhan the fugitive? Is his loner status partly just a function of what Sword and Sorcery stories are, and the kind of character fans want to read about?
A: That’s a good question. I believe most of my stories will focus on the time between Orhan’s deposition and his final destiny, which I won’t reveal yet. Partly that’s because I feel Orhan-in-trouble fits the needs of a pulp-styled Sword & Sorcery story best; it’s when he’s at his most driven and desperate. For me, affirmation of values like self-reliance, the ability to survive the toughest trials both mental and physical, and indomitability are core Sword & Sorcery values ― and they’ll be tested more with Orhan as fugitive than with Orhan as Khagan.
There have been stories wherein Orhan tried to build support, a power base from which to regain his throne – but things always happen. In my story "Valley of the Yellow-Eyed King" Orhan has united the bandits of the mountains and is forging them into an army, but then he gets called away to hunt down a demon tiger. The novella The Caves of Koro Shan is set after that, and shows the aftermath of his (unintended) long absence from that warband. Both stories can be found in my collection, Track of the Snow Leopard.
Orhan Timur, being based on Genghis Khan, will of course never stop trying.
Q: I love your combination of descriptive passages of scenery and temples, etc., combined with the hard-hitting action scenes. They feel very grounded in details, with vivid word choices. What can you share about your writing process? Do you outline plots and fill in details later, or start with a vivid scene and then follow it forward and backward in time, or what?
A: Thanks! Part of that I believe is because I have a really visual imagination ― when I’m writing I often see things like a movie playing in my head. Also I make sure I have a good visual library to draw on when writing – I research locations that are analogous to my settings, plus I used to have a big collection of National Geographic magazines. For vivid writing, there are no better teachers than Robert E. Howard himself – he really knew how to choose and pace his words. Refinements to that I learned from reading Leigh Brackett, David Gemmell and others,
and when I wax lyrical, I believe I’m channeling Tanith Lee.
As for my writing process, I’m a trying-to-reform pantser. I can’t seem to work with detailed outlines, but I do a lot of preparatory work before drafting; though sometimes I’ve written an opener, just a few paragraphs, then do the background work, including a very rough outline, after doing the opener. Stories usually start out as a what-if premise, often based on a historical event or snippet of mythology. Then I research and take notes – like for Walls of
Shira Yulun I bought Osprey Books’ Siege Engines of the Far East Volume 1. Sometimes I have to kill a story premise and do something else when my research shows things couldn’t have/wouldn’t have happened that way. And as I said, I do visual research – I look up photos and videos, the explosion of travel photography and videography is a boon for me there.
After I’ve digested and internalized my research, I’ll start writing – or just as often, spend days trying to figure out my opening scene. The first few sentences for me are crucial. The reader has to be hooked within just a paragraph or three. This is the same leeway I give myself when choosing a book to purchase – if the author hasn’t gotten me hooked within the first page, I put the book back on the bookstore shelf.
Q: Your own anthology, Swords of the Four Winds: Tales of swords and sorcery from an ancient East that never was, looks like a lot of fun, too. Do you think you’ll mostly stick with shorter stories, or are you developing any other longform fiction plans besides the soon-to-be-published novella?
A: I’m currently working on a novel, a sword and planet piece, but have to shelve that temporarily to do another Orhan Timur novella. I believe the bulk of my work will continue to be shorter fiction though, as that’s the form I believe works best for Sword & Sorcery. Eventually I’ll do an Orhan Timur novel, but like Moorcock, I’ll likely be doing it as a sequence of interconnected short stories.
Thanks!
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