In good news for readers of adventure fiction, the late lamented e-zine Flashing Swords, founded by the irreplaceable Howard A. Jones, is relaunching in Fall 2007 with a new slate of editors. Candidly, I don’t know the work of the guys at the top of the pyramid (the pseudonymous CrystalWizard and James Boone Dryden), but the associate editors (Jason M. Waltz a.k.a. “Howard von Darkmoor”, Michael D. Turner, SC Bryce, Steve Goble, TW Williams) make up a pretty damn impressive editorial board all by themselves.
The new front page is here. The discussion forum, for news and whatnot, is at the same address as it used to be. They’re not open to submissions until Nov. 1 (the first issue will be an in-house production), but their guidelines are here.
Funding is always a problem with small magazines, especially e-zines, but the recent and apparently temporary death of Flashing Swords was all the more depressing because it didn’t seem as if it had to be. The zine was a secondary casualty in the tempestuous collapse of the Pitch-Black publishing empire. Maybe this time, standing on its own two feet, Flashing Swords can go on cleaving any heads that need to be cleaved.
[The good news snaffled from Steve Goble’s Swords Against Boredom.]
Very cool 🙂 Always on the lookout for new markets.
Yes, there aren’t a lot of markets that are interested in adventure-fantasy at shorter lengths.
I haven’t had the guts to submit a story yet, so I haven’t run into that. 🙂 And, for some reason, I rarely write fantasy short stories. I guess fantasy and epic are too closely tied together in my head.
Booklength fantasy is the way to go these days, I think, if only for economic reasons. (People are buying genre books; magazines, not so much.)
Ha! 🙂 That is nice and poetic.