WITCHLORD WEAPONMASTER second edition now on sale

Buy WITCHLORD WEAPONMASTER second edition, a paperback book in a standard paperback size, 6 inches wide by nine inches tall. Ready for purchase now.

Ended up as a 6 inch x 9 inch book ... the 8.5 inch x 11 inch description somewhere on the lulu.com site is wrong, sorry. 6 x 9 is a standard paperback size .

And so it's done. A second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER sees the light of day, after being out of print for many years.

It's available now from lulu.com.

Storefront:

lulu.com/hughcook

Unfortunately, while lulu.com would like to be a child-safe site, something like THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER or the suicide bomber novel TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER is not a child-safe book, so to see this "mature" content you have to certify yourself as adult, as follows:-

To see the mature content (1) sign up to make a free log-in identity then log in; (2) go to "MY ACCOUNT"; (3) click on "manage content access level"; (4) assuming you are 17 or older, choose "Mature" as the consent level, and save that preference.

Returning to lulu.com/hughcook you discover that a number of books which were previously invisible are now visible.

I originally thought it would be impossible to fit the 250,000 words or so of the text into a single 6 inch x 9 inch volume, as the technical limit for the print-on-demand process used is 740 pages.

However, after a little fiddling with margins, it proved possible to get it in using, for the body of the text, the same 12-point Garamond font which I have used for all my other projects done via lulu.com.

There is a PDF sample (opens with Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader) at

zenvirus.com/witchlord

Just point your browser there and you will find a link to the PDF file.

Alternatively, a direct link to the sample file would be:

zenvirus.com/witchlord/witchlord-sample.pdf

The sample file consists of the front matter (including maps) plus the text of the first chapter.

Later in 2006, second editions of THE WORDSMITHS AND THE WARGUILD and THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY should also become available from the storefront.

With that done, all ten of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS books will be in print, as stocks of the original Corgi paperbacks are still on sale via amazon.com.

The stocks were remaindered some years back by Transworld Publishers, owners of the Corgi Books imprint, but were purchased by Colin Smythe of Colin Smythe Ltd, the original publisher for the CHRONICLES series, who published some of the CHRONICLES books as hardbacks.

Colin bought the Corgi stocks, rebadged the books with new ISBN numbers, and still has them on sale as of this writing, February 2006.

It's a pleasure to have THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER back in print, and I hope the new edition will meet the needs of those readers who strongly desire to read the missing books, but for whom the extortionate prices some of these volumes have been fetching on the second-hand market have put them out of reach.

To close up here, just a note of thanks to fans of the series who have e-mailed me with messages of support during my medical troubles over the last year or so. At such a time, it's been good to be online and plugged in to the wider world.

In February 2006 the three volumes of the OCEANS OF LIGHT trilogy also became available from lulu.com, the books in question being WEST OF HEAVEN, EAST OF HELL and NORTH OF PARADISE.

This fantasy series is set in the alternative reality realm of Chalakanesia, an archipelago which stands athwart the metapsychic faultline, a structure which tends to make reality head in some distinctly alternative directions.

Also in the pipeline, some time this year or early next, are:

THE SUCCUBUS AND OTHER STORIES, a book of short fiction. Short fiction, but I'm aiming for a pretty solid book, maybe about 700 pages.

THIS IS A PICTURE OF YOUR GOD: A HUGH COOK READER. A book of random writings, a book to sample by dipping into it rather than to read as a coherent unit: poems, stories, blog entries, essays, journal entries.

THE SHIFT. A short SF novel (about 60,000 words) published some years ago. This is going to be, then, a new edition of an old book. It's a short fast-paced book including aliens, a machine which changes the world, sex and violence. I'm very fond of this book.

PLAGUE SUMMER, workmanlike novel about drug smuggling in New Zealand against the background of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a novel written by a young man, me, who grew up in the New Zealand countryside just across the road from a cow farm.

Okay as a novel in the "plot connects, characters work" sense, but, that said, only for the absolute compleatist, I think.

Central character is a minor thug called Oberth, a prototype of larger and more dangerous thugs to come.

And, finally, THE DEATH OF BIRDS, a book of poems on the subject of death and dying, and of the absurdities of the world in which that death and dying takes place.

Thanks to Stephen Wilson, a close reader of WITCHLORD/WEAPONMASTER, for proofreading tips. Stephen has built a great CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS fan site at www.idlefellows.com/hughcook and his enthusiasm has recently extended to commissioning art work depicting characters from the CHRONICLES books.

The artwork I have seen so far includes what is, to my way of thinking, a stunningly effective drawing of Jon Arabin, one of the characters in THE WALRUS AND THE WARWOLF.

It gave me great pleasure to see the man himself, in the flesh, so to speak.

A closing note of thanks to the guys who put together OpenOffice 2.0.

For TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, I used Microsoft Word to build the book, but, as Word struggled to handle a file of 200,000 words, I ended up spending way too much time staring at an hourglass.

By contrast, OpenOffice 2.0 effortlessly handled a file of 250,000 words in its native ODT format, which it then allowed me to save painlessly as a Word document, the format required by lulu.com.

Other software used in this project for various purposes included the open source FTP program FileZilla; the Irfan View image manipulation program; a Microsoft program with collage capability which is called Microsoft Premium 10; the little Paint program that comes with Windows; and my trusty text editor, UltraEdit.
To resolve weird formatting problems that I encountered in trying to work with old files that go back to the days when I was using DOS, I also pressed into service NoteTab Light, a highly capable free version which I've used on and off for some years now.

(If you want some extra bells and whistles, such as a spell checker, then you can pay a few bucks and pick up the everything included version.)

UltraEdit and NoteTab Light are both text editors, the kind of thing you would use to write a computer program rather than do fancy style stuff using pretty fonts and pictures.

Also used at various times was PrintKey, a program which captures the screen with options including to save what you have captured or print it out.

PrintKey installed and ran fine for me under Windows 98, but, under Windows XP Professional, I ended up having to go hunt down the executable and copy it onto the desktop. Thereafter, after the executable was clicked, the "PrtSc" (print screen) key which, back in the days of DOS, used to dump the contents of the screen to the printer, becomes enabled as a hot key.

So you get back the functionality of the print screen key. You can hit it, capture the screen and send it to the printer. Or capture just a selected rectangle and either print or save that.

Browser used for this enterprise was Mozilla.

Adobe Reader was used to check various trial PDFs, which I made with OpenOffice 2.0, which has a simple EXPORT AS PDF option on the FILE menu.

I'll add here, at the end of this blog entry, the words which are at the end of the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, a kind of "final last words".

Thus:


FINAL WORDS

This book, the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, is a kind of monument to the early part of my life, the time when I dreamed dreams and saw visions. Whatever happens from now on, that phase is over. Putting together this second edition, then, is an act of conclusion, so I think it an appropriate place to record my last words, despite the fact that my funeral is not on the calendar yet. My life was good, and I regret nothing. Win or lose, I am satisfied. Many thanks to those of you who chose to accompany me, in person or in spirit, on some part of the arc of my life.

Me and Ray Bradbury

Guest Gulkan's saga quest is into its thirty-third chapter, thirty-three out of fifty-seven, and the story is cooking along nicely, as the following excerpt shows:-

EXCERPT STARTS:-

After considerable further hesitation, Thayer Levant at last consented to follow the others. With Guest Gulkan leaded, they braved their way into a huge chamber where there arose a kind of waterless fountain which was adorned with the warm and breathing bodies of a thousand women. Up, up rose this fountain, in tier upon tier, crowded with nubile beauty. For once, Guest Gulkan was quite lost for words. He just stood there and gaped. As he stood there, a woman danced forth from the company of her peers, positively floating through the air as she tranced toward him. She beckoned to him, and he stepped forward, as if in a dream.

Abruptly --

The women vanished.

The women vanished with a clangor of metal and a burst of shuddering laughter.

Immediately, the adventurers realized they were confronted by (and more than partially surrounded by) a huge heaped-up conglomeration of steel, a towering contraption of whispering tubes and slowly grinding tentacles, of rotating disks and spindling toroidal columns, of glowing screens and phosphorescent feelers, of spiked antennae and gleaming chelae.

This thing of coiled and coiling metal sat there in a huge and brooding inertia, sat there with all the mighty weight of an ink-black thundercloud pregnant with hailstones the size of a turtle, sat there in predatory poise. There was no telling what or where its eyes might be, yet the thing saw the travelers, clearly, and these four mortals were the focus of its vulturing regard.

-:EXCERPT ENDS.

I wouldn't mind sitting down and reading this. This book of mine, THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, I've never read it as a book, starting at page one and moving through at the end. It's a very long book, about 250,000 words, and I've never had the time.

And I don't have now, not now while I'm in the process of preparing the second edition for publication.

Now is the time of the finicky rages of proofreading, the fretful business of chasing down punctuation marks missing or unnecessarily duplicated, of figuring out which "had had" is legitimate and which is a blooper.

That's the level at which I have contact with the book.

Maybe I'll finally read it, as it should be read, as a book, cover to cover, start at page one and go on to the end, in my old age. If I get to have an old age. In the meantime, however, getting through the text is not an act of pleasure but a task.

Working on this task, I'm reminded, time and time again, of a story by Ray Bradbury which I read many years ago. My recollection is blurred and I don't recall the title, but let me tell you my version of it here.

There's a guy, and he's a working stiff. It's not a tale from the world of penthouse suites. We're much, much closer to the barrio.

But, although this guy is poor, and going nowhere, he has an incandescent dream, a visionary dream for his children. He wants to give them interplanetary flight. An elite dream, which he can't put on his credit card. We can deduce the obvious, which is that he doesn't even have a credit card to start with.

Even so, he does it. He achieves his dream.

He's just a working stiff and so his children cannot possibly have the dream he wants for them. It's a megamillionaire idea, and he, he's not that. He's Mr. Broke.

His children cannot possibly have what he wants them to have.

And yet they do.

He builds a rocketship in his backyard, and the ship is launched, and the children, thanks to their father's act of faith, are launched. Interplanetary space is theirs, and they are awed, and rightly so.

And from time to time the father checks on them to see how they are doing. And they are doing fine, it's working out.

But the father knows how fragile this is. If one tiny thing goes wrong, if the video turns scratchy or the diesel engine unexpectedly runs out of fuel, then it's over. No more space machine. Just a noisy tin can vibrating away meainglessly in the backyard.

But nothing breaks. The illusion holds, and it is this illusion that the father delivers to his children.

As a father, at one level I read this as a tale of how we, guided by such love and wisdom as we possess, conscious of the niceties of timing, build a fraud for our children to live in, a provisional abode of apparent safety.

The family world, it's fraudulent. We don't tell kids, at least not when they're not even two years of age, that all this stuff which seems so permanent is not. It's a sham, an illusionary gloss which the imagination has built, and it stands, in its fragility, upon the foundations of a crueler, grimmer world, a world in which the father's brain, for example, is the chaotic slowly-stewing aftermath of exposure to radioactivity.

A world in which you, too, my darling, were born, ultimately, so you could die.

We don't say this. Instead, we persist in the maintenance of the vision. Visions being part of the supplementary world we need to build to survive in the actual world that we really do live in.

And, for me as an artist, what Bradbury's story communicates, more clearly than anything else, is the father's responsibility to his art, the art of illusion which he is working on the world on behalf of his children. It must be, if it can be, impeccable.

It's craftsmanship, this illusion he's building for his kids. Having the inspiration, getting the idea, seeing how it could be done, that is one thing. But meticulously carrying the project through to its conclusion, that's another.

And this story has been coming back to me, repeatedly, in the last few months, as I've worked my way through a variety of projects.

You never catch all the mistakes, and there is always going to be some glaring blooper, some embarrassing disaster which you failed to catch. But you have to try for the perfection you are seeking. Persist, and try to make sure the missing period is replace, that morning does not accidentally follow afternoon, and that "there" and "their" have achieved their appropriate mutations.

I would not count myself as a great Bradbury fan, but I have read FAHRENHEIT 451 at least three times, and the old man's spirit (as far as I know, he's still alive, at this writing) is with me, I feel, as I work.

A builder, a fabulator, a creator of complete and self-sustained works of the imagination. One of those who helped to show me the way.

Me and Ray Bradbury

Guest Gulkan's saga quest is into its thirty-third chapter, thirty-three out of fifty-seven, and the story is cooking along nicely, as the following excerpt shows:-

EXCERPT STARTS:-

After considerable further hesitation, Thayer Levant at last consented to follow the others. With Guest Gulkan leaded, they braved their way into a huge chamber where there arose a kind of waterless fountain which was adorned with the warm and breathing bodies of a thousand women. Up, up rose this fountain, in tier upon tier, crowded with nubile beauty. For once, Guest Gulkan was quite lost for words. He just stood there and gaped. As he stood there, a woman danced forth from the company of her peers, positively floating through the air as she tranced toward him. She beckoned to him, and he stepped forward, as if in a dream.

Abruptly --

The women vanished.

The women vanished with a clangor of metal and a burst of shuddering laughter.

Immediately, the adventurers realized they were confronted by (and more than partially surrounded by) a huge heaped-up conglomeration of steel, a towering contraption of whispering tubes and slowly grinding tentacles, of rotating disks and spindling toroidal columns, of glowing screens and phosphorescent feelers, of spiked antennae and gleaming chelae.

This thing of coiled and coiling metal sat there in a huge and brooding inertia, sat there with all the mighty weight of an ink-black thundercloud pregnant with hailstones the size of a turtle, sat there in predatory poise. There was no telling what or where its eyes might be, yet the thing saw the travelers, clearly, and these four mortals were the focus of its vulturing regard.

-:EXCERPT ENDS.

I wouldn't mind sitting down and reading this. This book of mine, THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, I've never read it as a book, starting at page one and moving through at the end. It's a very long book, about 250,000 words, and I've never had the time.

And I don't have now, not now while I'm in the process of preparing the second edition for publication.

Now is the time of the finicky rages of proofreading, the fretful business of chasing down punctuation marks missing or unnecessarily duplicated, of figuring out which "had had" is legitimate and which is a blooper.

That's the level at which I have contact with the book.

Maybe I'll finally read it, as it should be read, as a book, cover to cover, start at page one and go on to the end, in my old age. If I get to have an old age. In the meantime, however, getting through the text is not an act of pleasure but a task.

Working on this task, I'm reminded, time and time again, of a story by Ray Bradbury which I read many years ago. My recollection is blurred and I don't recall the title, but let me tell you my version of it here.

There's a guy, and he's a working stiff. It's not a tale from the world of penthouse suites. We're much, much closer to the barrio.

But, although this guy is poor, and going nowhere, he has an incandescent dream, a visionary dream for his children. He wants to give them interplanetary flight. An elite dream, which he can't put on his credit card. We can deduce the obvious, which is that he doesn't even have a credit card to start with.

Even so, he does it. He achieves his dream.

He's just a working stiff and so his children cannot possibly have the dream he wants for them. It's a megamillionaire idea, and he, he's not that. He's Mr. Broke.

His children cannot possibly have what he wants them to have.

And yet they do.

He builds a rocketship in his backyard, and the ship is launched, and the children, thanks to their father's act of faith, are launched. Interplanetary space is theirs, and they are awed, and rightly so.

And from time to time the father checks on them to see how they are doing. And they are doing fine, it's working out.

But the father knows how fragile this is. If one tiny thing goes wrong, if the video turns scratchy or the diesel engine unexpectedly runs out of fuel, then it's over. No more space machine. Just a noisy tin can vibrating away meainglessly in the backyard.

But nothing breaks. The illusion holds, and it is this illusion that the father delivers to his children.

As a father, at one level I read this as a tale of how we, guided by such love and wisdom as we possess, conscious of the niceties of timing, build a fraud for our children to live in, a provisional abode of apparent safety.

The family world, it's fraudulent. We don't tell kids, at least not when they're not even two years of age, that all this stuff which seems so permanent is not. It's a sham, an illusionary gloss which the imagination has built, and it stands, in its fragility, upon the foundations of a crueler, grimmer world, a world in which the father's brain, for example, is the chaotic slowly-stewing aftermath of exposure to radioactivity.

A world in which you, too, my darling, were born, ultimately, so you could die.

We don't say this. Instead, we persist in the maintenance of the vision. Visions being part of the supplementary world we need to build to survive in the actual world that we really do live in.

And, for me as an artist, what Bradbury's story communicates, more clearly than anything else, is the father's responsibility to his art, the art of illusion which he is working on the world on behalf of his children. It must be, if it can be, impeccable.

It's craftsmanship, this illusion he's building for his kids. Having the inspiration, getting the idea, seeing how it could be done, that is one thing. But meticulously carrying the project through to its conclusion, that's another.

And this story has been coming back to me, repeatedly, in the last few months, as I've worked my way through a variety of projects.

You never catch all the mistakes, and there is always going to be some glaring blooper, some embarrassing disaster which you failed to catch. But you have to try for the perfection you are seeking. Persist, and try to make sure the missing period is replace, that morning does not accidentally follow afternoon, and that "there" and "their" have achieved their appropriate mutations.

I would not count myself as a great Bradbury fan, but I have read FAHRENHEIT 451 at least three times, and the old man's spirit (as far as I know, he's still alive, at this writing) is with me, I feel, as I work.

A builder, a fabulator, a creator of complete and self-sustained works of the imagination. One of those who helped to show me the way.