Welcome to the fourth issue of Flashing Swords. With this installment we've officially been in existence for one year. Our regular visitors have no doubt noticed the growing number of staff and their contributions to the swordandsorcery.org half of the site. In the end managing both sides of the web site grew too much for one man, or at least one man like myself who has so many irons in the fire. Fortunately there were some tremendously talented people on hand, and you'll find them running swordandsorcery.org now: the indefatigable Ryan Harvey, Managing Editor, the mighty trio of S.C. Bryce, Bruce Durham, and Paul McNamee, Contributing Editors, and our hardworking Columnist and sword and sorcery scholar, Andy Beau. While I remain involved with SwordandSorcery, I can now focus more of my time on Flashing Swords.

I have assistance on the Flashing Swords side of the site as well. My old friend Joe McCullough has recently joined up as Associate Editor, and Steve Goble has been helping out with copyediting.

Some of you may know Joe from his excellent essays on swordandsorcery.org, or his Stevan the Targeteer stories, which have appeared in multiple venues, including Black Gate and Lords of Swords. I first ran across one seven or eight years ago in an issue of a little magazine titled Gauntlet! The Magazine of Heroic Fiction, and liked the tale so much I promptly wrote him a letter. We've been friends ever since.

You may not know Steve Goble, but you will soon. I began accepting his stories for future issues almost half a year ago. The man has been flooding the e-zine with exciting adventure fiction and you'll finally get to see some of it this very issue. In addition to being remarkably good, it always came in remarkably clean, and I wasn't surprised to learn that Steve's secret identity was a copyeditor. Readers out there may not feel Joe's influence right away, as he's reading submissions several issues out, but they're likely to notice Steve's immediately.

I look back with pride on what's been accomplished in this first year, and know that we will continue to grow. Bit by bit, new readers and writers find the glow of our campfire and sit down to join our fellowship.

I'm certain that the site and the attached discussion group at SFReader is an amiable organization, just as I'm sure I'm an amiable guy, so I was a little surprised at the funny thing that happened on the way back from the editorial last time. While the overwhelming reaction to the New Edge editorial was positive, a few people took loud, even vulgar, exception to it. I closed the essay with these very words about the site and what we hoped to accomplish with it, and it seemed to me that I offered up a live and let live mentality pretty clearly: "If you're not interested, that's fine, as there are scores of other sorts of fantasy to go read. Live and let live. But if what we're talking about sets your pulse thrumming, then by all means, there is room at our side." (You can look it up. I haven't changed a word since I posted the essay last issue. Honest.)

Now I don't plan to rehash or defend against every purposeful twisting or misread by people who seem to want to go out of their way to be offended, but I do want to clarify several points. Some have implied or suggested that the New Edge was some sort of an attempt to jump on a bandwagon. It seems that in the last year or so a whole slew of new literary movements have reared their heads. That's honestly news to me, but more power to them. I'm too busy to keep track of such things and have yet to perform any research to verify the "movement" phenomenon or what it's about. I have a sneaking suspicion that there are writers in other genres besides those published in this e-zine who feel excluded by modern short fiction publishing preferences.

Certainly sword and sorcery has gotten short shrift. True, it's possible to find the occasional novel with sword and sorcery characteristics, and there is the Warhammer franchise, which reliably offers up sword and sorcery tales (note that two involved in the New Edge discussion--William King and C.L. Werner--are Warhammer novelists) but sword and sorcery just hasn't been very welcome in short fiction markets. A few places take it, occasionally, but in magazine guidelines you usually find "No sword and sorcery" alongside "No porn." Say what you will about modern fantasy magazine markets, but the truth of the matter is that sword and sorcery in only dependably found within Black Gate, anthologies such as those published by Pitch-Black and G.W. Thomas, and within e-zines like Sword's Edge and Pulp and Dagger.

And within Flashing Swords.

That's why we get flooded with submissions, and that's why the standard of writing the e-zine sees is becoming quite high and will remain so. Readers out there WANT what we're offering, and authors WANT to craft it. That's probably why our forum numbers continue to climb, why the daily unique hits count continues to rise, why I've asked Joe McCullough on board to help sort through the rising tide of submissions. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that the short story market is dying and that readers aren't interested in it. Might it be that a lot of the magazines aren't offering what readers want to see?

I can hear the howls of protest already.

I have nowhere said that this fiction is bad or that fiction is good. What I do say is that a kind of fiction I enjoy reading is difficult to find. The New Edge editorial set out to explain what sort of fiction I am looking for, and to establish that Flashing Swords meant to offer a home to like-minded readers and writers. And so you will find sword and sorcery, historical swashbucklers (which you also can find in Paradox), and sword and planet. You haven't seen any sword and planet yet, but you will very soon, and I'd certainly offer more if more folks submitted it.

As to those New Edge principles, you can refer to them by revisiting last issue's essay. Some people were rightfully confused with the term "hardboiled," which I didn't bother to define. "Hardboiled" has connotations that might imply trenchcoats and fedoras, but the word has greater significance. We've had some interesting exchanges in the discussion forum on this topic, and forum member Jeremy Harper clarified my intent better than I did myself:

No, Conan isn't Sam Spade, but R.E. Howard was to fantasy what Hammett and Chandler were to detective fiction. Moorcock has pointed that out. So has Don Herron, one of the leading figures in Howard studies. Howard's prose does not read anything like Hammett's or Chandler's, but is similar in spirit. He does not couch his action and plots in a genteel style--he is as direct and straight as a sword's blade. His writing and descriptions can be beautiful and haunting, but unlike Dunsany, or Peake, or his great friend and contemporary Clark Ashton Smith, he does not try to dazzle you with word-witchery. His way, to quote Stephen King, is to pull on his combat boots and assault your senses. This is what I feel Howard Jones meant by wanting stories with a hard-boiled style.
Jeremy Harper

Now it's time to sit back and let the fiction speak for itself. You'll see a lot of new names this time and I wager you'll enjoy every one of these tales. You can find out more about each author in their introductory paragraphs.

In upcoming issues you'll see the return of D.K. Latta's Zargatha, Bruce Durham's Dalacroy, S.C. Bryce's Dermanassian, Joe McCullough's Stevan the Targeteer, a story from Nancy Varian, and, as requested, more Harold Lamb, not to mention a whole lot more new fiction!

Before you launch into the fiction, however, I need to spare a final word to the cause. Folks, if you like what we're doing here, we need your support. I can imagine a lot of you rolling your eyes to this, but I'm absolutely sincere. This is a fragile enterprise, a flower that's just begun to bud, a tiny windblown flame. We need your help to keep things going. If you believe, like we do, that what we've begun has merit, then please support Pitch-Black by purchasing Lords of Swords and the upcoming Sages and Swords. Lords of Swords is already available through Amazon and is in many Borders bookstores (if it's not in yours, request it!). Spread the word! And once you spread the word and pick up your copies of these anthologies, if you're still inspired and want to skip a vending machine break, you can donate a few bucks to the Flashing Swords coffers. I'm crazy enough that every cent of your donations go to pay authors, not me or the other volunteers. Trust me, if we were in this for the money we'd have been out of here a long time ago.

For now, enjoy, and, as Joe McCullough used to sign off a letter whenever we sold a story to the same market:

Swords Together!

--Howard Andrew Jones

October, 2005