Tag Archives: Tales of the Crimson Keep

Peter David visits the Crimson Keep on his Own

Writing is, by and large, the loneliest profession you can undertake.  It’s not like a typical office job where, if you run into problems, you can go to your supervisor and get some guidance from him or her.  It’s not like your friends can inform you about a procedure you didn’t know about that will solve the situation for you.  In writing, there’s you and the computer screen and that’s it.  It’s your story to tell:  Not your editor’s and not your fellow writers, neither of whom is in your office to pitch in any way.

The Crimson Keep stories haven’t been that way.  Crimson Keep began when Crazy 8 launched a round robin challenge at Shore Leave many years ago.  We took turns wedging our bodies (easier for the skinny guys; more problematic for me) into a space between two brick pillars and produced the very first combined Crazy 8 combined writing endeavor.  Each of us had an hour to come up with our contribution, which naturally became more challenging the further in we went because there was more for each new writer to read.  Should really have given the later writers ninety minutes, now that I think back on it.

We later did a second group story, minus the part about sitting at a convention.  The only hitch with both group stories is this:  I have no recollection which parts of the stories were mine.   Just as it’s difficult for writers who are undertaking a group effort to, say, write a sitcom script, it’s hard to remember which joke was whose.

That was solved when we planned Tales of the Crimson Keep, in which each of us would contribute our own story to the endeavor.  I wasn’t sure what I could come up with that wouldn’t step on somebody else’s undertaking, and eventually, I seized upon an idea that had been done in a couple of episodes of Xena, Warrior Princess.  I would come up with a story set in an entirely different time period and have the characters “reincarnated” so that they looked and sounded identical to the way they used to be, but had no recollection of their previous lives.  Toss in a young man from the Keep who had been trapped for centuries, set it during World War II so we could have Nazis for our villains, and the story practically wrote itself.

If you are encountering the Keep for the first time, welcome to the magic show.  If you’ve been following us all this time, thank you for your support and patronage.

Tales of the Crimson Keep – Newly Renovated Edition is now on sale in the usual variety of formats.

Peter David Visits the Crimson Keep on his Own

Writing is, by and large, the loneliest profession you can undertake.  It’s not like a typical office job where, if you run into problems, you can go to your supervisor and get some guidance from him or her.  It’s not like your friends can inform you about a procedure you didn’t know about that will solve the situation for you.  In writing, there’s you and the computer screen and that’s it.  It’s your story to tell:  Not your editor’s and not your fellow writers, neither of whom are in your office to pitch in any way.

The “Crimson Keep” stories haven’t been that way.  “Crimson Keep” began when Crazy 8 launched a round robin challenge at Shore Leave many years ago.  We took turns wedging our bodies (easier for the skinny guys; more problematic for me) into a space between two brick pillars and produced the very first combined Crazy 8 combined writing endeavor.  Each of us had an hour to come up with our contribution, which naturally became more challenging the further in we went because there was more for each new writer to read.  Should really have given the later writers ninety minutes, now that I think back on it.

We later did a second group story, minus the part about sitting at a convention.  The only hitch with both group stories is this:  I have no recollection which parts of the stories were mine.   Just as it’s difficult for writers who are undertaking a group effort to, say, write a sitcom script, it’s hard to remember which joke was whose.

That was solved when we planned Tales of the Crimson Keep, in which each of us would contribute our own story to the endeavor.  I wasn’t sure what I could come up with that wouldn’t step on somebody else’s undertaking, and eventually, I seized upon an idea that had been done in a couple of episodes of Xena, Warrior Princess.  I would come up with a story set in an entirely different time period and have the characters “reincarnated” so that they looked and sounded identical to the way they used to be, but had no recollection of their previous lives.  Toss in a young man from the Keep who had been trapped for centuries, set it during World War II so we could have Nazis for our villains, and the story practically wrote itself.

If you are encountering the Keep for the first time, welcome to the magic show.  If you’ve been following us all this time, thank you for your support and patronage.

Mary Fan Visits the Crimson Keep

Want to know a fun fact? Contributing to Tales of the Crimson Keep was the first time I’d written in an already-established world. It was both exciting and a bit intimidating—as most new things are. As far as sandboxes go, the Crimson Keep was a pretty vast and flexible one. The premise of an ever-changing fortress with unlimited possibilities within the walls meant that nearly anything was possible.

At the same time, the first edition of the anthology was already out, and there’d already been many stories set in this world. The last thing I wanted was to write something that would be inconsistent with what was established.

The first thing I did was read every scrap of the first edition to get a feel for what kinds of stories fell into the world of the Crimson Keep. The answer: many kinds. Some were funny, and some were more serious. But all felt like they were skating across a glimmering pool of whimsy.

I decided to leave the established characters be and introduce the Keep to someone new: a visitor from another part of the world who, like me, was seeing the Keep for the first time. And so I created the character of Meilin, a girl who came all the way from the Far East on a quest to the Keep. How fascinated would she be by the fortress’ dangers and charms? How much trouble would she run into?

Of course, I couldn’t just let her run amok in the Keep. I had to send someone along to make her life even more different. I’m not entirely sure why I settled on a childlike, chaotic neutral spirit with phenomenal supernatural powers and the eternal mental age of a kindergartner. Maybe it was because that seemed to me to be the embodiment of the Keep’s fanciful nature.

The story’s title, “Glisk of the Keep,” is a double entendre. I’d recently learned of the word “glisk,” which can mean either refer to light (e.g. rays spilling through clouds, a glint in one’s eye) or mean “glimpse.” Somehow, it seemed to fit my mischievous spirit, who lived in the Keep and caused trouble for all within its walls. But since “glisk” also means “glimpse,” and Meilin would only get to see a small part of the fortress (since she’s a visitor and not a resident of it), it also seemed to fit with the story.

I hope you’ll check out my story in the newly renovated Tales of the Crimson Keep and have as much fun reading it as I did writing it!

Tales of the Crimson Keep – Newly Renovated Edition is now available at your favorite booksellers.

Russ Colchamiro Writes of Thieves in Night – Tales of the Crimson Keep

Talk about a long time coming.

More than 25 years ago, while I was still in college, I had an idea for a story of some kind: two thieves who, by happenstance, happen to rob the same house at the same time.

It was an amusing scenario, and I had a few of the details filled in, but I didn’t have a full blown story I wanted to tell. It needed a hook. I didn’t have one.

The story was never far from my thoughts — I knew I wanted to do something with it — but there it lived, furtively, quietly, in a drawer, and lingering like an ancient mist in the back of my mind.

Enter Crazy 8 Press.

Enter Tales of the Crimson Keep.

The Keep has wizards and ghouls. Magic and spells. Secrets. And, of course, the Keep itself.

In a flash the story that had been percolating for all those years finally had an elixir. I was able to conjure the tale. The hook was provided for me.

And so I bring you “Thief in the Night”.

The core is still there, two thieves with the same target. But this tale being part of an anthology filled with magic, demons… and danger… their night of burglary in no way ends the way either of them had in mind.

But that’s the thing about being a thief. No matter how much you plan and plot, you aren’t the only thing that goes bump in the night.

Enjoy.

Tales of the Crimson Keep the Newly Renovated edition will be out later this month.

Crimson Keep: We Got You Covered

When we wrote the first Crimson Keep story, “Demon Circle,” we really didn’t know what we were getting into. That’s because, up until Kevin Dilmore provided the opening line at our Crazy 8 panel on the first day of that ShoreLeave when we were going to be writing the story on-site in round-robin fashion, we didn’t have any idea how the story was even going to start, let alone where it was going to go. We didn’t know what kind of story it was, what genre it would be in, what the tone would be, any of that. It was only as we wrote that we figured all of that out—the story grew from author to author, developing itself under our fingers, until by the end we had a fully formed fantasy tale.

Then we had to come up with a cover.

Glenn took care of the first one, and the image was evocative if a little dark for such a goofy story. When we went back into that world and each wrote our own stories there, then collected all of those plus “Demon Circle” in the original Tales of the Crimson Keep, he built that cover as well. And you can tell at first glance that this is a collection of fantasy stories.

What you can’t tell is that they’re fun, and even funny, rather than dark and serious. This isn’t grim and bloody fantasy, it’s much lighter than that.

Which is why, when we decided to go back in and revise and expand and re-release the anthology—now with a new story by our newest C8 member, Mary Fan, plus an all-new round-robin story by all eight of us—I suggested that we would need an all-new and completely different cover.

Bob, Russ, and I discussed our requirements. “Think light-hearted,” I suggested. “Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures series. John DeChancie’s Castle Perilous series. Heck, Piers Anthony’s Xanth series! The cover needs to say ‘fantasy’ but it also needs to say ‘fun.’”

Bob talked to our artist, Ty Templeton, and Ty did up some sketches. He sent us six of them, including one that he didn’t think would actually work because it was too busy.

I loved it. “That’s the one,” I said. “It looks like M.C. Escher meets Monty Python.”

Ty said okay, he’d give it a shot. And when he sent in the final, all three of us felt that it was perfect.

I think you can agree that now, when you pick up Tales of The Crimson Keep, you know that you’re definitely getting fantasy stories but you’re also in for a whole lot of fun. Almost as much fun as we had writing them.

Tales of the Crimson Keep – Newly Renovated Edition will be available in August.

Sword & Sorcery & Schmaltz

The first sword and sorcery I ever read was Robert E. Howard’s Conan, in the books published in the mid-1960s in paperback by Lancer Books, with the soon to become iconic cover paintings by Frank Frazetta. My father had brought home a recently published paperback edition of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs that someone had left behind at his office. I recognized the Ape Man from the movies I’d seen on TV, but I wasn’t prepared for what I read. It was like I had discovered the real-life version of what was, essentially, portrayed as a grunting cartoon character in the movies. It floored me. I still think it’s a great novel, as close to literature as pulp fiction got when it was published in 1912. I reread it every few years.

My next trip to the library after that included a hunt for more ERB. I was rewarded with John Carter of Mars (so…score!), which was my gateway to sword & sorcery. As I recall, it was on a later library visit that I spotted Conan on the paperback rack, where the librarian told me I might find some more ERB books. Conan was hard to miss: a dark scene of a ripped barbarian in a life and death struggle with a gorilla wearing a startling crimson cloak!

Like toppling dominos, that library paperback spinner rack Conan (the best things in my childhood were sold on spinner racks!) lead to Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Eternal Warrior and Lin Carter’s Thongor and to L. Sprague DeCamp and Andrew J. Offutt and the rest of the 1960s explosion of S&S authors, including Fritz’s Lieber’s Fafnir and the Gray Mouser.

Fafnir and the Gray Mouser stood out from the barbaric crowd. First, they weren’t exactly barbarians. I mean, technically sure, the giant swordsman and minstrel Fafnir and his partner, the diminutive former wizard’s apprentice and swordsman hailed from barbaric roots, but they were more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than their loin-cloth wearing brethren. Fafnir and the Mouser were rogues and more true-to-life, characters who acted in the world instead of just reacting. Not only were Lieber’s stories witty, his characters had senses of humor. No grim and gritty angst-filled monologues for these cheating, brawling, larcenous, wenching adventurers. Their swords were for hire and life was good.

Unfortunately, when I finally got to create my own sword and sorcery character for DC Comics in 1982, I seemed to have forgotten the wit. The very first installment of Arion, Lord of Atlantis (appearing as a back-up in Mike Grell’s Warlord #55 (March, 1982) opens with steely-eyed warriors ominously eyeing the coming storm and angsty young Arion spouting his ominous feelings in pseudo-Shakespearean tones. The series (which was co-created with artist Jan Duursema and ran for eight issues in the back of Warlord, and thirty-five issues plus a one-shot in its own title) wasn’t entirely without humor; I always had a knack for witty dialog, but the tone of the series was dry and serious.

I fixed that but good in 1992 when I revived the character in 1992’s Arion the Immortal miniseries (with art by Ron Wilson). It’s 45,000 years later, Atlantis has long sunk beneath the sea (taking all but the most minute bits of powerful magic with it), and there’s a colony of surviving Atlantean deities living in modern-day New York City. Arion is one of them, the quintessential “you kids get off my lawn or I’ll turn the hose on you!” old man, wrinkled and frail looking. He lives in a one-room apartment over Carnegie Hall and makes his living as a three-card monte dealer in Times Square. His ancient foe owns a deli on the Lower East Side that he eats in all the time. And when the magic returns, making Arion young again, well, chaotic hilarity ensued.

These days, it’s hard to keep humor out of my writing, the more cynical or darker the better. That’s why when I was presented with the world of the Crimson Keep in which to write a short story shortly after being inducted into the ranks (you don’t know how rank sometimes!) of Crazy 8 Press, I had no problem coming up with “The Wee Folk at the End of the Hall” for the 2015 Tales of the Crimson Keep anthology. The world and characters in which this was set had been created by Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, and Aaron Rosenberg in “Demon Circle,” a round-robin story written live at a convention in support of the Comic Book Legend Defense Fund.

The Crimson Keep is home to an old wizard and his apprentices, but it’s not exactly a steady home. The rooms and corridors and stairways in the Keep are constantly shifting and changing. Stray from well-used routes between familiar rooms and you can be lost for days or weeks or forever in the infinitely-possible layout. And, seeing as how my Crazy 8 comprades are no slouches at the funny themselves (except for Hauman, but we take care of him in They Keep Killing Glenn…now on sale!), there’s ample opportunities for wit built right into the concept.

Which brings us to Tales of the Crimson Keep: The Newly Renovated Edition, featuring not one but two (count ‘em, two!) new stories. The first is “Glisk of the Keep” by the newest addition to the C8 crew, Mary Fan. The second is “Poor Wandering Ones,” a poignant round-robin tale by all eight of the Crazy 8. All that…plus an eye-popping new cover by the amazing Ty Templeton.

I’ve feel like I’ve come a long way since Conan!

Tales of the Crimson Keep: The Newly Renovated Edition will go on sale later this month.