Beginnings

   In the past I've written and talked about developing some sort of site dedicated to Swords & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy. It's the stuff I grew up reading in my dad's beat up "Flashing Swords" anthologies and Lancer's illegal "Elric" volumes. I have stacks of beat up Lin Carter pastiches alongside my hard sought Charles R. Saunders' originals and love them both. It fills me with nostalgia but it also gets the adrenalin pumping as I'm reading it.

   My vision of S & S is pretty expansive and not limited to (though totally including) the adventures of neckless barbarians with double bladed axes in chainmail loincloths. I consider (and I know I'm not being particularly original here) the stories of Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" as important to the development of the genre as heavy lifting done by Robert E. Howard in the beginning and later by the likes of Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock.

   I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do on this site but if men with thick necks and swords, kidnapped princesses, goateed sorcerers with pointed cowls and lost temples have any appeal, stick around.