Release date: January 26, 2024
Subgenre: Sword and Sorcery Anthology
About Neither Beg Nor Yield:
Excerpt:
Foreword
Sword & Sorcery is flush with Life.
It is exciting, violent, and personal. It is LIVE!-ism! It is absurdist survivalism twined with dashes of hedonism and stoicism. In simpler terms, S&S is neither fatalistic nor altruistic, nor is it selfless or perversely selfish. It is not romantically heroic or even anti-heroic, if we employ the accurate meaning of that descriptor. It is, however, Byronic, in all the glories of that label. It assuredly does not avoid pain in its pursuit of pleasures, but neither does it complacently accept life as decreed by the Fates, Gods, Nature, and especially Man.
Sword & Sorcery is a clenched fist thrust into the sky, a raised middle finger in the face of the Unknown, an epithet spat into the dirt through a rictus of bared teeth. S&S demands an attitude of not merely surviving but of dominating living, all else—everything else—be damned. The heroes of S&S continue living deeply until there are no more breaths to take. The only -ism S&S promotes is LIVE!-ism. Absolutely a rebellion against meaninglessness, it also fully embraces an I-don’t-give-a-damn-if-it-is-all-meaningless creed. “I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” Robert E. Howard, through Conan, again saying it best in “Queen of the Black Coast.”
Sticking with Howard, his “Iron Shadows in the Moon” is prime example of S&S with triumphant survival as pure motivation. Not simply the survival of crawling from the heaving sea onto a rocky shore gasping for air and kissing the sand but the survival of standing one foot atop a defeated foe with head thrust back, fists pounding chest, and a cry of victory bursting full-voiced from a heaving bosom! A superior example of S&S Attitude, and one of Howard’s best openings to a Conan story (the other being “The Black Stranger”), its first 24 paragraphs possibly one of the best opening sequences of all time. And then it grows even greater as a story. Then there is Howard’s “A Witch Shall be Born,” which delivers the absolute most hardcore statement of S&S Attitude to be found:
“Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.”
Sword & Sorcery is contrary to Death.
It is this particular attitude from its hero that garners Sword & Sorcery its labeling, a certain mindset that holds to only two things. Foremost, an indomitable will with the passion to live. To ardently live, not merely survive, at any cost in the face of all odds, unequal or unnatural. LIVE!-ism. Secondly, a particular nonchalance in motivation. Non-dictated, distinct from the mores of ‘accepted’ society, and self-determined, this motivation is primarily concerned with reveling in the exhilaration of conquering fear. While beer, booty, booty, and battle are the temporary rewards and respite the S&S hero allows and accepts, it is the thrill of battle, the lure of overcoming challenge and outlasting that other, that rises supreme.
Amazon | Rogue Blades Entertainment
About Jason M. Waltz:
JASON M WALTZ ~ Jason is a lot of things, most often not the exact one needed at any given moment. He does believe in heroes, though, and strives to bring the heroic through presentation and publication. Recently Jason has taken to his own writing again, finding a few acceptances at Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword and Sorcery, in the new Weird Western anthology Monster Fight at the O.K. Corral Vol. 2, and in Parallel Universe Publications’ Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Vol. 7 anthology. Once Neither Beg Nor Yield emphatically answers the burning riddle of Sword & Sorcery, Jason aims to buckle down and begin gathering rejections in earnest. Heroes: They’re what Jason—and Rogue Blades—does, whether through writing, publishing, teaching, or reading. Check ‘em out at rogue-blades.com/jmw
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