Monday, January 29, 2024

Neither Beg Nor Yield: Stories With S&S Attitude, edited by Jason M. Waltz

 

Release date: January 26, 2024
Subgenre: Sword and Sorcery Anthology
 

About Neither Beg Nor Yield:

 

Can you handle the truth?
 

Sword & Sorcery has always been about the attitude.

 
Stop seeking elaborate definitions. Cease arguing over semantics and accoutrements. Quit making it more difficult than necessary. Learn the fundamental immutability of the S&S Riddle: Protagonists with nonchalant mercenary motivations & indomitable wills. It’s all in their attitude.

 

The definition of S&S has never been clearer.

 
Sword & Sorcery warriors are very, very dangerous people, considered barbaric, who act according to their own codes of honor in pursuit of their own ends. Brothers (and sisters) to THE WILD BUNCH, comrades of the SEVEN SAMURAI, partners of every MAN IN BLACK, and riders in every WILD HUNT. They don’t just seize the day—they seize Life itself by the throat and squeeze until it begs. They don’t falter in the dark or before the unknown—they spit in the face of Death itself and stomp it into the dirt until it yields.

“Life is not breath but action.” ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

“Fear won't stop you from dying, but it can stop you from living.” ~ James Norbury

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
~ Charles Bukowski

“Laugh or die.”
~ Angélique Kidjo


NEITHER BEG NOR YIELD: STORIES WITH S&S ATTITUDE is filled with over 180,000 words in 20 stories! This is THE BOOK OF SWORD & SORCERY that will define the genre for generations. Reading the powerful tales from these storytellers will permanently answer the question: WHAT IS SWORD & SORCERY?
 

It’s always been its attitude!

 
Discover the truth as Eadwine Brown, Adrian Cole, Glen Cook, Steve Dilks, Chuck Dixon, Phil Emery, Steven Erikson, John R. Fultz, Steve Goble, John C. Hocking, Howard Andrew Jones, William King, Joe R. Lansdale, David C. Smith, Jeff Stewart, Keith J. Taylor, Frederick Tor, Eric Turowski, Bill Ward, Lawrence A. Weinstein, and C.L. Werner share it!

 

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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