Categories
Science Fiction and Fantasy

Robert E. Howard

I got some RPGs this week from the Indie Press Revolution sale, so I got to read Dogs in the Vineyard on the train to and from word (Car problems), and I read the two first Sorcerer supplements. Sword and Sorcerer made me think of Conan, and thinking of Conan made me read the biography on the Robert E. Howard site. Interesting stuff.

Don't want to be alive when I'm 25

When Howard was my age, he was dead for 7 years. How’s that for a sobering thought. Before committing suicide, he got to be a successful writer, taking that young angst and enthusiasm we would pour into roleplaying games or fan-fic or whatever and putting it into stories which will probably endure long after I am dead. He didn’t fret with editing or rewrites – except maybe that time when, you know, the magazine couldn’t go to press because the only copy of a story’s manuscript was with the cover artist, and he had to write the story again from scratch. He lived his stories, and I guess he had a lot of fun writing them.

Still, killed himself.

Of course, reading that sympathetic biography, you wonder if he didn’t quit while ahead.

Maybe you realize that if your life isn’t going to be Kings of the Night, it might as well be Worms of the Earth.