Motivational Monday: No Greater Agony

 

[Link] Stepping Into Raymond Chandler’s Shoes Showed Me the Power of Fiction

by Denise Mina

“The Second Murderer” is the first Philip Marlowe book written by a woman. Me.

Marlowe is, of course, the most famous creation of Raymond Chandler, perhaps the most famous of American crime novelists. Reading Chandler was always a guilty pleasure of mine, his vision of 1930s Los Angeles unfolding vividly for me all the way in cold and rainy Glasgow. On the one hand, there is his glorious writing, his blue-collar heroes and the occasional profound observations about the human experience. But there’s also his liberal use of racial slurs, his portrayal of people of color and homosexuals as grotesque caricatures and the fact that his work is suffused with misogyny. It takes a strong stomach to read a story in which a woman needs a slap to calm her down.

Crime fiction was, and is, anti-feminist. That’s why I chose to write it in the first place.

Traditionally, women never had agency in crime fiction, and when I started out I wanted to try to shift the dial, casting in with a movement that already counted such lights as Sara Paretsky, Marcia Talley, Mary Wings and Val McDermid. The way I saw it, crime fiction was the new social novel, wrapped in a genre that already seemed to be reaching a wide audience of largely female readers.

The knock on commercial fiction is that it’s often written so quickly that it tends to simply mirror, for good or ill, the social mores of the time that produced it. Chandler may have been a misogynist, but he definitely lived in misogynist times, and his fiction reflects that. When values change or views become more enlightened, these kind of books tend to age poorly. Sometimes this aging-out happens quite suddenly: How tired the endless copaganda procedurals seem now; how tone-deaf the books that end with the police justifiably shooting a suspect to death. The tsunami of books featuring women with faulty memories cannot be read in the same way since the #MeToo movement or in the context of changing attitudes about sexual violence and child abuse. Overnight, yesterday’s resilient trope seems hopelessly offensive, even dangerous.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/opinion/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-denise-mina.html

HORROR AND HEROICS TAKE OVER REESE UNLIMITED! BARRY REESE’S ‘THE STRAW-MAN BOOK ONE’ DEBUTS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Known for his action-packed pulp storytelling, award-winning author Barry Reese brings a new twist to his Reese Unlimited Universe. Sovereign City's borders harbor horror and terror has a new name in THE STRAW-MAN BOOK ONE.

Grove's Folly is a sleepy little town on the outskirts of Sovereign City. Known mostly for its history with the Revolutionary War, most people visit the town for its annual Pumpkin Festival... but something dark and frightening lies beneath the soil of Grove's Folly.

Now that something has awakened, plunging the town into a hellish new reality. Who or what is the Straw-Man and why does this strange cryptid haunt the streets at night? From the mind of award-winning author Barry Reese comes the newest series set in his shared pulp adventure universe.

THE STRAW-MAN BOOK ONE by Barry Reese. From Reese Unlimited and Pro Se Productions.

With a haunting cover by Luis Filipe and print formatting and logo design by Antonino lo Iacono, THE STRAW-MAN BOOK ONE is available for 9.99 via Amazon.

The first volume in a new series from Barry Reese, THE STRAW-MAN BOOK ONE is also available on Kindle formatted by lo Iacono and Marzia Marina for $2.99. Kindle Unlimited Members can read this exciting tale for free!

For more information on this title, interviews with the author, or digital copies for review, email editorinchief@prose-press.com.

To learn more about Pro Se Productions, go to www.prose-press.com. Like Pro Se on Facebook at Pro Se Productions.

Motivational Monday: Writing Under Water

 

[Link] Wordless

(Originally Posted on December 30, 2021. It's older, but still well worth a read for when you feel the words are broken and just won't make their way to the page.)

----------------------------------------

by Christa Faust

It’s Been A Year. Again. Next year looks to be more of the same and then some. But this isn’t one of those “how about that 2021?” Happy Fucking New Year type of posts.

I want to talk about not talking. Or more specifically, not writing.

Something has happened to me over the past couple of years. Something I can’t seem to put into words. Because that’s the problem. My words. They seem… broken.

We have all been playing this fun (not actually fun) game over the interminable eternity of this Fucking Pandemic. The options may be different on each person’s list, but the underlying multiple choice shuffle is the same.

Why am I like this right now?

Read the full article: https://christafaust.com/wordless/

Unleashed at last! League of Monsters, the new anthology published by Mechanoid Press Publishing is now available!

It Takes Monsters to Fight Monsters! 

Count Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster. The Werewolf. The Gill Creature. 

You’ve seen various versions of them countless times. But never like this! 

It is the 1950s, and a cadre of Nazis known as the Last Reich are plotting to remake the world in their own horrible image.

Moira Harker, the great-great-granddaughter of Mina Harker and the last living member of a secret group of monster hunters known as the Order of Van Helsing, has brought together history’s most frightening creatures to prevent even greater monsters from taking over the world.

Within these pages you’ll meet: Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, a reluctant werewolf, and a gill creature and his beautiful telepathic handler.

These monsters have joined forces and now travel the globe saving the world from an even greater threat.

Join James Palmer (Monster Earth), Russell Nohelty (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter), Bobby Nash (the Hunter Houston: Horror Hunter series), Teel James Glenn (A Cowboy in Carpathia: A Bob Howard Adventure), Jessica Nettles (The Children of Menlo Park), and Adrian Delgado as they take you where monsters dwell, inside the… League of Monsters! Cover art by the invincible Mark Maddox, with cover design by the incredible Jeffrey Hayes.

League of Monsters is available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover at the following retailers:

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGJJPPHC

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CGJJPPHC

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CGJJPPHC

Don’t be afraid of the dark.

New submission opportunity -- Remixing Giallo

Attention, all you folks looking for the coolest anthology ever to submit your crazy, creepy, sexy, bloody little stories to. I'm putting together the story collection outlined below. You're officially invited to submit. 

Giallo Re/Mixed & Re/Imagined
(AKA Sending Argento Into Space)

If you're a fan of Argento, Fulci, Bava, or Martino, you are familiar with the Giallo film genre. But did you know it got its name from yellow mystery books? Of course, the movies took it way past mere mystery into something almost synonymous with “Eurosleaze.”

Black-gloved killers. Sexed-up victims. Blood so red and thick it could never be real. But at its heart, a Giallo thriller was always wrapped up around a twisted murder mystery story that kept viewers guessing until the final blood-drenched scene. 

That's the vibe I'm hoping to recapture here in this anthology. 

Twisted mysteries that have one foot in violence and another in crazyville and bring to mind classics such as Twitch of the Death Nerve, Deep Red, What Have You Done with Solange?, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Stage Fright, Baba Yaga, Tenebre, All the Colors of the Dark, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Blood and Black Lace, and Four Flies on Gray Velvet. (If you haven't watched any of these, please do. They're awesome-tastic, whether you choose to write for this anthology or not. 

The twist on this, though, for this anthology is:

Each story must take the standard tropes of Giallo and put it in a different genre setting. No two stories can be in the same setting. Wrap your story proposal in the trappings of sci-fi, Western, urban fantasy, summer camp horror, Gothic romance, Dickensian, superheroes, sword and sorcery, planetary romance, 70s urban crime, haunted house ghost story, medical thriller, martial arts, bodice ripper, samurai epic, etc. 

Sound like fun? I thought so. 

The details:

• Stories must be between 5-7k words.
• Stories must use the tropes of Giallo (gloves, up-close killings like knives and garotes, no poisoner or sniper types).
• Stores must be in a setting other than traditional Giallo.
• Story pitches must be approved before you turn in the story. Someone else may have already claimed the Western you had an idea about.
• R is welcome. Hard R can be even better. But let's avoid NC-17 or X though. 
• All characters must be original. No public domain characters or characters from Giallo flicks that would need to be licensed.
• The best Giallo stories still drop clues like any good mystery, even with all those twists and turns in the plot. 
• When in doubt, remember that "over the top" is your best friend here. 
• All stories will be approved by the editor, me. Speed is good, but this isn't first-come, first-served. 
• If you have questions, please email me for clarification.

Let me see your ideas, and we'll put a super cool book together. 

========================

For those of you who were interested in the Giallo-inspired book (Giallo Re/Mixed & Re/Imagined), here's a sample of what I'm looking for when you send your pitches. You can also consider the Samurai epic setting no longer on the board. It's all mine. 

Petals Fallen Off and Scattered So Suddenly

A giallo-style story set in Edo-era Japan

by Sean Taylor

Hisakichi is a ronin who wanders Japan taking jobs as he finds them. Sute is a disgraced geisha already kicked out of her master's chambers and now wanted for the deaths of three of his heirs. If found by the Daimyō's guards, she will be beheaded with barely an afterthought of a trial.  

Having found Sute (whose name means "foundling") weeping over the latest victim), Hisakichi is determined to protect her and vows to buy back her honor by solving the crime and finding the true killer. 

The killer slices the neck of each victim with a kaiken, the weapon of choice for a woman for self-defense, and leaves a scattering of cherry blossoms beside each body (which signifies the idea of mikkaminumanosakura, or sudden change in life). There is also a single bloody koto (gauntlet) left on the other side of the body, the one worn for the murder, which only makes the killing so much more confusing -- a warrior's glove paired with a woman's blade and a ritual flower.

But he's no detective or wise man, so he knows the odds aren't in his favor, even as the killer picks up the pace almost as if to taunt him. Not only that, the woman he has vowed to protect is also hiding a devastating secret from him.

Motivational Monday: Failsafe

 

Bonus Sunday Funny: A Good -Ism

 In that case, I'm a retro-vintage

deconstructional pulp revivalist.

Yeah, that works.

[Link] 7 Tips for Getting Back to Writing After Summer

by Jenna Avery

Today I’m addressing a question regarding getting back to writing after summertime.

“My kids are starting school again. (Whew! Ack!) Truth be told, it’s been hard to write this summer with so much going on between family vacations and organizing summer camps. How can I regain my momentum after a rocky summer, writing-wise?”

Hey, good question! Many screenwriter-parent types are asking ourselves similar questions right now. Whether you’ve been writing intermittently, or not at all, the good news is that as your kids head to their classrooms, you can tap into the “back-to-school” energy they’ll be experiencing too.

And this is true whether or not you’re a parent. There’s a natural activation energy that arises in the fall and spring in particular, so this is a smart time to revisit your writing practice and give it a refresh if needed.

Even pro writers disrupted by the strike and accustomed to regular writing deadlines might be floundering a bit right now too, even though it’s an excellent time to dust off and work on passion and side spec projects.

Here are some tips to help get you back in the saddle again.

Read the full article: https://scriptmag.com/ask-the-coach/7-tips-for-getting-back-to-writing-after-summer

Flinch Books announces Six-Gun Legends!

Chums, my Flinch Books publishing partner John Bruening and I are back in the saddle with our thirteenth pulp-pounding book, SIX-GUN LEGENDS, now LIVE on Amazon in print and Kindle editions! Lasso the link in the Comments below!

SIX-GUN LEGENDS returns to those thrilling days of yesteryear with stories by ten talented writers: Fred Adams, Terry Alexander, Jim Beard, John C. Bruening, Trevor Holliday, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Terrence McCauley, Will Murray, Christopher Ryan and Duane Spurlock. Each of these storytellers spins a tale of the mystery, mayhem, intrigue, and adventure that inevitably unfold when one of these legendary entities steps out of the collective imagination and into the spotlight with guns blazing.

Cover illustration by Ted Hammond.

Available on Amazon.

News of the World -- Putting Summer Behind Me

To start off, I realize that my posting has been lax with summer. Honestly, even the past two weeks, I've been mostly just posting the "easy stuff" -- press releases, inspirational quotes from writers, interesting article links, that kind of thing. It's been a few months since I actually posted the "bread and butter" stuff like original articles, interviews, and (one of my favorite regulars) Movie Reviews for Writers. All of that will be returning. 

A Tohru-tastic Christmas memory.

But for me, I guess I just need to get this all off my chest in order to move on with more compelling content. 

My summer sucked. Probably the absolute worst summer of my life. I know I can be prone to exaggeration, but not this time. I'll reduce it to a bullet list:

• Week 1 -- My mom died unexpectedly.
• Week 2 -- My cat, Tohru, whom I had kept as a pet for 16 years, died.
• Two weeks ago  -- My dog, Boomer, my best fur buddy for 16 years, died. 

The thing about each of these is that any one of them would have driven me into grief. But the closeness of them to each other and the order in which they happened, only made the summer that much more painful. As much as I loved my cat and dog, their deaths only made the feelings of my mom's death start to swirl all over again -- this time combined with the memories of my sweet furbabies. 

Boomer, in repose,
and in my reading chair.

So, yeah, I spent pretty much the whole season more than a bit disengaged from the world around me. And that meant everything suffered, relationships, housework, responsibilities, all of it, but for the purpose of this blog, it meant my writing suffered. 

My actual stories.

My writing about writing (such as here on the blog).

My networking with other writers and publishers. 

All of it. 

My home is so quiet now that the sheer enormity of it makes it difficult to write. Gone are the skittering clicks from where Boomer would walk on the tile and linoleum on claws I had forgotten to trim. Gone also are the whining meows while Tohru wandered through the house wondering where her people were. Those things weren't distractions. They weren't annoyances. They were apparently the soundtrack of my life I needed in order to work. And now I have to get used to a new composition and learn how to work with it now. 

It still doesn't seem fair. But as long as I still want to be a writer, fair or not, it simply is what it is. (Though I have always hated that saying.) Que sera, sera. C'est la vie. 

MeMe's house, the best place on earth to write.

I'm still a living, dark-minded swirl of melancholy and memories, but I finally feel like maybe I can put the pen to the page again (at least figuratively, anyway -- I haven't written anything by hand other than a grocery list or a hall pass for one of my students in years). I even visited MeMe's house (where I go to focus when I need a writing retreat) and managed to finish two stories that I owed to my publishers. I didn't get the rest of the stories knocked out like I wanted to, but I considered those two stories a major tick mark in the win column considering my frame of mind. Now, I just need to finish the editing process on them both and send them off for publication. 

Anyway, I feel like words might be coming back to me. As such, I hope this month to finally give you a return to form for the blog. And that means interviews, original articles, movie reviews, the whole enchilada. At least, that's the plan. Hence this more personal post. It's a start. 

Now, we'll just have to see if I'm not misreading my own signals. 

Wouldn't be the first time. 

=============================================

My beautiful mom. whom
I miss very, very much. 

Motivational Monday: Drilling and Blasting

 

[Link] All Hail the Long-Suffering Cadaver

by Amor Towles

Once at the center of the murder mystery, the cadaver has become increasingly incidental to the action and now figures as little more than a prop.

For over 100 years the cadaver, that unsung hero of murder mysteries, has been accommodating, gracious and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proved more reliable. Since the murder mystery first gained popularity, there have been two world wars, multiple economic crises, dance crazes and moonshots, the advent of radio, cinema, television and the internet. Ideas of right and wrong have evolved, tastes have changed. But through it all, the cadaver has shown up without complaint to do its job. A clock-puncher of the highest order, if you will.

Meanwhile, many of our most revered detectives have proved rather difficult to work with. They have been variously arrogant, antisocial or persnickety. Witnesses have often been skittish or defensive. Many have intentionally sowed confusion through lies of omission or commission springing from their own sins and prejudices.

But decade in and decade out, the cadaver has remembered its lines and hit its mark. This despite the fact that it has borne the brunt of a thousand humiliations. Having been subjected to that most definitive form of violence, it has had to lie undiscovered, often in a cellar or back alley, overnight. Once the police arrive, our cadaver has been poked and prodded, its pockets emptied. After being shuttled to the morgue and laid out on a slab, it has been cut open, unceremoniously. Almost from the moment the corpse is discovered, it has been an object of slander. Family, friends and acquaintances who tended to be complimentary and discreet when our victim was alive are suddenly enumerating personal failings and sharing rumors of infidelity or financial malfeasance. And all of this — the loss of life, the autopsies, the recriminations — the cadaver has suffered in silence, on our behalf.

The cadaver’s unwavering professionalism is all the more admirable given the diminishment of its standing over time. If we look back to the so-called golden age of detective fiction, in the 1920s and ’30s, when the form was reaching its apotheosis in the works of Agatha Christie, the cadaver maintained an almost enviable status. After all, it was the cadaver who set the wheels of a mystery in motion.

The stories of the era tend to begin in a relatively benign and inviting manner. A small assembly of family members or friends might gather for the weekend in a rambling country manor. The setting and circumstances are not that different from what one might expect to find in a play by Chekhov or a novel by Henry James. That is, until, with the scream of a housemaid, the cadaver is discovered. Its sudden appearance sprawled on the study floor with a knife in its back is what transforms the book in our hand, taking us from the realm of domestic drama into that of the whodunit.

But in the golden age, the cadaver didn’t simply get things going. It maintained its position at the center of the story from the moment of its discovery until the denouement. As Hercule Poirot often pointed out, it was the psychology of the victim that was paramount. In life, was the cadaver lascivious? Unscrupulous? Greedy? To understand who had most likely monkeyed with the brakes of her car or poisoned her cup of tea, one first had to understand whom she had loved and whom she had spurned; whom she had enriched and whom she had cheated.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/books/review/amor-towles-cadaver-murder-mystery.html

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION PRESENTS MYSTERY MEN (& Women) Vol 9

Airship 27 Production is thrilled to present the ninth volume in this showcase anthologies series featuring new pulp heroes created by today’s writers. Jamie Ramos offers up ex-super cop Steelgrave who comes face to face with an old foe on the streets of Detroit.  Jonathan Sweet introduces the beautiful and deadly, Black Wraith who investigated the blackmailing of a U.S. Senator. Mark Allen Van’s gangster hero, Killdevil, returns in a second outing when learns a woman is targeted by her own husband. Jarrett Mazza introduces Arnold Zigler, an enhanced athlete soon to be known by his secret identity as The Zig Zag Man.

“Our readers love this series,” states Airship 27 Production’s Managing Editor Ron Fortier. “The showcase format offers these wonderful writers the opportunity to present to the world their own unique spins on classic pulp heroes and Volume Nine is a perfect example of that. Each of the tales is fast-paced, exciting, and full of action and adventure.”

Airship 27’s award-winning Art Director, Rob Davis provides not only the interior illustrations but also the colorful cover this time featuring Mark Allen Van’s Killdevil. This is another stellar entry in a series readers demanded.

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

Available now from Amazon in paperback and soon on Kindle.

Motivational Monday: Paving Roads

 

Motivational Monday: Write To Read

 

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION PRESENTS AFTER SUNSET

At seventy-five years old, John Taylor lives in an old church on Indian land, reflecting on his time as sheriff of Devil's Creek Run, a mining community that was desperately trying to find its way in the harsh and unforgiving land of the frontier west. From dealing with devastating droughts, an Indian uprisings, and legendary outlaws, he finds himself surrounded by the ghosts of those that he has lost along the trail, both friends and enemies as he reflects on it long after sunset.

Jonathan Casey delivers an original western focusing the spotlight on one man and how the land and history shaped him. This tale of the rugged frontier packs an emotional wallop.

Colorado artist Sam Salas provides the interior illustrations and Shannon Hall the dramatic cover, with Art Director Rob Davis doing book design.

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

Available now at Amazon.

Motivational Monday: Literary Alchemy

 

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION PRESENTS THE LUCIFER STONE

When mysterious rocks fall out of the night sky, Princeton Astronomer Peter Armstrong is kidnapped by a group of criminals led by a mysterious little fellow named Stuka. He discovered the rocks emanate lethal radiation that melts people. Managing to escape, Armstrong soon realizes that he is the target of not only the gangsters but also foreign agents wishing to possess the stones and develop them into super weapons.

Writer Bob Madison delivers a fast-paced, old fashion pulp adventure reminiscent of the classic movie matinee serials. The action is non-stop with a cast of truly colorful characters. Artist Kevin Paul Shaw Broden provides the interior illustrations and Adam Benet Shaw the colorful cover. Book design by Art Director Rob Davis.

“This is an old fashion pulp yarn,” reports Airship 27 Production Managing Editor, Ron Fortier. “Madison is a professional writer and delivers a fast-paced action tale with some very likable characters.”

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTION – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

Available now from Amazon.