[Link] Molly Crabapple's 15 rules for creative success in the Internet age

by Molly Crabapple

I'm a visual artist and writer. What this means is that I have done most things one can do that involve making pictures (as to making words, I'm far newer). I've drawn dicks for Playgirl. I've painted a six foot tall replica of my own face and carefully calligraphed things people have said to me on the Internet, then displayed it in a Tribeca gallery, as a sort of totem. I've live-sketched snipers in Tripoli. I've illustrated self-published kids books for ten dollars a page. I've balanced on jury-rigged scaffolding on a freezing British dawn, painting pigs on the walls of one of the world's poshest nightclubs.

I've made my living as an artist for eight years, almost entirely without galleries, and until relatively recently without agents. It was a death-slog that threw me into periodic breakdowns . I'm pretty successful now. I make a good living, even in New York, have a full time assistant who gets a middle-class salary, and have a book coming out with a major publisher. I feel so lucky, and so grateful, for every bit of this.

My success would not have been possible without the internet. I've used every platform, from Craigslist and Suicide Girls to Livejournal, Myspace, Kickstarter, Tumblr and Twitter. I'm both sick of social media and addicted to it. What nourishes you destroys you, and all that. The internet is getting increasingly corporate and centralized, and I don't know that the future isn't just going back to big money platforms. I hope its not.

Here's what I've learned.

Read the full article: http://boingboing.net/2014/11/04/molly-crabapples-rules-for-c.html

Nuggets #34 -- All the Senses

I prefer words that touch the senses through not

only sight and sound, but also through smell, 

touch, and taste as much as I can get away with. 

And combinations of them can be doubly effective.

AIRSHIP 27 – THE PODCAST!

The crew of Airship 27 Productions is thrilled to announce the start of a brand new hour long podcast devoted to the world of New Pulp Fiction. It will be titled, “ZONE 4 presents AIRSHIP 27,” as the show will be part of the Zone 4 family of podcast currently sponsored by the Comic Related website.

Brant Fowler, the creator/engineer/host of the long running Zone 4 made the announcement in a special segment just released. The new pulp-related hour long show will be hosted by the creative team behind the popular new pulp publisher, Managing Editor Ron Fortier and Art Director Rob Davis. No stranger to podcasts, Fortier has been a regular host on Zone 4 for the past two years and a semi-regular on PULPED, created and produced by Tommy Hancock.

“This just seemed like the next step for us,” Fortier admitted happily. “When Brant brought up the idea, both of us jumped at the chance. Rob and I want to make the once a month show an informal, fun place to share current news on what is happening in the world of New Pulp Fiction. So, although the program will bear our company name, rest assured we’ll be discussing what is happening, going on and coming out from all the new pulp publishers out there.” Davis has even suggested the possibility of having guest on from time to time.

The show will post the second week of each month and be available via the Comic Related website and on I-tunes; links to each episode will also appear on the company’s Facebook Page. Adds Fortier, “One of the things we’ve love to do with the show is use is as a platform to answer questions from our many fans out there; the Loyal Airmen who support and buy our books. All people have to do is send their questions to either myself and Rob and we’ll make it special part each show to answer them.”

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – PULP FICTION FOR A NEW GENERATION!

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #308 -- Arting and Selling

Is there a difference between writing for art and writing to sell? What is it (or what are they)?

I believe this is a vast difference, but I also believe the two intersect as well.

What do I mean by that? Well, I'll give you two examples, each an inverse of the other.

Example #1: When I take a writing gig for a publisher who is paying for a story, such as for the Zombies vs. Robots story I did for IDW, I have to write to the specification that the publishers gives me, regardless of what my art dictates. If the publisher wants 7000 words and I feel the "true" story needs 11,000 words, then I have to save that "true" story for something else and come up with a new 7000 word story instead. The same goes for other criteria too. In fact, I have a publisher who despises first person accounts, so that artistic tool is taken out of my toolbox when I work for that publisher. However, within the constraints of that 7000 word story, my goal is to write the most artistic story I'm capable of creating.

Example #2: For my short story collection Show Me A Hero, I entered the stories fairly unhindered. Almost everything was up to my artistic discretion. Story length, experimental formats, POV, tense, etc. I had a full and ready artistic toolbox from which to choose my colors and brushes (so to speak). However, I also had a little voice of reason in the back of my head telling me that in order for a collection of literary-focused super hero stories to sell to the public, I'd better make the decision to reign in some of the more "out there" ideas and put colors and brushes away for this project. I had to self-limit my art in order to make the finished canvas more likely to be successful.

So yes, writing for art's sake can be freeing, and writing for sale's sake can be limiting, but the two can comfortably co-exist within a writer who strives to write the best stories within the parameters the market has officially or unofficially set.

I'll leave it with this analogy: If I want to write a Shakespearean sonnet, then I can't write a 20-line poem without rhyme. If I do, it ceases to be a sonnet. However, within those 14 lines, I can write the best rhyming poem with ending couplets that I can create.

And that, my friends, it the art of selling fiction (or perhaps the knack of selling art -- take your choice).

[Link] 2 Rules for Making Time to Write

by K.M. Weiland

“‘It is only half an hour’—‘it is only an afternoon’—‘it is only an evening’—people say to me over and over again—but they don’t know that it is impossible to command oneself sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes—or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it.” —Charles Dickens (writing to Maria Beadnell Winter, a childhood sweetheart, who wished to make an appointment with him)

How is it, I’d like to know, that Dickens can get away with saying something like that, and we can’t? Well, he is Dickens, I suppose. As a famous and beloved author, he could get away with being concise and even slightly snarky. Or could it be the other way around—that he was a famous and beloved author because he wrote just such notes?

Making Time to Write: The Greatest Struggle

One of the greatest struggles (yes, add another one to the list) of the writer’s life is making the time to write. For some reason or another, most non-writers have a hard time fathoming that writing must be approached with the same dedication, discipline, and time management of a regular job. Family members and friends are likely to give us hurt and dirty looks when we sequester ourselves behind closed doors for yet another evening/night/morning/week of typing away. Add to that unfortunate guilt our own tendencies to procrastinate, and our already overloaded schedules often seem to have no place at all for our writing.

But guess what? If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer.

Read the full article: http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2008/07/making-time-to-write.html

[Link] Your Book Landing Page—Can’t-Miss Headline Writing Secrets (and Mistakes to Avoid)

by Casey Demchak

When I was a kid there were word games where you could read a simple letter—and if you circled every fifth word you would get a secret message of some kind.

It was neat. So neat in fact that I developed a similar strategy that works wonders on website landing pages that are designed to sell books.

The strategy is built around the fact that before anyone reads your website sales page, they will almost always skim your headlines first. If all a visitor does is skim your sales page headlines and subheads, they should receive a concise selling message and a confident call to action.

This “secret” message will often entice them to go back and read all the copy between your headlines to learn more details about your book.

Here is an example of how this headline sequence technique can look on a web sales page promoting a business book.

Continue reading: http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/12/your-book-landing-page-cant-miss-headline-writing-secrets-and-mistakes-to-avoid/

[Link] Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living

by Nick Pipatrazone

I am not a writer first. I have a family, and without them I would have little reason to want to write -- or to do anything else. My desire to create is held in silence during the day, so that my literary moments can be focused and absolute.

I also remain an admirer and student of Dubus’s fiction, from the haunting “A Father’s Story” (pdf) to the terse “Leslie in California,” but have recently been drawn to his essays. One piece in particular, “The Habit of Writing,” appeared in On Writing Short Stories, an anthology edited by my undergraduate mentor, Tom Bailey. The essay is otherwise difficult to find, but is the most refined presentation of Dubus’s fictional process.

“I gestate: for months, often for years,” he begins. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins in “To R.B.,” Dubus likens ideas to a form of pregnancy, a self within the self. Stories “grow” inside him. Like children, stories are acts of love. Both are to be cared for, but sooner or later, must be released into the world to live of their own accord.

Dubus writes an idea in a notebook, and then leaves it alone: “I try never to think about where a story will go.” Planning is an act of control, and “I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.” Ever the Roman Catholic, Dubus first sees “characters’ souls.” Faces appear next, and that “is all I need, for most of my ideas are situations, and many of them are questions.” Only when Dubus sees the first two scenes is a story “ready for me to receive it.” Then he writes.

coverIt was not always that way. Dubus used to plan the plots of stories, but those stories were “dead long before I put the final period on the page.” He needed to complete multiple drafts for stories to “tell me what they were.” A novella, Adultery, “took seven drafts, four hundred typed pages…to get the final sixty pages,” a method that “seems foolish now.” Hours spent on discarded pages were replaced with gestation of idea.

Dubus changed his method while writing a story, “Anna.” The narrative was to be told from her point of view, but Dubus struggled to “become her.” He attempted a different approach:

“At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook. I did this for only a moment before writing, as a batter takes practice swings while he waits in the on-deck circle. In that moment I began what I call vertical writing, rather than horizontal. I had never before thought in these terms. But for years I had been writing horizontally, trying to move forward (those five pages); now I would try to move down, as deeply as I could.”

Read the full article: http://www.themillions.com/2014/11/gestation-of-ideas-on-vertical-writing-and-living.html

PRO SE PRODUCTIONS ANTES UP WITH FIRST NEW RELEASE OF 2015- POKER PULP!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

One of the most popular games of chance gets Pulpy in the latest release from Pro Se Productions. A leader in Genre Fiction, Pro Se Productions announces the debut of its latest anthology -- Poker Pulp.

“Poker,” says Pro Se Partner and Editor in Chief Tommy Hancock, “is a game made for Pulp stories. Legends, myths, even a language of sorts has grown up around the game in all its various types and guises. And of course such a game invites a colorful cast of characters to play it, as witnessed on any one of the TV channels carrying poker tournaments ad infinitum late at night a few years back. The staple of many a good Western tale and even several Noir type stories, it only made sense to take Poker into the Pulp arena. And of course, with Pro Se doing that, we’re offering you a bit of what you’d expect and a dose of something different. Each story has Poker at its center, but the writers bring their own touch to the tales, casting the game into new genres with different faces around the table than the usual suspects. But someone still wins and someone still loses in Poker Pulp, and usually more than just money.”

Aces and Eights, a Dead Man’s Hand. Life and Death dealt over a shuffle of a deck. Stakes from dollar bills to souls tossed into the center of the table. And sitting around, waiting for the turn of a card, to raise, check, bet, or fold, are rogues, scoundrels, dames, and sharps. Every single one betting their last breath on the hand they hold.

Pro Se Productions presents Poker Pulp, an anthology centered around the storied, legendary game of cards and chance. Authors J. H. Fleming, Michael Krog, and Brad Mengel deal three tales that up the ante, taking Poker to an all new level of Pulp. Action, adventure, and intrigue are the game of choice in Pro Se Productions’ Poker Pulp.

Poker Pulp features a stylish cover and striking logo design by Jeffrey Hayes, print formatting and cover layout by Percival Constantine, and eBook formatting by Russ Anderson.

This three story collection is available in print via Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/ohuhbbo and at Pro Se’s own store at http://tinyurl.com/oapepfl for $9.00. Poker Pulp is also available as an eBook for the Kindle at http://tinyurl.com/oytb6s3 and for most other formats at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/507105 for only $2.99.

For more information on this title, interviews with the author, or digital copies for review, contact Morgan McKay, Pro Se’s Director of Corporate Operations, at directorofcorporateoperations@prose-press.com.

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

Nuggets #33 -- Rick Ruby's Own Damn Story

The further I got into the story, the more I loosened up and let 

Rick and the crew just do their thing, the more the pressure 

seemed to finally fall away like broken chains. It was as if Rick himself told me to just relax and let him tell his own damn story. 

Nicole Givens Kurtz' Curse and Cure

At first glance you might not take Nicole Kurtz as a hardcore, sci-fi pulp writer. But don't let her innocent sweetness fool you. She's the real deal. Don't believe me? Then let her tell you in her own words. 

Tell us a bit about your latest work.

My latest work is included in the anthology, Athena’s Daughters, Volume II. The story is called, “Reanimated,” and it tells the story of detective Tanisha Moore. She lives in the dusty town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Burnt out, bored, and brimming with apathy, Tanisha covers the basics of her job, while dying a little bit each day. Everything changes when murdered victim, Sherri Cross, is reanimated. More than one of the women will become alive.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

One of the themes I revisit often in my work, particularly in my science fiction pulp stories are those of dehumanization and how technology is more curse than cure. In other works, I delve into themes of the other and how we define humanity evolves or has evolved. I tend to favor cyberpunk stories and those where women are kickass and smart—definitely smart because brilliance is what is truly attractive.

What would be your dream project?

My dream project would be to write a series of novels like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. One epic all-encompassing universe that not only has great depth, but also far-reaching and lasting effect on others. I have a list of authors I would love to write with or be included in an anthology with, but I will not embarrass them by having a fan-girl meltdown on your blog.

If you have any former project to do over to make it better, which one would it be, and what would you do?

If I could go back to a former project and make it better, it would be my Candidate series of books. My writing has matured so much in the last 17 years since Browne Candidate was written that I know it would be a much more rich series now. With e-books and the rights of that series being returned to me, I have the option to revisit that world and revised, expand, and re-release to the reading public. That’s the beauty of modern technology; however, I am so excited about my new pulp worlds, I’m not sure I ever will. I may keep that series as a marker for where I was as an author. Besides, the series is still quite good.


What inspires you to write?

I’m inspired by life, really. I’m in education, and the events I have witnessed in the last 13 years ended up becoming the bases for “Smoke People,” my L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Honorable Mention story. My short story, “Sweet Tooth,” which will be included in Dark Oak Press’s The Big Bad, Volume II anthology is a direct results of my childhood growing up in a housing projects in Tennessee. So, my stories are fueled by my past, by my present, and by how I want the future to be.

Of course, it totally helps to have an active imagination. Writing is a necessary process. I'm an insomniac and what else would I be doing at 3 in the morning?

What writers have influenced your style and technique?

I love pulp and mysteries, so a lot of my style is influenced by Robert B. Parker, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Sue Grafton, Kim Harrison, and classic writers, such as Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. 

My science fiction pulp series, Cybil Lewis, is set in the near-future and involves a private inspector, who incorporate so many of those other writers’ techniques and styles. Cybil is one hell of a character, and most people who read her, never forget her. That’s because she comes from such a diverse stock of authors’ influences.

I teach literature, so my writing style tends to blend all of these very diverse storytellers into my own method and style of writing.

Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or it is a science continuum?" Why? 

Writing is an art most of the time. It’s creativity despite the fact that some authors mesh styles together like a literary Frankenstein’s monster. It’s still an act of creating something new, something different, or something familiar. 

There is a method to writing, but what I have found in the last 17 years of doing this is that the method varies as much as the authors. I’m sure my opinion here flies in the face of more successful authors. 

Any other upcoming projects you would like to plug?

Yes, please! I am involved in two different anthologies in the upcoming year. To stay in the know, stay connected to me the following ways:

Twitter: @nicolegkurtz
Facebook: http://facebook.com/nlkurtz
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/nlkurtz/
Other Worlds Pulp: http://www.nicolegivenskurtz

The anthologies are: 

• The Big Bad, Volume II from Dark Oak Press. My horror short story, “Sweet Tooth,” will be included.
• Athena’s Daughters, Volume II from Silence in the Library. My horror short story, “Reanimated,” will be included.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #308 -- Pulp Weakness

You've mentioned the strengths of pulp many times, but what do you consider it's weaknesses?

Most folks who are fans of pulps will bring up the racism or sexism that is rampant in the pulps, but those are the low-hanging fruit, as far as I'm concerned.

For example, what makes so many of the original pulp tales such a letdown for me (as well as so many of the 1970s comics, for that matter) is that the characters weren't true characters at all. They were more caricatures of Gods who had very little or no humanity to them at all. They were more like forces of nature who didn't react emotionally or psychologically to any of the conflicts they had to face.

Too many of those "good ol' days" tales have the impact of one wall getting smashed into another, with no change affecting anyone, even the peripheral characters. Sure, it worked for creating a plot of one event leading into another, but that was all.

And if stories require change (or at least the opportunity to change even if one doesn't take it), then how can such a tale truly be called a story? It is more a narrative of an incident or string of actions but not really a story.

And yes, I realize that the "change" type of story is considered more important for so-called literary fiction, but even for adventure stories, why should I care if like in so many of them there's really nothing ever really at stake either physically or emotionally? (And don't say the hero's life, because let's face it that was never really in danger, nor was it likely that he or she would actually lose to the villain.)

As always, your mileage may vary.

[Link] What Books Do for the Human Soul: The Four Psychological Functions of Great Literature

by Maria Popova

“Writers open our hearts and minds, and give us maps to our own selves.”

The question of what reading does for the human soul is an eternal one and its answer largely ineffable, but this hasn’t stopped minds big and small from tussling with it — we have Kafka’s exquisite letter to his childhood friend, Maurice Sendak’s visual manifestos for the joy of reading, and even my own answer to a nine-year-old girl’s question about why we have books today.

Now comes a four-point perspective on the rewards of reading by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton and his team at The School of Life — creators of those intelligent how-to guides to modern living, spanning everything from the art of being alone to the psychology of staying sane to cultivating a healthier relationship with sex to finding fulfilling work. In this wonderful animated essay, they extol the value of books in expanding our circle of empathy, validating and ennobling our inner life, and fortifying us against the paralyzing fear of failure.

Read the full article: http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/09/school-of-life-literature-reading/

[Link] BLACK HEROES OF PULP FICTION (and we don’t mean Samuel L. Jackson or Ving Rhames)

by Balogun 

Some of you are saying “If not the movie by Quentin Tarantino, then what the in the hell is Pulp?”

Is it that nasty, fibrous stuff I hate in my orange juice, but my wife always buys, because – for some odd reason – she loves it?

What is Pulp?

Is it that early 80s British alternative rock band who sounded like a hybrid of David Bowie and The Human League?

What is Pulp?

Think adventure, exotic settings, femme fatales and non-stop action. Think larger-than-life heroes, such as Doc Savage, The Shadow, Marv, from Sin City and Indiana Jones.

The genre gets its name from the adventure fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s.

Pulp includes Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Western, Fight Fiction and other genres, but what sets pulp apart are its aforementioned fast-pace, exotic locales, linear – but layered – plots, its two-fisted action….and those characters! As author Thaddeus Howze describes them: “I like the larger than life heroes of the pulp era, loud, bombastic, often arrogant, sexy, outrageous and oh so violent…”

The first pulps were published in the late 1800s and enjoyed a golden age in the 1930s and 1940s.

And – like most genre fiction of the day…and today – Black heroes were absent. Like most genre fiction of the day, if a Black person was found in pulp fiction at all, they were the noble savage…or just the savage.

Continue reading: http://chroniclesofharriet.com/2013/11/10/black-pulp/

[Link] More Examples Of Today's New Pulp

by Derrick Ferguson

You may recall that back in April of this year I wrote an article in which I gave three examples of New Pulp in today’s popular media. My hope was to show that the Pulp tradition never really went away and is alive and well. It’s just that the tropes of Pulp have been conscripted by Action Adventure, Horror, Science Fiction and many other genres. But there’s New Pulp aplenty all around. You just have to look for it:

CONGO:
This is one of the most spectacular examples of New Pulp. And when I say spectacular I’m talking about the sheer audacity of the story which is primarily a jungle adventure with a diverse and eccentric band of explorers looking for The Lost City of Zinj and the diamond mines located there. It’s a strictly 1930’s plot successfully transplanted to the 1990’s and enhanced with modern day technology.

Continue reading: http://dlferguson-bloodandink.blogspot.com/2014/09/three-more-examples-of-todays-new-pulp.html

Happy New Year!

Happy Anniversary to my lifelong love -- Lisa Taylor!

From our wedding day
in 1988. Smartest day
of my life, hands down.

Twenty-six years ago, this very minute, Lisa Taylor and I exchanged our vows to love and cherish each other, come what may. In a world where marriages fall apart as often as people's feelings change, we've somehow managed to stay together and grow deeper in love with each passing year.

I credit that to her, of course. She's amazing. 

And in honor my amazing wife and her years of deep love for me, I'm going to repost something here today that I posted previously on Facebook. Lisa, I love you and hope you never wise up and realize you deserve better than me.

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

I was thinking last night how the nature of true love is to sacrifice yourself for another regardless of your immediate sense of emotions at any given moment. As I thought, I tried to measure my love for Lisa Taylor against that mark.

If I'm honest I've failed that terribly. I've sacrificed a great many things, but not nearly enough. I've got a long way to go in order to fully sacrifice myself for her good, her her needs, for her dreams. All the while, I've never stopped chasing mine.

Now, on one hand I could say that if I stopped chasing my dreams, I would cease to be the person she fell in love with, the person she wants to be with, the person who supplies the ying to her yang (so to speak). I could say that, but at least from my perspective (whether or not it is true is entirely beside the point) it is merely me rationalizing my own selfishness and unwillingness to put aside my dreams for her.

If there's one thing I've held onto during our almost 26 years of marriage, it is my persistent chase for my writing and publishing dreams. Sure, I may have let them sit in the background for a bit from time to time, but the moment I let my guard down, there they were again, driving me to quit one job or pursue some other, regardless of what that might mean for our long-term financial security.

Lisa's dreams are simple. She wants to be secure. And from that security, she would love more than anything to travel to other countries. By now, any 46 year old husband should have been able to take his wife on at least one trip outside the country. But I haven't. We've never had the money (ie, the financial security) from which to take that risk. It's the key thing that I feel like a failure in about our marriage. I often wonder had I never quit my good-paying, corporate job in the religious world, how many trips like that we might have been able to take and how secure our financial footing and future might be today.

But I'll never know. I did what I did to chase my dreams, and to be honest, I doubt very much I'd change that decision even if I could go back in time to have that option.

It's a sticky wicket, as the saying goes. How does someone remain true to who he or she is, and yet still manage to sacrifice all of that which makes us ourselves to enable someone else to pursue all that helps him or her remain true to who he or she is too?

Hopefully, it's a lesson I'm still learning, and maybe one day I'll know how to do that.

But, and this is point of all this relationship rambling, through all of it, Lisa has got this down, far better than I probably ever will. She has, time and time again, set aside her dreams to enable me to pursue mine. As far as I know, she has done this without ever really growing to hate me for it or hold it against me in any deep form of resentment other than a sort of annoyance. She has loved me far better than I have been able to love her.

Her birthday is coming up on the 11th of this month, and if I had it in me, if I weren't such a failure at it, I would give her the greatest gift of all -- the man she deserves, a man who could empty himself completely to pursue the things that are important to her that are at odds with his own desires, the man who could love her the way she has loved me all these years.

But I don't think I'm capable of that yet. I really don't. I still haven't chased my writing dreams far enough yet. Maybe one day I'll see that end, and then we'll travel the world together. Maybe one day she'll wise up and realize she deserves far better than me. But I certainly hope not. I'm still selfish that way.

Lisa, I love you as best I can. And thank you for loving me in a way that far supersedes by own failings.

[Link] Editing - the Big Questions

by Joe Craig

I've given a draft of my work-in-progress to a trusted brain to read. This will be the first time anybody but me has read any of this story.

I started planning it more than two years ago. I started writing the first draft on January 7th, 2014. I finished the first draft on November 20th and since then I've done some extensive re-writing, but nowhere near enough to be finished.

There's still several weeks of editing and rewriting to be done, but to carry on productively, I need a trusted brain to tell me the answers to some big questions. For example:

Does it make sense?

When you've been working on one story for so long it's very easy to lose sight of what will be clear or obvious to the first time reader and what needs elaboration. But of course, everybody who reads the book will be a first time reader once. So it has to make sense, sentence by sentence and also on a larger scale across the whole plot.

Continue reading: http://turkeyonthehill.blogspot.com/2014/12/editing-big-questions.html

Pro Se Looking for Editors and Formatters

ATTENTION- PRO SE PRODUCTIONS is embarking on a daring mission for the first two months of 2015! In order to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves, we are in search of Copy Editors, Content Editors, and Formatters for at least from January 1 through March 1. Although these are not necessarily traditional paying positions, compensation such as unlimited free digital copies of all Pro Se works for Editors as well as a royalty percentage for formatters is available.

If you have experience as an editor or would like to become an editor, email Morgan McKay at directorofcorporateoperations@prose-press.com.

If you are skilled at formatting, please email samples of your work to Tommy Hancock at editorinchief@prose-press.com.

Again, we are opening these additional positions for January through March 2015, but the positions can continue on beyond the first two months of the year potentially.

Pro Se Productions has left its mark on Genre Fiction and New Pulp in 2014. Join us on a really wild ride to kick off 2015 like no one ever has before.

[Link] Pulp Fiction: What’s It All About?

by Paul Bishop

I WAS ASKED the other day to explain what makes pulp storytelling different from other types of fiction. My kneejerk reaction was to claim, it’s hard to define, but I know it when I read it – which does little to answer the question. I’ve since thought a lot about what constitutes the pulp style of storytelling, which engenders both excoriating scorn from critics and fanatical devotion from acolytes.

By now, most readers know the term pulp was coined in reference to the thousands of inexpensive fiction magazines whose heyday spanned the 1920s through the 1950s. Printed on cheap wood pulp paper, the pulps were typically 7 inches by 10 inches in size, 128 pages long, and sported eye grabbing, luridly colored covers, and ragged, untrimmed edges. Today, the original pulps are more often collected for their gaudy covers than for the fluctuating quality of the words in between.

At the height of their popularity there were hundreds of pulp magazine titles gracing the newsstands each week. The demand for stories was as voracious as the pay per word was cheap. To make a living, a writer selling stories to the pulps had to be a word machine, churning out prose for a quarter to a half cent per word. The result of this constant demand was a straightforward, often formulatic, style of writing designed to entertain a vast audience of everyday, hardworking, folks looking for vicarious thrills and chills to escape the humdrum of their daily lives.

The pulps were also a refiner’s fire for many writers who are household names today – Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Louis L’Amour, John D. MacDonald, and others. To these men belonged the battered typewriters and hard drinking tropes, which themselves have become a cliché within the public conscious.

There were also giants of the pulp writing field whose names are not as familiar, but whose characters have gone on to become iconic examples of pop culture – Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow, Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, to name just a few, all started in the pulps. We all know their famous creations, but most would look blank if asked who the creators were.

The downside of the insatiable demand for stories to fill the pages of pulp magazines was it also guaranteed much of what was published was slapdash gruel of little to no lasting impact. It is this explosion of dross that gives pulp dismissing critics a place to hang their clichéd hats. However, the beating heart of the true pulps – the best of the stories and characters born within their pages – has shined for almost a century of popular culture.

Read the full article: http://venturegalleries.com/blog/pulp-fiction-whats/

[Link] Creative writing: when characters are difficult to get on with

by Charlotte Seager

Even authors as seasoned as Stephen King often struggle to fully imagine their inventions and once they have, the relationship can remain very uneasy

Characters don’t always do what you want. Sometimes they cause mischief, take on lives of their own, or even work against you. It’s not just a problem for inexperienced writers: George RR Martin recently admitted it was a struggle to write from Bran’s viewpoint, while Roald Dahl said he got Matilda so “wrong” that when he’d finished his first draft he had to start again from scratch.

Of course it’s not the characters’ fault. The problem lies with the author. Take Stephen King, who confessed to Neil Gaiman that writing protagonists in blue-collar jobs is more difficult nowadays because his own circumstances have changed. “It is definitely harder,” King said. “When I wrote Carrie and Salem’s Lot, I was one step away from manual labour.”

This is also true for characters’ ages, added King. “When you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time. But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little 12-year-old girl in Dr Sleep than it ever was for me to talk about five-year-old Danny Torrence because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don’t mean that Joe has the shining like Danny – but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff.”

For other authors, the difficulty can be a question of tone. When I asked Siri Hustvedt to name the character who made her struggle the most, she chose the narrator of her third novel, What I Loved. “Despite the fact that Leo is 70 (I was in my forties then), a man, a Jew born in Berlin, and an art historian, none of which describes me, I didn’t find it hard writing as an old, Jewish, male art historian,” she says. “I struggled to find the man’s emotional tone, the cadences of his prose.”

Read the full article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/nov/21/characters