Pulp

You feel better now? Here, try some , (I'll put extra butter on it...none of that fake stuff either.)

There must some kind of market for 'pulp'. I guess it is like all other books, write a great story and it will sell...........?

I wish I could write one. (Wonders off.......)

AE Merritt=fun stuff. Haggard, too. I don't write that style, but I like reading it. And I have many Merritt and Haggard books on my shelves.

Several years ago, I won at auction a dozen issues of the old magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries. They were around in the 30s and 40s reprinting fun adventure, horror, and fantasy. That was my intro to Merritt and many others. I highly recommend him.

I have the first one: and a whole bunch more.

Man those images are huge. I won't post any more. But I think I'll pull them out tonight and reread a bunch. Thanks, willie.

Willie, I covet that book.

I've only got a few FFMs, mostly with Hodgson or Haggard, but I've got several fair-sized stacks of other pulps. Fifteen years ago or so I lucked into a source of Argosy issues at an antique store in Gallatin, Tennessee. I wound up with about 40 from the early 20s to the mid 40s, including one Merritt cover (Snake-Mother) and one Burroughs cover (Apache Devil). I've got a couple of Doc Savages, a few Weird Tales, a fair number of Astoundings, Amazings and Fantastics, some westerns, and whatever else I've been able to scavange from antique stores in the surrounding towns. Plus, I've probably got a couple of thousand hard-back and paperback reprints of pulp-lit. It's all great stuff.

No argument from over here. I was raised on a steady diet of Doc Savage and Tom Swift.

Pulp plotting? How is that any different than a three or four act play, or the typical story arcs in about 90% of all published writing?

Eat my pulp, mfa highbrows.

How Lester Dent, biographer of Doc Savage, went about writing pulp plots:

http://www.miskatonic.org/dent.html

I can't say I was raised on pulp, having choked down a large volume of Tolkein-derivative sword-and-sorcery in my mis-spent youth. Over the past several months I've been devouring the Hard Case Crime line, which reprints pulp crime novels with a sprinkling of new titles. It has drastically affected my writing, even though it's not in my preferred genre (vaguely dark speculative fiction).

I suffered through The Story of Edgar Sawtelle just last week, partly out of a family obligation. Through the first 200 pages I was itching for any sort of plot movement, having grown accustomed to head-long rush of crime fiction.

I think there is something to be appreciated in books that seek to accomplish no more than a couple of hours of entertainment. I'm thinking I'd rather be writing those sorts of stories myself.

This is exactly what I write!!! My icky bug is supposed to be b-movie pulpy. I've always liked those books the best.

The nearest I've read to that lately has been Mandibles by Jeff Strand.

I've never had much use for a book that drones on page after page of the MC's personal problems and inner thoughts. Sure, I want to know the character, but damn, I want the story to move!

I get bitched at all the time by my writer's group for not delving deep enough into my characters, but none of them read horror, or any kind of pulp. A lot of them are more literary than I am.

I like my stories to get to the point. That's why the fantasy I wrote is only 78,000 words.

I miss Doc Savage, E. Rice Burroughs, Hardy Boys, the list goes on!

There are some authors that remind me of the old days, but they are also keeping with the flow, like James Rollins, Clive Cussler, Jack DuBrul, and Preston & Child. No, they don't specifically write horror, but their stories tend to move at more than a snail's pace.

As for horror, though not pulpy, Bentley Little, Scott Nicholson, Elizabeth Forrest all do pretty good.

I've only read one Conan, which some would call pulpy, but it was the best thing Robert Jordan ever did.