Many things are cyclic.
Depression, economic and otherwise, comes and goes like the temperamental seasons of some spiral world postulated by Larry Niven.
We currently live in a system over-designed to obscure economic depression from its sufferers.
We are six years into a great depression, and publishing, particularly the kind of publisher positioned in small markets to take on new authors [like my publisher Paladin Press] and a once more robust sci-fi magazine industry, has suffered. It has become harder for genre writers and new writers to break in to print. Major publishing houses are so skittish or doing so well that they just go with the same branded authors and even hire replacement writers to write under their name!
80 years ago my grandparents went through a depression that forged their particular ethos and economic sense. During that time my grandfather read sports ‘pulps’. Others read detective, boxing, strange & amazing, or oriental adventure pulps. A pulp was a small magazine printed on cheap wood pulp paper. What was published between their pages was not worthy of the literary magazines such as Harpers. However, some of those pulp authors are still selling today, because they wrote for people who knew hard times firsthand.
In a depression the rich get super rich, the poor stay poor, and the middle class slides toward poverty. The upper crust and their deluded worshippers and imitators keep reading the same stodgy soap opera stuff. The rest tend to read adventure, fantasy, and horror, elemental genres that reach deep into human pre-history.
Online Pulp
Two years ago I wrote a small piece on this site titled the Online Pulp Project. Since then I have been experimenting with running serials on the site. We have a regular number of serial readers. I have observed and learned. Now, as I necessarily take time off from writing fiction for the site to attend to my massive editing commitment, I’m making a step that will hopefully be part of an ‘online pulp resurrection.’
Over the past six weeks I have formatted for print and proofed 11 books, 9 of these being fiction. I have 7 novels and 5 nonfiction books left to go. This will curtail my online fiction writing for another six weeks. In the meantime I will take a break from the fiction serials [except for Hemavore which is a collaboration] and serialize most of the novel The World is Our Widow.
Once our existing titles have been put into print I will return to writing serials at the pace I worked in June and July on Fruit of The Deceiver. I am not satisfied with my output and intend to increase it to one novel or novella or two novelettes per month by only writing one serial at a time. These titles are all novellas or novelettes that will end up being released in print through Amazon as small affordable pocket volumes of 60 to 120 pages, within a month of their run on the site.
Serial Schedule for 2014-15
Once mid September hits here is the schedule you can expect, with the serial and the month I expect to complete it in:
1. Hurt Stoker [Don’t worry Akira, I’m going to break your boy out of jail.], September
2. The Caddy, September
3. Poet, October
4. Shoebox, October
5. Mantid, November
6. The Spiral Case, November
7. Fat Girl, December
8. Hemavore, December [this will be ongoing and should be about done by December]
9. Winter, January
10. Out of Time, February
11. Yusuf of the Dusk, March
12. Last of The Exiles, April
13. Grace-speaker, June
As any horror writer should, I end my outline on a lucky number. The serials above are not dead ends. Hurt Stoker will restart in 2015 as Iron City Stakes, as will Out of Time, the Spiral Case, and Hemavore. Blood of Heaven and Tribes are also long-outlined projects which I plan on dusting off for late 2015, as well as finally finishing Seven Moons Deep, which I will serialize over the summer as I write it.
What About Your Story?
My average article on writing gets more reads than every category except racism and how to beat the shit out of people. As far as I can determine we have 200 writers out of the 2,000 regular visitors. If you would like to serialize some of your fiction let me lay it out for you.
1. It costs nothing
2. You get paid nothing
3. It’s all yours, with the site just serving as your promotional platform.
4. I will not have time to edit or proof it, so if you have any typos they will show up, so make it clean.
5. Anytime you want I can archive it or delete it at your request.
6. I won’t review it, because I do ‘heads up’ reviews written largely so people don’t have to read the book. I want them to read your story, not my critique of it.
7. If you would like a one-off story of yours or a serial to appear on this site just email me at jameslafond dot-com at gmail dot-com.
Online Pulp Writer’s Guidelines
Note: This article is posted in the format used for fiction, rather than that normally used for articles like this so that you can see what your work will look like.
1. No graphics
2. Send your story as a word file in the size you want it published. I won’t break it up for you.
3. Type selections are limited to section heading and italic. I will encode these for you. If you use bold-face, small-type or underlined type it will not show up.
4. If you want to respond to a comment about your story just use the comment function on the site to generate your own comment, in which you will need to cite the comment you are responding to.
5. Your story will appear under the guest author’s tag on the fiction page.
6. I can’t put hyperlinks in an article or story. The truth is Charles doesn’t trust me not to use it to escape this planet he has me trapped on with you crazy apes. If you have a site and want me to post a link on our network page I can do that! That is permitted by the Mighty Webmaster Mind.
7. If you are a female tennis pro or Olympic gymnast, and are not married, I’d like you to deliver the manuscript by hand—just write me for the street address.
I hope your writing is going well, and if you would like to share this space with me I’d be glad to have some company. I have a hard time navigating the internet. My online reading would be much less work if I could just click on the blue e with the halo and read your story in between uploading and checking mine.
This is why I really like the articles you do on writing..
Writing, art is what makes us primates worth a damn.
The pulps were for the common man and while not a populist by any means, that means something..especially in these declining times.
Horror and darkness in fiction is always relevant, although not always done well (see the cinema!). It cuts to the bone, and the raw..we are primates afraid of the dark but we can light the way and reach for something higher than just spearing the predator with eyes that shine..
On the practical writing level, if you are trying to avoid producing a dated work, then writing geared towards ordinary people—at least ordinary in the hierarchal social sense—will be less likely to become dated. Adventure, horror, science-fiction, and fantasy have all been excluded from the literary canon, I believe, in an attempt by the upper class of the literary community to preserve the relevance of their fleeting and petty social concerns. Horror and science-fiction are essentially sub genres of fantasy, although their proponents will take me to task for that.
Let's consider a definition of the novel and fantasy by Brian Aldiss, in his foreword to David Pringle's Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels—a stuffy enough old Brit, "Fantasy may be as old as literature and older than the novel; it has certainly been derided as long as there have been novels, and remains stubbornly non-canonical in form...in an age when we are becoming statistics and mere consumers , it draws our attention to the drama of the inner life..."
Now let's read David Pringle on the same, "...the novel was predominantly a realistic form: it dealt with day-to-day life in a matter-of-fact way..."
What we have, in the form of the narrative art perfected over 250 years of English novels is a tool that can bring the modern speculative impulse—and/or the ancient tendency toward wonder—to a person who works for a living whether they live now or a hundred years from now. And the best part about it is the art form was high-jacked from the idle rich of a bloated beastly empire who developed it.
Thanks for checking in Dominick.