What I Learned at the Pulp Revolution

One of the things I’ve learned to love about being published is reading the work of those who are published alongside me.  This is particularly true when the work I'm reading exceeds my own in quality.  One doesn’t need to be the headliner, or to play the lead, to enjoy being part of a terrific collective performance.  The moon is beautiful in itself, but it shines because it’s bathed in the radiance of the sun.

StoryHack Action and Adventure Issue Zero (my God, man, haven’t you read it yet?) contains no weak links, in my opinion.  But every reader will have favorites, and there were three stories in particular that blew me away, and taught me valuable lessons as a writer.

Jay Barnson’s “Dead Last” is wonderfully action-centric; it’s similar stylistically to one of those seven-minute single-camera tracking shots that directors like Scorsese work into their films.  Setting his work in an underworld of magical agencies at cross-purposes, where wizardry and gunfire are equally effective tools, Barnson lights the fuse on page two, and the fireworks don’t end until his final, devilishly brilliant twist.  For a writer like myself who tends to get buried in exposition and world-building, it’s a poignant reminder of the great lesson of the Pulp Revolution:  readers read in order to be entertained.

Julie Frost’s “The Monster Without”, with its morally-centered werewolf private eye, also brings plenty of slam-bang action to the table.  Yet it’s in the quiet moments that Frost truly excels; the story is at least equally effective as a reflection on the importance of family, and as a portrait of an ex-soldier struggling with PTSD.  Pulp fiction at its best is not a comic book, in which the consequences of violence can be brushed off or “retconned” away.  Frost’s hero, like those of Joe Abercrombie, bears scars both physical and psychological, and pays a substantial price for the life that his code compels him to lead.  Frost reminds us:  a story’s not about what it’s about, it’s about who it’s about.

Meanwhile, Shannon Connor Winward, author of the cranium-cracking “Daughter of Heaven”, obliterates utterly the false distinction between the pulp and the literary.  In leading the reader on a chase across the colonies and craters of Mars, Winward conjures up horizon-spanning visions and strings together sentences that would be award-worthy in any publication.  I dare you, reader, I double-dog dare you, to stare with Winward’s protagonist into the skies above Tikhonravov crater and manage to keep your jaw from dropping open.  Winward’s story is a master class in imagery, and crushes any illusion that pulp holds writers to a lower standard where wordsmithery is concerned.

What a treat to read such a collection.  And what an honor to be included!  It’s these achievements that a new writer clings to as the rejection notices pile up in glacial stacks.  If I am thought worthy to share the company of these artists—published novelists, Writers of the Future winners, celebrated generals in the #PulpRevolution—then there must be something in me worth developing.  The sidehustle is still on; the dream is still worth chasing.

If support for the arts is important, then the StoryHack Kickstarter is a worthy means of doing so.  I was delighted to donate, and to offer a new set of pulp writers the same opportunity I was afforded.  Perhaps you’ll choose to do so as well.

Meet the Menagerie

I read to be entertained. 

I read to escape. 

I read pulp.

Catch me at a debate tournament and you’ll likely find me in the school library, where results are being tabulated.  Catch me in that library and you’ll watch me walk right by stacks of quality literature to pick up a graphic novel.  I actively prefer YA to adult fiction.  Given the choice between a new Aliette de Bodard release and a Heinlein I’ve read three times, I’ll likely reach for the Heinlein.  I recognize that my tastes as a reader limit my ability to write for upscale markets, but I can’t apologize for it.  It’s who I am, and who I’ve always been.

My principal introduction to the writing of fiction was through “efeds,” which are, roughly speaking, exercises in competitive mosaic fiction.  The game master sets up a scenario, the writers adopt various characters and turn them loose in the scenario, and everyone produces individual story segments featuring their own character existing and changing the story universe, but all while confined by the events and changes created by previous characters.  This format, as you might guess, is better-suited to slam-bang action than carefully constructed plots.  I played in efeds which placed the players in the roles of hired mercenaries, superheroes, and even professional wrestlers.  It was pulp.  I loved creating it.

Pulp hasn’t got the market presence it once had, in part because its core market has been captured by video games and by serial novels set in video game universes.  But there are, as it turns out, readers who long for the literary conventions of yesteryear.  Signalling their affiliation under the hashtag #PulpRevolution, they’ve been gaining ground over the last two years or so, opening up new venues for old-school, action-centric work.  One of those venues, Cirsova, even picked up a Hugo nomination this year.

I dreamed, one night, of Amelia Owen, Countess of Basingstoke.  She appeared in a gown, sitting in an ornate Victorian parlor, spinning an antique globe with a dreamy smile playing about her lips.  I awoke knowing that she was the protagonist of a story—but what story?  Certainly a pulp adventure of the old school—something along the lines of what H. Rider Haggard would have dreamed up.  Certainly she’d be the center of a motley band of ruffians and rogues, all of them outcasts, but each of them admirable in their own way.  Eventually it became clear to me that they were Queen Victoria’s cleanup crew—that Her Majesty was secretly ashamed of the atrocities of empire, and occasionally found it necessary to intervene directly in order to right the worst wrongs of colonialism.  Lady Amelia and her menagerie were to be the Queen’s hand, deployed to work Her Majesty’s secret will, and to bend the arc of empire towards justice.

Was this a novel?  A series of novels?  Alas, after the donnybrook that was Axis of Eternity, I didn’t feel I had another one in me, at least not for a while.  But the story wanted out of my head, and was not to be denied.  So over a couple of weeks, with no realistic prospect of publication, I splattered an eight-thousand word initial adventure into my word processor.  And then I left them there for a couple of years while I strove to write something I could sell.

The literary market is a funny thing.  While I butted my head against numerous brick walls trying to get the rest of my work into print, the #PulpRevolution was steadily brewing in the background.  Enter, at this stage, Mr. Bryce Beattie, proprietor of the widely-read blog StoryHack.  The revolution had called out to him, and like Lady Amelia herself, he was putting together a menagerie—a collection of talented ruffians, proper tools for a black task.

I made the cut.  Given the superior credentials of literally every other writer in StoryHack Action and Adventure Issue Zero, I don’t quite know how.  I’m batting ninth, no question.  But I have a bat in my hands, and I’m appearing for a hell of a team.

I have, therefore, the privilege of introducing Amelia Owen, Lady Basingstoke, a young woman of breeding and refinement with a most improper appetite for adventure.  Meet also John Runciter, disgraced courtier and alleged sodomite, and his ward Jack, an orphan boy from the streets of New Orleans with a talent for elusion.  Meet the giantess Fatima.  Meet Sergeant Declan Curragh, dishonorably discharged hero of Balaclava.  Meet Doctor Lemuel Lepellimer, genius inventor and incorrigible pyromaniac.  A varied menagerie of ghastly beasts, to be sure…but where civilization fails, beasts reign supreme.

Let There Be Pulp!

A brief welcome to fans of StoryHack Action and Adventure, an exciting new publication featuring old-school pulp fiction.  Therein you will find the strong-jawed detectives, the grizzled warriors and eldritch wizards, the steely-eyed spacemen, two-fisted men of the west, cunning adventurers, and intrepid explorers you feared literature had lost track of.

I'm honored to have my tale of Victorian adventure, "Menagerie," among the selections in Issue Zero.  Expect to hear more about this story, the magazine, and about what you can do to ensure that you have subsequent issues to eagerly devour, as release draws near.