Two chapters today wrapped up that novel I've been working on, which is #370 for me. I'm not really done done with it, since Livia still has some editing to do on it and I haven't seen her notes yet, but I'm putting it in the books anyway.
Tomorrow I need to write the outline for the next book in this particular series, but I have to discuss it with Livia first to make sure the basic idea for it is feasible.
Showing posts with label writiing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writiing. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
Most of you have heard about it. Some of you own it. A few of you have already blogged about it. But I got my copy of THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS the other day, and it’s wonderful. Over 1100 double-column pages of hardboiled crime fiction from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. I am, as we say down here in Texas, in Hog City. I plan to read a story or two from this huge volume between every novel I read, so it’ll take me a while to work my way through it, but I can practically guarantee that I’ll have a great time doing so. So far I’ve read the first two stories, “One, Two, Three” by Paul Cain and “The Creeping Siamese” by Dashiell Hammett. The Cain story, about a private eye trying to find a swindler, isn’t as terse and bleak as a lot of his work, but it’s just as complicated. It takes a full page – that’s two columns of pretty dense type – at the end of the story just to explain everything that went on in the first nine pages. Great stuff. The Hammett story is a minor Continental Op yarn, but the Hammett voice is there and entertaining as always.
Unlike some things, I can pinpoint, sort of, when I became a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction like the stories included in THE BIG BOOK OF PULPS. It was on a very foggy December evening in 1967, when I picked up a copy of the Pocket Books edition of the Ron Goulart-edited anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS at the Book Oasis in Fort Worth’s Seminary South Shopping Center. I was there with my mother, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I was aware of pulps before that, but only Doc Savage and the Shadow. When I read Goulart’s book, which included authors such as Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, Raoul Whitfield, John K. Butler, and Lester Dent, the stories immediately struck a chord in me that still rings as clear and true today as it did then. I’ve read a ton of hardboiled pulp mysteries in the past forty years, and a lot of work that was influenced by those stories, and I still love ‘em.
Today’s page count: 20. And the pages that I thought were terrible when I was writing them yesterday didn’t look so bad today. In fact, they were all right. They just needed a little polishing.
Unlike some things, I can pinpoint, sort of, when I became a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction like the stories included in THE BIG BOOK OF PULPS. It was on a very foggy December evening in 1967, when I picked up a copy of the Pocket Books edition of the Ron Goulart-edited anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS at the Book Oasis in Fort Worth’s Seminary South Shopping Center. I was there with my mother, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I was aware of pulps before that, but only Doc Savage and the Shadow. When I read Goulart’s book, which included authors such as Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, Raoul Whitfield, John K. Butler, and Lester Dent, the stories immediately struck a chord in me that still rings as clear and true today as it did then. I’ve read a ton of hardboiled pulp mysteries in the past forty years, and a lot of work that was influenced by those stories, and I still love ‘em.
Today’s page count: 20. And the pages that I thought were terrible when I was writing them yesterday didn’t look so bad today. In fact, they were all right. They just needed a little polishing.
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