Numbers Game

I wrote 22 pages today, giving me 290 for the month of July. Some years that would have been a really good month. This year I'm somewhat disappointed in it, since I was trying to average 400 pages a month and now it's doubtful that I'll do so. I know good and well that I'm too obsessive about this stuff, but that's who I am. It keeps me going.

I read three pulp Western stories today, by Lemuel De Bra, Harry F. Olmsted, and Gunnison Steele (Bennie Gardner). All three were pretty good. This evening I've started DERAILED by James Siegel, which I picked up because both Ed Gorman and Bill Crider recently talked about it on their blogs. I'm about 50 pages into it, and I'm wondering, "Is this book gonna get any better?" Not a good sign.

Ed Race; Bradley Denton

I'm finishing up the chapbook ED RACE: MURDER IN THE SPOTLIGHT by Emile C. Tepperman, a prolific pulpster who has achieved an added level of fame among pulp fans because so little is known about him. For THE SPIDER, in addition to writing some of the lead novels as Grant Stockbridge, he also wrote a back-up series of short stories about a vaudeville performer named Ed Race who juggles loaded revolvers and makes trick shots with them. Billed as the Masked Marksman, Ed is also a licensed private detective and naturally stumbles into crimes on a regular basis. I had read some of these before and liked them, so I bid on and won this chapbook on eBay recently. It reprints four stories from THE SPIDER. I'm not sure I like them as much as I thought I would. The plots are pretty weak, even by pulp standards. Tepperman wrote good action scenes, though. Overall I'd say this collection is okay, but probably only for devoted pulp fans.

I also read a very good novella in the September F&SF called "Sergeant Chip" by Bradley Denton. I think I've met Denton at an SF convention or two, but I don't actually know him. This story is narrated by a dog, which made me predisposed to like it since I'm a great fan of dogs. It's a near-future war story with a pace that never lets up and some poignant moments, as well as good action. I haven't read F&SF regularly since Gordon Van Gelder took it over, but both issues I've gotten since I recently subscribed have been excellent.

Not much gas in the tank today as far as writing is concerned. Seven big pages.

Real Life; Giant Lizards

Too much real life today; writing had to take a back seat to other stuff that had to get done.  I managed a little research for another new project, that's all.

I'm still reading the September issue of F&SF, which I think I mistakenly referred to as the August issue a few days ago.

A few weeks ago at Half Price Books I bought a boxed set of 50 "Horror Classics" on DVD.  Most of these are hardly classics, but that's all right.  Tonight we watched "The Giant Gila Monster", just your basic hot rods/rock & roll/giant lizard movie.  I don't recall ever seeing it before.  Cheaply made, with mostly bad acting and a goofy script, but pretty darned enjoyable anyway.  You probably had to be there in the Fifties to really appreciate it, though.  I was a little kid then, but I still remember the era fairly well.

Writing Biz; Rain

I found out that the non-fiction project Livia and I have been working on for a couple of weeks is likely a non-starter.  It's not completely dead, but it's now been pushed 'way on the back burner.  That's all right, I'm pretty busy at the moment anyway, and no research is ever wasted.  Meanwhile I wrote 23 pages on the Western, so I'm happy about that.

After all the storms and power outages in June, I was ready for some peaceful weather, even though I knew it was likely to get hot and dry.  So it did in July, hitting 100 degrees a few days and upper 90s a lot, with less than a tenth of an inch of rain for the month.  Until this afternoon, when a nice little storm front rolled through and brought us a couple of hours of good rain.  Oddly enough, I was writing a thunderstorm scene in the book while the thunder and lightning was going on outside.  That hardly ever happens.  For some reason it usually works out so that I write blizzard scenes in the middle of summer and scorcher scenes when it's freezing outside.

I'm still reading various short stories.

Short Stories

I seem to be in short-story-reading-mode at the moment.  These spells come over me every couple of weeks and last a few days.  As I often do, I'm alternating between sources for the stories.  In this case, it's a couple of pulp reprint chapbooks, SLAVES OF THE SILVER SERPENT by Lemuel De Bra and ED RACE: MURDER IN THE SPOTLIGHT by the mysterious Emile C. Tepperman, and the August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  The De Bra story I read today wasn't as good as the one I read a couple of days ago, but it was still okay.

I also wrote 16 pages today, a decent day's work.

Willeford; Whitehouse; Longarm

Today was spent running errands and shopping, so no work.  At Half Price Books I picked up several Charles Willeford novels in the No Exit Press editions.  I'm not a big Willeford fan, but I figured these were probably worth having.  Also got THE YEAR OF THE SKY KINGS, a non-fiction book about air combat in World War I by the old pulpster Arch Whitehouse.  They had a couple of shelves of vintage NF paperbacks about WWI and WWII.  I'll probably buy a few more of them here and there, if nobody else gets them first.  A while back I wrote a World War I aviation story for an as-yet-unpublished anthology and enjoyed it so much I'd like to do more.  Not a big market for such things these days, though.

Got back home to find that the latest mailing from PEAPS, the pulp apa I'm in, had arrived, along with my author copies of the new Longarm, LONGARM AND THE TALL TIMBER.  When I wrote this, it was LONGARM IN THE TALL TIMBER, but that's nothing to quibble about.

Still reading THE AVENGING GUN, but I should finish it tonight.

Weather Report

It was cool and cloudy here today, with a nice north wind that swept all the pollution out.  All in all, about as nice a day as you'll find in North Texas at this time of year.  I even turned off the air-conditioner and opened the windows in my studio.  I don't know if that had anything to do with the fact that I got 21 pages written, but I'll take 'em however I can get 'em.

During a spare few minutes this afternoon I read Lemuel De Bra's short story "Slaves of the Silver Serpent" in the collection of the same name published last year by Black Dog Books.  This story originally appeared in a 1922 issue of BLUE BOOK, one of the all-time great pulps.  And "Slaves of the Silver Serpent" is one of the best pulp stories I've read in years, with an ending I didn't see coming at all.  This is the first thing I've read by De Bra, but I'll be reading more.  I'm also still reading J.L. Bouma's Western novel, THE AVENGING GUN.

I haven't talked much about movies on here, because we haven't seen many lately.  Tonight we watched the DVD of STARSKY AND HUTCH.  I have fond memories of the TV series, but as Livia points out, that's probably because we were dating at the time and watched it a lot at her parents' house.  As I counterpointed, I bought -- and read -- the novelizations by Max Franklin (really Richard Deming), so I must have liked the show at least a little on its own merits.  At first I thought the movie was going to be absolutely awful, but it improved as it went along to the point that I considered it merely bad, with a good moment here and there.  I usually like Owen Wilson, am less fond of Ben Stiller (though he's great in MYSTERY MEN, a mostly unseen and underappreciated film), and I enjoyed seeing the original Starsky and Hutch, David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser, in a cameo.  The movie looked good and the music was okay if you like Seventies music.  For the most part, though, the script just wasn't funny.  I don't have a problem with them doing a parody instead of a straight remake, but if that's what you're going to do, it had better be funny.  Oh, well, at least the John Travolta version of HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL never got made, so there's something to be thankful for.

Back to Work, Sort of

I finished going over that big manuscript this morning, then spent the afternoon getting back up to speed on the Western I was writing.  I was only able to add a couple of pages to it, though.  I'm hoping the pages will begin to roll again tomorrow.

A couple of reviews of the recent reprint of my first novel, TEXAS WIND, have appeared online at the following sites: Epinions and Bleeker Books .  As always, I appreciate the kind words.

I'm reading THE AVENGING GUN by J.L. Bouma.  I've seen Westerns by Bouma around for decades, but this is the first one I've read.  So far it's pretty good.

 

Cave of a Thousand Tales

CAVE OF A THOUSAND TALES, Milt Thomas, Arkham House, 2004

This new biography of the legendary pulp author Hugh B. Cave was based on many personal interviews Milt Thomas conducted with Cave over several years.  Not surprisingly, it's a very intimate portrait of Cave as both a writer and a human being.  I knew very little about his childhood or personal life; all I knew was that he produced a multitude of stories that were both very well-written and very enjoyable.  Discovering that Cave was so prolific in part because he was trying to escape from some unpleasant personal circumstances gives the stories an added poignancy.

The first half of the book covers Cave's childhood, adolescence, his first attempts at writing, and his blossoming pulp career.  Thomas's account moves on to Cave's foray into the slick magazine market, his experiences as a war correspondent during World War II (I wish I'd known that Cave was around Guadalcanal; I would have had him make a cameo appearance in one of my World War II novels), his trips to Haiti, where he learned so much about voodoo that would form the basis for many of his later works, his years as the owner of a coffee plantation in Jamaica, his mainstream novels and his later horror novels, and the rebirth of interest in his pulp work that began with Karl Edward Wagner's publication of the collection MURGUNSTRUMM in 1977.  In reading this book I discovered that Cave was at the fourth World Fantasy Convention in Fort Worth in 1978, a convention that I didn't know about until it was over.  Within a few years, though, I met quite a few people who were at that very convention, including Bill Crider and Joe Lansdale.  Paralleling the story of Cave's professional life are the varied tragedies of his personal life.  You can't help but feel a little sympathy for Cave, who was a modest, genuinely decent man.

As for CAVE OF A THOUSAND TALES, it's a well-written, well-researched, beautifully-produced book.  I was a little unsure about Thomas's habit of fictionalizing certain incidents in the lives of Cave's parents and in Cave's early life, but the technique worked just fine.  I might have a quibble or two with certain of his comments about pulp history, but those are very minor points.  All in all, this is a highly readable account of the life and career of one of my favorite writers, and it's one of the best books I've read this year.

On another note, I'm glad to see that Ed's Place  is up and running again.  This blog by Ed Gorman is one of the sites I visit every day, and it's what got me interested in blogging in the first place.

I worked on editing and revising that big manuscript again today.  I ought to be able to finish going over it tomorrow and then I can get back to producing new pages.

The More Things Change . . .

While reading CAVE OF A THOUSAND TALES today, I came across a quote from a letter Hugh Cave wrote to fellow pulpster Carl Jacobi in late 1932.  Cave complains about having written 32 stories in that year, but at that point he'd been paid for only 19 of them.  He was running out of money, yet publishers owed him over $1500, which of course was a pretty good amount of money in 1932.  I wouldn't turn my nose up at it now.  That got me to thinking about my output.  So far this year I've turned in five novels.  I've been paid for one of them.  Of course, I've gotten some payments for books that I wrote last year, but still, getting paid always lags farther behind than the writer feels like it should.  That's why unless you're a big-name, high-dollar-advance writer, you've always got to have a lot of projects in the pipeline, so that some money will be coming in for something on a semi-regular basis.  It's a nerve-wracking way to make a living . . . but of course, nobody's got a gun to my head forcing me to do it, either.

This was a real-life day, no writing or revisions, etc.