The Wrap Up

READING

I read 127 books this year, a small increase from last year's 116. 77 of them were e-books, so while that makes up the majority of my reading, I still read quite a few print books, too, and I expect that rough split to continue. 33 of the 127 were review copies. I wasn't able to review all the books that were sent to me, but I read and blogged about as many of them as I could and I'm sure some of the others will show up on the blog in the future. 21 of the 127 were books that I edited and published. In looking through the list, I noticed that I didn't read any books published in 2015 by the so-called Big Five. The only new books I read from traditional publishers came from Kensington and Baen, companies that have distribution deals with the Big Five but are independently owned, and there were only a few of those. Everything else I read was either small press, self-published, or decades old. This wasn't intentional. I'm certainly not boycotting the Big Five. But it's an unavoidable fact that they're publishing less and less that I want to take the time to read these days, while there's so much good stuff coming out from those other sources that I couldn't even hope to keep up with it. The important thing to me is that I don't think I'll ever run out of good books to read.

Which brings us to my top ten favorites of the books I read this year, in alphabetical order by author:

LIE CATCHERS, Paul Bishop

THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES, Lawrence Block

THE SHOTGUN RIDER, Peter Brandvold

TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, Edgar Rice Burroughs

THE BIG DRIFT, Patrick Dearen

101 ESSENTIAL TEXAS BOOKS, Glenn Dromgoole and Carlton Stowers

FIRE WITH FIRE, Charles E. Gannon

TURN ON THE HEAT, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

RIVER RANGE, L.P. Holmes

WAITING FOR A COMET, Richard Prosch

My short list had 17 books on it, and I could have added another dozen or more that were pretty close. So it wasn't easy getting this list down to 10, but there they are, for what it's worth.

WRITING

As those of you who have read yesterday's post are aware, I wrote just over a million words this year, the 11^th consecutive year I've reached that mark. That breaks down to 12 novels and 7 shorter pieces of fiction, most of them novelette or novella length. Right now my plan is write at least that much in 2016. I'll need to if I'm going to keep up with the projects I've committed to do. It's a lot of hard work, but I'm still having fun so I don't see any reason to stop now.

PUBLISHING

Rough Edges Press continues to occupy a significant portion of my time. With plenty of invaluable technical help from Livia, along with some great covers, REP brought out 9 books in the Blaze! Adult Western series, along with a number of reprints and originals from Stephen Mertz, Ed Gorman, John Hegenberger, James J. Griffin, and David Hardy. We published three original anthologies, the two WEIRD MENACE volumes and the Alternate History anthology TALES FROM THE OTHERVERSE. The Blaze! series will continue in 2016, along with a full slate of original and reprint novels and collections, and we'll also have a big science fiction anthology next summer, if all goes according to plan. More details on that later. UPDATE: I added a picture of all the books REP published in 2015 to the top of the post.

So you can see there's plenty going on to keep me busy. I guess I stay out of trouble that way. Many thanks to those of you who have stuck with the blog for another year. I'll be around.

A Million Words and Counting

Yes, I know I kept saying I planned to slow down a little this year. And my writing pace did fall off, enough so that for most of the year I was convinced there was no way I'd get that million words again.

But then I realized that with a really good December, the million was in reach, so I couldn't just turn my back on that. I had to try for it, especially since I've committed to writing enough books in the next two years that I'll be right around a million words for those years as well. So why break the streak now?

In the end it was pretty close, but earlier today I hit the million word mark for the year. That's 11 consecutive years, something I never would have thought I was capable of. If I actually do achieve that goal the next two years, that'll be 13 straight, and I'm much too superstititous to leave it at that, so I'll have to try for 14 straight, and if you're going to do that, hell, you might as well go for 15.

Clearly, it's a sickness. But not necessarily a bad one to have . . .

(I realize this post sounds like I'm bragging. Honestly, I'm not. I'm not foolish enough to think that a million words is an insignificant achievement even once, let alone 11 years in a row. I'm certainly proud of it. But this is just what I do, a niche that I've carved out for myself. As Walker Martin commented on a post a few days ago, I'm a pulp writer even though there aren't any real pulps anymore. If that's the way I'm remembered, I'm fine with that.)

Night of the Ghost Cat - Peter Brandvold

Hell has frozen-over in the town of Sanctuary, New Mexico Territory... 

Clay Carmody, unwitting ghoul hunter, has no time for ghouls. He had his fill of ghouls in Poudre Canyon. (See Canyon of a Thousand Eyes.) Having forked paths with the beautiful Claudine Bridger, sheriff of Camp Hawkins, the drifter has lit out on his own to the mountains of northern New Mexico, where he is holing up in a remote line shack. 

It figures to be a quiet winter for Clay Carmody. He and his young line shack partner, Ronnie Landry, will likely fill their nights drinking and playing poker and watching the snow fall after days filled with making sure the range of their boss, Old Man Bradbury, isn’t encroached upon by rustlers or nesters. 

Unfortunately, rustlers or nesters are the least of Carmody’s problems. 

When a big cougar kills young Landry, Carmody must take to the hunting trail. The trail leads him to the town of Sanctuary, which, much to Carmody’s dismay, is no sanctuary at all. 

It turns out that Sanctuary is being stalked by the same cat that killed Carmody’s partner. The cat seems to kill indiscriminately. Its blood lust is insatiable. Not even Carmody’s boss, Old Man Bradbury, and the young Duke and Duchess of Norfolk are exempt from its savagery. It will render Bradbury’s pretty, lusty young daughter speechless and worse... 

As the storm rages over Sanctuary, the cat stalks the town—attacking and terrifying, torturing its victims. It amuses itself by torturing men in the most hideous ways imaginable. 

And it seems impervious to bullets... 

Clay Carmody, the reluctant ghoul hunter, finds himself on the hunt for yet another ghoul. At least he has a beautiful demon-hunting witch at his side. But not even the lovely witch from another time, another place may be enough to save Carmody from the cunningly wicked and shape-shifting ghoul who time and time again proves itself the Devil’s own worst nightmare. 

For the ghost cat seems intent on turning the town of Sanctuary into a blood-drenched Hell... 

WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC SCENES OF SUPERNATURAL TERROR, SEX, AND GORE! 

(About that warning...you'd be well advised to take it seriously. However, it doesn't say anything about great action scenes, vividly described settings, and a fine protagonist in Clay Carmody, and you get all those things in this book, too. As always, Mean Pete spins a fast-paced Western adventure yarn. NIGHT OF THE GHOST CAT is one of those one-sitting books you hear about, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys a Weird Western!)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Mole People

This is another good one I recorded from Svengoolie's show. THE MOLE PEOPLE, from 1956, is more than just another Fifties monster movie, though. John Agar, Hugh Beaumont (yep, Ward Cleaver his own self), and Nestor Paiva play archeologists on a dig in Mesopotamia who come across an ancient stone tablet bearing a message about a lost civilization that worshipped the goddess Ishtar. The tablet carries a curse with it, and after it's accidentally broken, a convenient earthquake opens up a passage leading deep into the earth. When one of the other scientists falls into it, Agar, Beaumont, and Paiva climb down to see if he's still alive, and what do they find? An underground city populated by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, of course.

So, what do we have here? A lost civilization, an evil high priest (played by Alan Napier, who was the butler Alfred on the Sixties TV version of BATMAN), sword fights, a beautiful slave girl, and some stalwart scientist heroes. This is pure pulp, a yarn that easily could have been a serial in ARGOSY or ALL-STORY from the heyday of the scientific romance during the first three decades of the Twentieth Century.

The mole people of the title are almost a throwaway element, a subterranean race enslaved by the Sumerians, and they actually wind up being pretty sympathetic characters. The rubber heads and gloves they wear are obviously fake but pretty effective anyway. I had no trouble suspending my disbelief.

THE MOLE PEOPLE was directed by Virgil Vogel, who directed a lot of episodes of Western and detective TV shows I watched during the Sixties, and he keeps things moving along very nicely, packing quite a bit of plot and world-building into less than an hour and a half. Agar and Beaumont are pretty good as the heroes, Napier chews the scenery as the villain, and somebody named Cynthia Patrick is bland but pretty as the slave girl. The only real problem with this movie is the unsatisfying ending, which reportedly was changed at the last minute by meddling studio executives.

That's not enough to keep me from saying that if I'd seen THE MOLE PEOPLE when I was ten years old, I would have thought it was the greatest movie ever made. There's no quicksand, but it has almost everything else I loved back then (and still do, for the most part). I'm sure most of you have already seen it, but if you haven't and you're stuck in your third or fourth childhood like I seem to be, keep an eye out for it. It's a lot of fun.

Writing the Novel From Plot to Print to Pixel - Lawrence Block

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been in the writing business for 39 years now. In the early days, when I was trying to break in and during the first few years after I started selling, I read every book on writing that the Fort Worth Public Library had on its shelves. I don't know if it did any good or not, but I immersed myself in them.

I didn't actually buy many books about writing, though, because we just couldn't afford them. But I subscribed to Writers Digest and The Writer, and I managed to acquire copies of three books on writing that I had for many years and read countless times: THE MYSTERY WRITER'S HANDBOOK, edited by A.S. Burack; WRITING POPULAR FICTION by Dean Koontz; and WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT by Lawrence Block. I also read Block's column every month in Writers Digest.

So it was almost like a visit from an old friend when I began reading the new, expanded, and updated version of Block's book, now called WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT TO PIXEL. Like any old friend you haven't seen for a while, it looks a little different—it's an e-book now, for one thing, at least the edition I read was—and a lot has been added to it.

But the information about how to develop ideas, to create interesting characters, to handle plot problems and all the other nuts and bolts of writing is just as useful as ever. The sections that have been updated the most are the ones that involve e-books and self-publishing, since that's what's changed the most in the publishing business in recent years.

Block talks about several things that I firmly believe: When it comes to writing, there is no right or wrong way to do anything; there is only what works. Every writer has a particular speed to which they're best suited, and the only way to discover that speed is to write a lot until you've figured out what's comfortable and sustainable. You have to be able to sustain that pace, whatever it may be, because to produce good fiction effectively and efficiently, you have to work at it consistently. You sit in a room and type. Sometimes for decades.

Because he doesn't seem capable of writing a sentence that's not entertaining, reading this book is an enjoyable experience in itself, not just for its educational and informational value. Block also provides quite a bit of background on how some of his novels came to be written, and that's always interesting to me. As for the writing, I already do many of the things he suggests, habits that I've developed over the years, and they work for me, I guess, since I've been at it for so long, but I also picked up some ideas about things I'm going to be watching for in my own books. One of the nice things about writing is that you can always get better at it.

WRITING THE NOVEL FROM PLOT TO PRINT TO PIXEL will be available soon. If you're a novice writer or an experienced writer or anywhere in between, or if you're just interested in good fiction and its creation, I highly recommend it.

The Annual December 27th Post

As always on this date, I like to pause and reflect on my years in this business. 39 of them, in fact, because I made my first sale on December 27, 1976, as those of you who read this blog regularly may recall. The details of that sale, plus assorted reminiscences about the early days of my writing career, can be found in December 27 posts from previous years. I tried to think of some new, never-before-revealed detail about that first sale, or my early career in general, but really, there ain't none. It wasn't that exciting a time. (Well, it was exciting for me to get that check, of course, really exciting, and Livia was probably pretty pleased as well, since it meant I wasn't totally crazy to believe that I could write for money, but other than that...)

So I'll just fall back on thanking everyone who's helped along the way, starting with Livia, of course, and including my daughters Shayna and Joanna, who have helped out many times in many ways, plus all the editors, agents, and fellow writers who have helped make it possible. I'd list them all, but there are too many and I'd forget somebody.

Next year will be 40 years for me as a writer. I'll try to think of something more interesting to say by then.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Aces, May 1932

Supposedly, BLACK ACES was Fiction House's attempt to imitate the success of BLACK MASK, but it didn't last very long, only seven issues. Its failure wasn't due to the quality of the writers, though. This issue featured stories by Carroll John Daly, James P. Olsen, Eugene Cunningham, Theodore Tinsley, William Chamberlain, and Franklin Martin, all well-regarded pulp authors. And it had a cover by Rudolph Belarski. The newsstands were just too crowded for it to stand out, I suppose.

This is the last weekend pulp post of the year. I hope those of you who read them are still enjoying them. I've started to think that I won't be doing these forever, but I'm not ready to quit yet and plan to be at it for a good while yet.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second March Number, 1950

RANCH ROMANCES had some great covers in the Fifties, and despite the title, many of the stories had a definite hardboiled feeling to them. Authors in this issue include L.P. Holmes, Wayne D. Overholser, Frank C. Robertson, Hal G. Evarts, and Stephen Payne. I don't know if the cover goes with any of the stories, but it sure makes me want to know what's going on. Maybe I'll write it myself one of these days.

Forgotten Books: Christmas Out West - Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, eds.

This volume of new and reprint Western Christmas stories was published in hardback by Doubleday in 1990 and in paperback by Bantam in 1991, which is the edition I read back then. Here are the contents:

"Three Yuletide Poems", S. Omar Barker
"How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar", Bret Harte
"A Journey in Search of Christmas", Owen Wister (an excerpt from the novel LIN McLEAN)
"The Bullpuncher", James Stevens
"Standing Alone in the Darkness", Arthur Winfield Knight
"Winter Harvest", John Prescott
"Mainwaring's Gift", Ed Gorman
"Seven-Up's Christmas", Charles Alden Seltzer
"Christmas Eve in San Augustine", Edward D. Hoch
"No Room at the Inn", Bill Pronzini
"Gunman's Christmas", Caddo Cameron
"The Death of Dutch Creel", Loren D. Estleman
"Stubby Pringle's Christmas", Jack Schaefer

There's not a bad story in the bunch. One of Barker's poems is "A Cowboy's Christmas Prayer", which I posted on this blog all the way back in 2004. It's one of the most popular posts I've ever done and still gets regular hits.

For this post I found another copy and reread the two pulp stories, Seltzer's "Seven-Up's Christmas", which first appeared in the December 1949 issue of GIANT WESTERN, and Cameron's "Gunman's Christmas" from the December 25, 1946 issue of SHORT STORIES. Seltzer's story is a suspenseful yarn about two cowboys snowbound in a line shack at Christmas time, both of them with secrets in their past. Cameron's story is about an outlaw who just wants to spend Christmas alone at his hideout in Indian Territory, but dangerous strangers keep showing up. Both of these are excellent Christmas tales. In fact, this whole anthology is very good, and although it's too late for this year, if you want to read some fine Christmas Westerns next year, I highly recommend it.

Since this is the last Forgotten Books post of the year, I also wanted to mention that going into this year one of my goals was not to use any reruns in this series. I managed to do that, although I've had to fudge a few times by reading novellas and writing about them. But I've had new content every Friday all year. I may not be able to maintain it, but I'm glad I did it for a year, anyway. I didn't do anywhere near that well with the Tuesday's Overlooked Movies/TV/etc. posts. But hey, it's all for fun anyway, and I hope you've all had a good time.

A Christmas Memory

Forty years ago tonight was the first Christmas Eve I ever spent with Livia. We had been dating since January of that year, and we'd gotten engaged in October. We weren't the sort to go out and party on Christmas Eve (we're still not), so we spent a quiet evening at her parents' house watching TV. All that was nice enough, but then something else happened that made everything even better.

It started to snow.

Now, a White Christmas, or a White Christmas Eve, for that matter, isn't unheard of around here, but they're not very common, either. I wasn't really worried about getting snowed in or not being able to get home because the temperature was above freezing and for the most part the snow was melting soon after hitting the ground. But the flakes were big and fluffy and coming down in a veritable blizzard and turning the ground white for a little while, and as I stood on the front porch with my arm around Livia and we watched that beautiful scene, I think it was quite possibly the happiest moment in my life up to that point. That glow remained strong inside me as I kissed her good night and drove home in the snow a little later, after midnight so technically it was Christmas Day.

I can feel it now, too, just like I did then. I always will. Merry Christmas, everyone, and to all a good night.