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As my summer break wanes to a close—I return to work this Thursday, 7 August 2025—I’ve been frantically making the most of time and trying to do as much writing as possible. Rather than writing for the blog, it’s mostly been fiction writing.
After The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard took eleventh place in overall sales in Hans G. Schantz‘s quarterly Based Book Sale, I decided it might be worthwhile to return to fiction writing.
First, I took an entire day to make audiobook versions of Inspector Gerard and my collection of non-fiction travel essays, Arizonan Sojourn, because Amazon has a nifty feature that creates an audiobook from your text using a range of computer-generated voices (I picked “English 5,” which has a great British accent); listening back to my writing (I needed to edit certain pronunciations for the computer-generated voiceover), I remembered how fun fiction writing can be.
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Second, I checked out some books in the Schantziverse about writing fiction, specifically pulp fiction. I’ve always enjoyed short stories, ranging from literary fiction to fast-paced pulps, but in the world of online self-publishing, writing quick, punchy, pulpy tales of adventure and intrigue seems to be the way to go.
I purchased three books in particular to dive into the world of pulp writing (again, all Amazon Affiliate links ahead; I receive a portion of purchases made through these links, blah, blah, blah):
Of these Bell’s How to Write Pulp Fiction has been the most useful so far. To be fair, I haven’t ready any of Cheah’s book yet, so I cannot yet give any guidance into how efficacious it is for the budding pulp writer. Bell’s book, however, is full of actionable (and action-packed!) advice that I have already began incorporating into my own writing.
Cowen’s The Pulp Mindset was the first book I purchased on the topic. It is not a “how-to” guide (as the author reiterates frequently), but rather a “call to action” for writers to embrace the “pulp mindset” of NewPub. “NewPub” is Cowen’s term for the new-ish world of self-publishing, one in which gripping, fast-paced storytelling and genre fiction dominate over slower-paced literary fiction. For Cowen, the distinction is almost a political one: the world of “OldPub” is an ossified world of progressive gatekeepers who push a certain ideology over actual quality (although Cowen makes it clear that he is not attempting to make a political point in the book, it’s fairly clear that he has little patience for the stodgy editors of the “OldPub” world promoting woke fiction at the expense of good storytelling).
The book has some issues—it’s clear that Cowen is padding out his page count to stretch the book to something he can charge $7.29 for (I’m guilty of this as well; I suspect all writers are to an extent), and the editing leaves a lot to be desired (I’m guilty of this, too)—but it also offers a fascinating history of the pulps, and how they developed.
I’ll save that history for another time, but just skim through these Wikipedia entries on Argosy magazine and Frank Munsey, about whom Cowen dedicates an entire chapter, and you’ll quickly see that the roots of the pulps go way back into the nineteenth century (and really, probably back to the dawn of storytelling itself). Cowen argues—rather persuasively—that the future of fiction lies in the past, to the golden age of the pulps.
Technologically, we’re at the point where we can replicate the affordable nature of pulps through Kindle Direct Publishing and other self-publishing platforms. Naturally, self-publishing has always suffered from lots of low-quality writing (and AI has only exacerbated the problem), but for those willing to put in the hours and the sweat, it offers the opportunity for dedicated writers to reach a wider audience at a price anyone can afford.
An example: the author Mariella Hunt began self-publishing just a couple of years ago. As I recall (and I hope she’ll forgive this rough paraphrase of a past conversation), she told me that she had always been a writer, but needed to start making some money from it to pitch in with her family. Her book The Sea Rose, takes place in (I believe) an alternate Georgian England in which mermaids are real. That spawned a sequel, The Sea King, part of her Lords & Ladies of the Sea series. She used the now-defunct Kindle Vella serialized publishing platform to release the second book in chapters. Her ability to write compelling cliffhangers and digestible chapters, from what I could tell, made her very popular on the platform.
I have long wanted to write a collection of weird fiction, and to experiment more with the pulp format. One of Bell’s key pieces of advice was to maintain a file of story ideas, and earlier this week I hammered out a long list of ideas.
Then I started to write.
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