"Yes, Mary McCarthy is a much neglected novelist now and that's a shame..."
"Gee it really is hard to argue against Emile Durkheim..."
"'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.' Wow. Just... wow!"
"I'm telling you Katie you have to read White Noise before you read Underworld. You have to get into the rhythm of his sentences. DeLillo is all about the sentence..."
"Margaret Atwood opened my eyes, but Octavia Butler... she blew my mind!"
"My Aeolic Greek is a little rusty, but if that isn't a motto of Sappho then it surely should be."
"No madam, I'm not that J.D. Salinger."
"Then we throw our manuscripts into the fire and that's the end of the writer's retreat. We're free baby, free of our hangups and ready to really write! Anyway, next year we're in Montreal..."
Today in pulp: how do you write a novel in two weeks?
Pulp writing that has to work within specific constraints, which in turn shape the nature of the story. And speed is the biggest constraint of all: you have to write quickly!
But there are ways to make it work for you...
Today a prolific author may write a book every year, but in the 1950s and '60s pulp writer sometimes had as little as two weeks to complete a 50,000 word story and have it ready for print.
That’s 25 novels a year: but at least they got Christmas off!
Writing that quickly is hard, but surprisingly liberating. Pulp writers had to go with their first ideas and had to make them work. There wasn’t time to ‘kill your darlings’ - instead you had to toughen them up and send them into battle!
Today in pulp I'm taking a look back at the Regency Romance series from Signet Books!
Signet's Regency Romance series started in the late 1970s and ran until 2006. Like its rivals Harlequin and Mills & Boone, Signet Regency Romance published a number of titles each month, often to the same formula...
Most (but not all) Signet Regency Romance covers were by Allan Kass, and I can heartily recommend Rhonda Whiting's wonderful blog about this artist, featuring hundreds of scans of his work allankass.blogspot.co.uk
What are the pulp archetypes? Pulp novels are usually written quickly and rely on a formula, but do they use different archetypal characters to other fiction?
Let's take a look at a few...
The Outlaw is a classic pulp archetype: from Dick Turpin onwards lawbreakers have been a staple of the genre. Crime never pays, but it's exciting and trangressive!
Some pulp outlaws however are principled...
As Bob Dylan sang "to live outside the law you must be honest." Michel Gourdon's 1915 hero Dr Christopher Syn is a good example. A clergyman turned pirate and smuggler, he starts as a revenger but becomes the moral magistrate of the smuggling gangs of Romney Marsh.
Given the current heatwave, I feel obliged to ask my favourite question: is it time to bring back the leisure suit?
Let's find out...
Now we all know what a man's lounge suit is, but if we're honest it can be a bit... stuffy. Formal. Businesslike. Not what you'd wear 'in da club' as the young folks say.
So for many years tailors have been experimenting with less formal, but still upmarket gents attire. The sort of garb you could wear for both a high level business meeting AND for listening to the Moody Blues in an espresso bar. Something versatile.