A Penny a Word

I like pulp fiction. Not the movie--though I like that, too--but rather the prose tales, printed on pulpwood paper, that were so popular in the early decades of the 20th century. They came in all flavors, stories of air pilots, cowboys, aliens, and private detectives, and everything in between and beyond. I'm partial to the adventure and horror pulps, but I'll indulge in almost anything and have.

What inspired this confession? Well, I'm currently approaching the end of Rivals of Weird Tales, a thick volume of 30 stories that appeared in the horror and fantasy pulps (except for, naturally, Weird Tales). I've been trading off between reading that and Pulpwood Days Volume 2, which contains classic nonfiction articles by pulp writers. Some time ago, I watched part of a documentary on the pulps, the only such video I could find online. But I was disgusted to realize, about halfway through, that the doc was really just a glorification of pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard, and thus a sneaky advertisement for Scientology. That was when I resolved to make my own, more honest, doc about the pulps, one that didn't play up one scribbler as more important than he was.

Therefore, I feverishly ordered from eBay and Amazon a tall stack of books either on the subject or containing actual stories. After a while, though, as I often do, I burned out on it, lost all interest, and set the toppling stack aside. I still had (and have) every intention of making that documentary, but it'll be a while. There are other more pressing writing projects to focus on.

I love reading about the days of the pulps, especially the writers who banged out pounds of stories for a penny or so a word and the editors who helped them improve and get published. Some of those scribes (or hacks) were so prolific, they had to keep multiple typewriters around the house and sometimes take breaks for their fingers to cool off. I'm astounded by the seemingly endless stream of ideas they generated and the speed with which they produced, often without even outlining the plot. I'm so jealous of that ability. I'm a perfectionist and insanely slow. But I wish the pulps were still around today so I could take a crack at them.

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