New Year New Pulp

From Coming Attractions:

Charles Ardai, Edgar Award-winning author and creator of the acclaimed pulp mystery series Hard Case Crime, announced a new series of pulp novels scheduled to debut in the summer of 2009: The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. Featuring painted covers in the grand pulp tradition by artist Glen Orbik, the series will chronicle the travels and travails of modern-day explorer Gabriel Hunt, who scours the globe in pursuit of precious artifacts, lost civilizations, and secrets that could save the world...or destroy it.

"These books are for anyone who grew up reading H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs or watching Harrison Ford wield his bullwhip at the movies," said Ardai. "We're talking classic adventure fiction, complete with horses, snakes, shovels, pickaxes, torches, traps, bottomless pits, barroom brawls, jungles, jewels, and just about everything else that's ever made your heart beat faster."

Authorship of each book will be credited to Gabriel Hunt himself, with the hands behind the Hunt nom-de-plume scheduled to include some of Hard Case Crime's most popular authors. James Reasoner is the author of one of the upcoming Gabriel Hunt novels. The first title is due to hit bookstores in May 2009, with subsequent titles following every other month.

Gabriel Hunt's initial adventures are expected to take him to Borneo, Guatemala, Turkey, Egypt, Antarctica, and the Kalahari Desert.

http://www.huntforadventure.com/

Pulp For New Media

As an addendum to my post below, I wanted to give my fellow pulpsters a New Years Eve thought or twenty as they contemplate how they are going to jump into the wide weird world of web content. I call my blog Pulp 2.0 because I truly see the internet as a refinement of the pulp publishing model. While you may choose to disagree with me (at your peril) , there are lessons we can all learn from pulp. Many of those lessons have already been applied to other media like TV and radio before it.

So here they are:

Volume:

• Pulp (just like new media) needs a lot of content. You can't just produce one "Home run" and sit back. You must have a lot of base hits to win the game.
  

• That means that the pulp must be easily produced and/or acquired.

• It also means the flow of it must be constant. People are counting on it just like they count on their new DVDs every Tuesday; their new comics every Wednesday; and their new Magazines every Thursday. Pulp must be reliable that way.

• It also means that pulp (and Pulp 2.0) must be prescient and be constantly looking to the future to spot trends and "the next big thing."
  

Marketability:

• Pulp must be easily "sold" to the consumer. It's so high concept you can pitch it in less than 30 words and the consumer "gets it" right away. Ideally you can "sell it" with just the "cover."
  

• Pulp must have an immediate appeal to its audience. It's not complicated or at least the sophistication doesn't show.
  

• Pulp must be translatable from one media to another without losing its core appeal.

Diversity:

• Pulp requires a variety of genres delivered in a variety of ways to satisfy a variety of audiences.

Quality:

• It must be so crafted as to be utterly seamless in its simplicity and solidity. It can't be good one month (or episode) and entirely different (and crappy) the next.
  

• It must be coherent and consistent within its world. As Lee Goldberg says,"It must have a franchise." (CSI - every week you know what you are going to get)

• It must have style, and a point-of-view.

This all runs parallel to my NewPulp declaration, but these are all things that pulp did (does) well, and can easily be adopted by new Media creators for Pulp2.0.

The internet is not about big (the way theatrical movies are big) .
It's about small (short?) and consistent (every week? Update in my email box or RSS Reader?) and most of all, entertaining.

The NewPulp Declaration of Intent:

After this post, I have been thinking about the ideas and ideals of NewPulp and Open Source Pulp.

So I decided to come up with this:

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NewPulp is a storytelling and media-making movement that recognizes the work and conditions of genre authors and artists of previous generations and builds upon those foundations to create a new, yet familiar brand of populist genre entertainment.

NewPulp crosses both genre and media lines creating a hybrid form of fictional entertainment that embraces the immediacy, variety and economy of the internet as a means of storytelling.

NewPulp is concerned primarily with entertaining its populist audience, and eschews any pretense of “importance.” NewPulp attempts to simply capture the joy of genre fiction storytelling for new audiences and new media.

New Pulp, while aiming first to entertain, also seeks to reinvent how such genre fiction may be created and presented. This includes, but is not limited to: new plot devices and structures; the use of new media; greater depth and variety of characterization; the use of popular cultural references and the application of today’s science, technology, politics and social norms and aberrations.

NewPulp is not concerned with either satire or parody of the form as the conventions of genre fiction from previous generations are well known and easy prey. NewPulp instead seeks to evolve the form so that the storytelling resonates with today’s audiences in a meaningful, entertaining and engaging manner.

NewPulp embraces the heroic ideal in all its forms,but is not limited by it.

NewPulp is by its very nature an amalgam of various genres and forms. It rejects only those strictures that seek to chain the fiction to realism, and is a storytelling movement of entertaining big ideas and ideals.

NewPulp understands and embraces interactivity with its audience as a means to develop material, creators and storytelling media and markets.

NewPulp is meant to be created and shared quickly no matter how the storytelling is accomplished - prose, art, video/film, audio, interactive game, poetry or performance --including cosplay. (edit to add: Just as previous generations of pulp creators wrote quickly in order to be paid for their work, today's NewPulp creators work quickly to feed the internet pipeline which entertains the audience).

NewPulp strives not for strict “perfection,” but for entertainment value in which it finds its “perfection.” It is imperfect and a storytelling predicated upon the willing suspension of disbelief of its audience.

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Not complete as I am sure I've left some gaping thoughts wide open, but it's a direction.

(K)nightmarish Lessons Learned:

So, I just turned in my draft of our Knightmare radio play that I'm doing with Decoder Ring Theatre. Along the way I've learned a few lessons that I feel I should chronicle if not pass along to you, my fellow pulpsters:

(Note: These are some of the lessons that inspired the Pulp Writer's Warm Up seen below)

1. Real life drama (which I won't go into other than to say it was both financial and legal and a pain in the ass) got in the way of my writing. This is a major no-no here at the Mad Pulp Headquarters. It prevented me from moving forward and honoring my commitments in a timely manner. It wasn't professional of me, and it really hurts that I was so paralyzed by it. If this weren't a personal, non-paying gig I would have fired myself.

2. During this time, I learned I have a lot of good friends who stepped up and for that I am grateful. You know who you are as you listened to me whine, and didn't offer me cheese with that.

3. I realized I like owning my characters. I like building things and laying the groundwork for people to build upon what I've started. Gregg is going to have his hands full with the script I've turned in, and I am sure he will hit it out of the park (or slap it into the goal. Whatever it is you Canucks do...) I am so happy I acquired the rights to do The Knightmare and make him my own. I know Cameron Tyler would be proud.

4. This internet thingie is really built on the short burst entertainment model. I am trying to embrace that in my work, realizing that most folks who read (or listen, or watch, or play, or interact with) material online do so in small increments. It makes sense to build on that and not try to shoe-horn longer forms onto the web - not only for attention-span reasons but for bandwidth issues too.

(Yes, I am talking yet again about the serial. Get over it)

5. It's hard writing a radio drama. You find yourself laying a ton of narrative pipe in the dialog (characters asking questions. Exclamations with tags of info on them, vague references) and it doesn't sound right - at all. Thank Dog I am working with Gregg who has a better ear for that than I do because he knows what works and what doesn't. I will have to do more of these things and develop my chops.

6. I also realized/cemented/committed to doing my next project online. Moving forward and building the infrastructure for NewPulp. More on that later.