Pulp Production

Producing a weekly chapter has turned into an interesting animal. Despite all my good intentions, or maybe because of them, instead of working on the piece throughout the week, I usually slam it out Thursday Night/ Friday Morning, right before I post it. This leaves me with mixed feelings. I decided before I even started that for initial postings, I would do sight editing, try to flush out the big mistakes, but I was not going to rewrite a chapter five times every week, this is a side project, one meant to give me a steady creation outlet while muddling through edits with The Novel. That vicious beast. 

Going into it, I didn't have any illusions of producing something unique and original, more of producing an enjoyable pulp serial, entertainment for entertainments sake. Most of these chapters will end on cliff hangers, it is part of the schtick. I do have a mapped out outline of where the story is intended to go, but no chapter by chapter outlines, I'm mostly flying blind.

The unexpected side effect of my project is my snow balling obsession with giving it an audience. It's pulp sci-fi for cripe's sake! There is  nothing incredibly original about it, it smacks of themes often used in science fiction. Yet here I spend several hours a week plugging it on blogging networks, finding new places to drop it for notice. Why? Why bother at all? It's just a side project right?

Well, every one has to start somewhere. New Earth Six has evolved into a dual sided project, to keep up a writing regime, and to plant the seeds of a social writing network. If The Novel does find its way to the press, then I have the roots in place to begin an author's platform. 

There was also the interesting magic of blogs make into books. Quite a few of the fiction blogs I discovered on my journey have not only established an impressive network, they have gone on to create "novel" editions of their work. 

But I got really excited when I realized I have become a part of the pulp machine. It's not as sneer worthy as it sounds. Pulp fiction is a long practiced tradition that has changed forms over the years. Many writers considered classics of the 20th century were the pulp novelists of old. There are so many lofty ideas tied in with writing these days, if its not literary fiction it's genre aka trash writing. What happened to writing for entertainment's sake. 

That is what I want to do, that is what I hope I am doing with both my serial blog and The Novel. I find myself straddling the fence. Here I am polishing the crap out of my book, I want to produce a decent product for submission, while producing my pulp, my mildly edited, character driven, space opera. 

The pulp has been rather liberating.