Lately, I’ve been thinking about doing something more with The Silencer, a pulp-style masked vigilante hero I created in the early 2000s, when I became interested in the pulp magazines and their writers.
I have a great deal of respect for the pulp writers of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. They were writing at a speed that is pretty much unimaginable today (unless you are Nora Roberts, that is) and the best of them turned out stories that still manage to thrill some seventy or eighty years after they were written. Not bad for disposable fiction.
I wrote a couple of stories about the Silencer at the time. Two were published, another is basically publication ready, but failed to sell to the very specific anthology market it was aimed at. There are also some unfinished Silencer stories, which may or may not be salvagable.
I’ve always liked the Silencer and his cast of regulars. They were fun to write and still hold up pretty well after several years. It seems like a pity to just leave them lying around on my hard drive and in long out of print magazines. This is still a vague idea at the moment, but perhaps I’ll find a way to do more with the Silencer and his thrilling adventures fighting crime in 1930s New York.
Since I’m already on a pulp kick, I found something very cool: How to write for the pulps from the 1939 Writer’s Yearbook.
Much of this still holds true after over seventy years, even the payment rate hasn’t risen that much. Only old miner and faithful burro stories have gone the way of the pulps in the meantime.
The pulps were all about the action and action of course means fight scenes. So, on a related note,
Lilith Saintcrow has another post up in her series on writing fight scenes.
sending...