See You on the Radio

MEANWHILE … in a time and place where I manually cued up records, played commercials via cart machines, and pulled the latest news off the teletype, I seriously considered a career on the air. But I hung up those headphones long ago.

During the halcyon days of the comic book boom back in the late 80s/early 90s, I occasionally found myself back on the airwaves serving as a pseudo-expert on this or that once-in-a-lifetime event.  It was easy and comfortable and a lot of fun.

Then one day I found myself living a different life in a different world and I was now RADIO SILENT.

But silence is meant to be broken. After more years ago than I care to recall or admit, I stepped up to the microphone once more and let my voice be heard.

I had the pleasure of joining Tommy Hancock (Publisher, Writer, and Pulp Provocateur) on Pro Se Presents: The Podcast at its new home on Jackalope Radio, the internet radio network that brings you Pulped!, Nightwatch and so many other great shows. So spin your interwebs radio dial to Jackalope on Wednesday, July 30, at 7PM Eastern/6PM Central/5PM Mountain/4PM Pacific to hear us talk about TALL PULP and “Mike Fink and the River Round-Up.”

Admittedly, the once mellifluous voice was probably a little scratchy. I am sure that I talked too fast. To paraphrase Gordon Sumner, too often my eloquence escaped me. There are few things more disconcerting than hearing your voice proclaim something to a mass audience that does not correspond to the words your brain intended.

But it was fun and I hope to do more of this in the future.

See you on the radio.

Quoth the Raven … TALL PULP is 5-Star Pure Pulp

MEANWHILE … The Raven, perched upon a bust of Pallas, casts a wise and watchful eye over the words that flow from quill and keyboard.

If you are a fan of New Pulp and Genre Fiction you have probably come across Raven’s reviews on Amazon.com or on his own blog, aptly titled, Raven’s Reviews. If you have not though, I encourage you to seek him out. He is a voracious reader and reviewer and is always happy to discuss books.

Raven was kind enough to publish a glowing review of TALL PULP, the most recent anthology from Pro Se Productions. TALL PULP features Tall Tale characters in Pulp-style adventures by authors D. Alan Lewis, Gordon Dymowski, Nancy A. Hansen, Phillip Drayer Duncan, David White, and, yours truly, Greg Daniel.

But enough preamble, let me turn things over to Raven ….

Tall Pulp edited by Brad Mengel, Nikki Nelson-Hicks, and Frank Byrns

 

Take the Tall Tales stories of America, about such characters as Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Joe Magarac, and real people like the female pirate Anne Bonny, the legendary Leatherman, and Jim Bowie; add three fingers of pure Pulp—shaken, not stirred—and you have this excellent book!

 

“Anne Bonny’s Revenge” by D. Alan Lewis

Historically Anne Bonny was one of two female pirates who sailed with Captain Calico Jack Rackham. The other was Mary Read. When the Captain was caught and hanged, the two women plead their bellies, i.e., they were pregnant and went to prison.

This story opens with Anne Bonny attempting escape from the prison where Mary Read has, unfortunately died. Although she wasn’t pregnant when she entered prison, Anne is now by her lover, Lieutenant Joseph Harland who runs the prison.

The two are called before Jamaican Governor Nicholas Lawes. In short order he tells them that he knows their secrets and sends them on a nigh impossible mission: destroy the ships of Captain Vargas Santiago, a Spanish Pirate who was directly responsible for the downfall of Calico Jack…

Mr. Lewis welds blocks of historical semi-fiction together with the arc-welder of pure pulp. The result is a five star story that keeps the attention of the reader to perfection.

 

Freedom’s Road by Nancy A Hansen

Historically the Leatherman was a vagrant who regularly walked a 365 mile route through Westchester and Connecticut. He was named for his unusual leather clothing which he made and repaired himself. He spoke French and had very broken English. He lived in caves and campsites, and walked this route from 1858 until his death in 1889.

Benjamin Bartlett, an emancipated black man lives and works in the area of southern New England. One day he takes up for the Leatherman who is being tormented by a group of local delinquents. The scruffy rabble back off, but their red haired leader promises revenge. And as all the boys are white, Bartlett decides to leave in the company of the Leatherman. Time and again the Leatherman aides this man who helped him; by collecting food for the two of them, and deciding on the best routes to take.

Yet the boys have not been idle, and a professional hunter, a man named Able Kendricks, well known for his outstanding success in tracking wanted men. The tale of two very different men being tracked by this professional and the lengths they go to protect each other makes a great story!

Ms Hansen takes a famous but obscure historical beggar and then layers in the flavor of the plight of black people—even freed they were in danger of being sold back into slavery—to form a cohesive entrée of pure five star Pulp!

 

“The Untold Legacy of the Bowie Knife” by Phillip Drayer Duncan

Historically, Jim Bowie, inventor of the famous Bowie knife was an Indian fighter and soldier of fortune who died at the Alamo, fighting the army of General Santa Anta.

Jim Bowie and his friend Anthony have been hunting when Anthony is attacked by a group of men lead by one Major Norris Wright, a local banker. When Anthony is killed and Bowie assumed dead, Wright leads his men away.

But Anthony isn’t dead just yet, and the story he whispers to Bowie is right out of science fiction. His name is not Anthony but Antonius, he is from Ancient Rome, and Wright is a demon with supernatural powers than only the shard of metal carried by Antonius carries can kill.

Now Bowie takes up the mantle of his fallen friend and vows to complete his quest. And to make the shard easier to use, Bowie has a blacksmith forge it in a large knife blade—the original Bowie Knife, the Arkansas Toothpick!

Mr. Duncan uses the historical to mix with the Pulp to form new shades of color with which to paint a five star masterpiece!

 

“Paul Bunyan in the 23^rd Century” by David White

In tall tale lore Paul Bunyan was a giant lumberjack whose logging escapades took him from Maine to California. Babe the Blue Ox was his gigantic friend. Along the way he was responsible for clearing land, The Thousand Islands, and digging The Grand Canyon by dragging his axe through the heat of the desert.

2248 A.D. Man has reached the stars. Man has also along the way nearly destroyed the Earth. The Rain forests are all gone. The United Federation of Earth comes up with a plan to reseed the Amazon Rainforest. One councilman disagrees—Othello Ferax,  Governor of the African Territories. From a long line of Druids, he wants Earth to be abandoned until the planet recovers.

2252 AD. Paul Bunyan, a genetically enhanced beaver—who appears to be an animalistic cross between Captain American and Wolverine—patrols in his ship, Babe.

Othello Ferax and his men are committing sabotage using the stolen super seeds in an effort to discredit the science that has re-grown the rainforest. They have also slain geneticist Karen White, whose formulas produced Paul Bunyan, leaving Paul the only one of his kind. Now Ferax must be stopped. Paul and Babe will have a major role to play before the battle ends.

Mr. White has chosen to build this five star story by blending folklore with science fiction in a brew to sate the thirst of any Pulp reader! A special nod goes out to the author for the subtle references to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

 

“Crossing McCausland”by Gordon Dymowski

In the world of American Folklore, Joe Magarac is a steel man who walked fully formed from an iron mine. He was a hero to the Steel Industry of the United States.

Joe Magarac is in Appleton, Missouri, an unincorporated town on the outskirts of Saint Louis. He has arrived just in time to rescue a child from certain death in the sewer Oddly he s not well received. While the town manager calls Joe a hero, Don and Seamus MacKelly endeavor to raise the town against our man of steel.

We discover that a man named Robert McCausland, mayor of Pitchford, has great plans for the Appleton area. He wishes to be elected Governor of the area and set up a kingdom where crime will rule. He ruthless kills all in his way, especially those who have gone beyond his orders—or worse, failed him.

Mr. Dymowski combines folklore with crime fiction and a touch of a dystopian future into a five star blockbuster! Great job!

 

“Mike Fink and the River Roundup” by Greg Daniel

Mike Fink, the semi-fictional “King of the keelboaters” has a folklore rich in mighty deeds and shooting contests with Davy Crockett, whose own adventures are semi-fictional. He was the epitome of the river boatmen of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

One hundred years have passed from the heyday of Mike Fink, but the riverboater is far from dead. His appearance at a poker game in 1961 send the reader off on the road to adventure.

Fink recalls running into two colorful characters—Monocle Dan MacAuley and Bowleg Bill—about twenty years before in Memphis. Monocle Dan has the best sight of any man and the ability to shoot accurately at things other people can’t even see. Bowleg Bill is sort of like Pecos Bill, able to rope anything he wants.

The two join Fink in recovering his boat, the Gullywhumper. They then begin a campaign against German Bund members who are operating a U-boat in the Mississippi river. The three men have two rather unusual helpers when they seize the u-boat and its crew.

Greg Daniel’s mixture of pseudo-history and folklore comes together in the blender to make five star pure pulp!

Great book!

Now, a question. If I didn’t know the history of all of these fictional and real life characters from the time I was in grade school would I have still loved the book? In other words, will people encountering these characters for the first time have the same wild ride? I say they will. Most will probably spend time researching these characters. And that is what five star pulp is all about, solid entertainment that leaves a taste for more!

Quoth the Raven…

 

Harnessing Heroes and Hyperbole

 

When I think of Tall Tales, two things leap to mind: larger than life characters and over-the-top storytelling.  Heroes and hyperbole, if you will.  The heroes and hyperbole formula works pretty well for Pulp too.   In both, the improbable is commonplace and the impossible is just another challenge for the hero to overcome.  The hero is not the simple protagonist from literature class though, he is a HERO.  He runs faster, jumps higher, hits harder, and if he is not the smartest guy in the room, then his horse is.

The primary difference, and therefore the challenge in harnessing both to the same rig, is that Pulp tends to play it straight where Tall Tales relish, more often than not, outlandish humor.

Mike Fink struck me as a character that could effortlessly bridge both worlds.  His adventures were not as outrageous as some of his peers and focused on fighting and shooting, activities common in Pulp.  He would allow for a chase scene on the river as opposed to horseback or the rain slicked streets of New York.  The humor in his tales arises primarily from his braggadocio.  My lead was cast.

Tall Tales do not require a villain per se, but Pulp demands one.  So that was next on the list.

Why does it always have to be Nazis? Simple.   Nazis are always good Pulp villains.   They are also overused enough that there is some built-in self-parody value.  Some research for an unrelated story found me reading about U-boat activity in US waters.  Stick a U-boat in the Mississippi River and I had my villains.

With the easy part out of the way, all that was left was to find some way to twist Mike Fink and a Nazi U-boat into a story.  In the writing world, I tend to fall between pantser and plotter on the scale, but definitely closer to pantser.  I call myself a ponderer.

Things start by pondering the main character and seeking a scene that establishes who he is.  Drinking whiskey had played a big role in the tales of Mike Fink, but rarely was he drunk.  However, that was Mike Fink on the top of his game, the Mike Fink who was King of the River.  Take an older Mike Fink whose best friend is dead and he is accused of being the killer.  Another friend tries to take revenge for the first.  He is alone out west, far from the rivers and woods that are his life.  He learns his only true peer, Davy Crockett, fell at the Alamo.  His fellow river men are pitted one against the other in the Civil War.  If a man was prone to drink, those are excuses aplenty to crawl inside a bottle and stay there.

In the establishing scene, Mike Fink is a disheveled drunk on a one hundred year bender beset by a group of thugs who reckoned he was easy pickings and reckoned wrong.  He avoided confrontation for years as a harmless old sot, but when push comes to shove, he is still Mike Fink.  He just needed to be reminded.

At that point, I planned to grab ahold of Fink’s coattails and go where he dragged me.  What would motivate Fink to action?  Two things:  the river and friendship.   The river part was easy, but friendship would require more pondering.

I briefly considered pairing Fink with a classic Pulp character, but none really seemed to fit well with him.  Also Fink’s character is best displayed in his boastful taunts and I did not want to go tripping over the standard team-up trope from comic books, where the heroes have to fight each other upon first meeting.  It had to be someone who would be willing to play second fiddle, but could still hold their own beside such a colorful character.

I vaguely recalled a second tier Tall Tale character by the name of Bowleg Bill who was a cowboy who longed for the sea.  I envisioned him with a lasso around the U-boat and was sure that he could work in the story.  But there was still something missing; something to both tie everything together and drive the story forward.  I found it, more accurately him, quite by accident.

From the moment I decided to write a story for TALL PULP, I had the opening line in my head.  Back in sweeter times, back between the wars, travelling men would often stop at this little river town in Kentucky.  Problem was Mike Fink could not start there in the shape I needed him.  So what was there to launch the tale and why?

Whatever it was had to hold the reins of Tall Tales and Pulp in both hands.  It was actually already in the opening sentence.  Travelling men.  The larger than life confidence men and gamblers.  Men like Titanic Thompson or his fictional equivalents that populated the writings of Damon Runyon.

Except not them, but the men who, in their youth, had rubbed shoulders, pitched pennies, and played cards with them and, for a lingering moment, fancied themselves good enough to take them — to be them.  But, in the end, lacked the skill or the instinct or the fortitude necessary but would instead blame family or obligations or commitments for not being able to take to the road.  They stayed home, made good, led happy lives, but when they get together they spin yarns, tell lies, remember, and wonder.

Still the one thing to tie it altogether was missing.  My perspective character, Coot Dillingham, was originally going to tell a whopper about how he got out of a speeding ticket.  That did not seem to work.  Then he was going to recount winning a bet about how far it was to town from a guy who had lived there all of his life.  That did not seem to work either.  So I pondered some more.

The little Kentucky town is based on the town where my grandparents lived.  I originally heard the story about the town character blowing on a frozen lock from either my grandfather or uncle when I was very young.  Once Coot told that story and introduced Uncle Danny, everything clicked into place and the wheels turned smoothly.

I needed to harness heroes and hyperbole to have a TALL PULP story.  To make it work, I needed to find its humanity.

Mike Fink and the River Round-Up

 

My latest story, “Mike Fink and the River Round-Up,” appears in Tall Pulp from Pro Se Production. It was an absolute blast building a pulp adventure around a tall tale character and I will tell you more about that … some day in the foreseeable future. But for now, I am going to turn things over to the Pro Se Productions P.R. Express:

 

“Tall tales,” says Tommy Hancock, Partner in and Editor in Chief of Pro Se Productions, “are familiar in some form or fashion to every American, and some even have a worldwide presence.  And they lend themselves really well to being wrapped in the Pulp style and taken to another level.  Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Mike Fink, and more already stand well as over the top characters taking on insurmountable odds.  It makes perfect sense to throw six top notch Genre Fiction authors at these wonderfully realized characters and see what works of art they paint using a Pulp Fiction style brush.”

Tall Tales.  Stories of larger than life characters, heroes who stand above everyone else and perform great feats.  From digging the Grand Canyon to reversing the flow of the Mississippi River itself, there are figures woven into American history and lore that seem ready made for the classic Pulp magazines of yesteryear! Now, today’s best and brightest writers of Genre Fiction take those classic legends and shine a new light on them.  Pro Se Productions proudly presents Tall Pulp.

Thrill as characters like Jim Bowie, Joe Magarac, Anne Bonny, and Mike Fink come to life in two fisted action adventure tales!  Learn of the mysterious Leatherman and thrill to his wild adventures! And discover a whole new take on the concept of Paul Bunyan! Authors D. Alan Lewis, Gordon Dymowski, Nancy A. Hansen, Phillip Drayer Duncan, David White, and Greg Daniel take characters, both historic and fictional, and give them a treatment like no other.  Tall Pulp from Pro Se Productions.

Tall Pulp featuring a fantastic cover by Jeffrey Hayes and cover design and print formatting by Percival Constantine is now available in print on Amazon and via Pro Se’s own store at https://www.createspace.com/4891804 for $12.00. The collection of Pulped up Tall Tales will be available in ebook format in the coming days.

For more information on this title, interviews with the authors, or digital copies for review, contact Morgan McKay, Pro Se’s Director of Corporate Operations, at: directorofcorporateoperations@prose-press.com.

For more information on Pro Se Productions, go to http://www.prose-press.com. Like Pro Se on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ProSeProductions.

What are you? Lost?

You are probably wondering how you got here. Frankly I am too. But since we are both here, pull up a seat and get comfortable, We can be lost confused together.

A quick circuit of the interwebs will reveal that the last thing we need is another blog about writing and books and movies and television and [insert blog topic of your own choosing], so here is another one to throw on the e-pile. What is going to make this one any different? I guess that’s where I come in.

If you got here without having any idea of who I am or are just dying to know more, check out the “About” page elsewhere on this blog. But if you really want to get to know me, come back here on a semi-regular basis and read.

And if you do just that, what might you discover things like…

Why I write and why I read and, of course, why all right thinking people must agree with my views on these subjects.

The Future that Never Was but, oh, how I still want it to be.

The influencers and the influences that you can blame for me being the way I am.

The Good Old Days and how I misremember then.

Recommendations (but rarely reviews) of things I watch, read, and listen to and why, as one of the aforementioned right thinking people, you should too.

Other various and sundry topics ranging from New Pulp to College Basketball to Singing Cowboys to Disney World to Games (mostly not the video kind) to Publishing to Whatever Shiny Object catches my attention.

In short, me writing about all kinds of stuff instead of writing the stuff I should be writing (like the stories and books that have already been promised to editors).

That’s probably more of an introduction than you wanted, but don’t say you weren’t warned. If you ramble around and end up back here again, that will be entirely on you. But if you do, I’ll have a seat waiting for you.