As I probably mentioned already, I’ve been a roleplayer for the last 25+ years – having started to play seriously with Call of Cthulhu in the mid-80s.
It will come as no surprise that I like very much pulp-themed RPGs – home-brew stuff run on Savage Worlds, mostly, but also games such as Adventure!, or Hollow Earth Expeditions.
I like the genre, and I can slip quite easily into pulp-adventure-mode.
It’s fun.
My players often have a lot less fun.
Fact is – being Italian, they lack the pulp background.
They are pulp-illiterate.
And lacking the pulp culture, they have a hard time coping with the stories I pitch at them – with the characters, the situations, the mood.
The problem is similar to what would happen should I pitch one of my stories to most Italian publishers.
This is not a country for pulps. Continue reading
Tag Archives: pulps
Relaxing with the Queen of Pulps
This is the Christmas week, so we’ll be not publishing a lot of contents.
January will mark the first anniversary of Karavansara, and we’re planning some celebrations.
But right now, I’m trying to recharge a little my batteries, and to do so I’m enjoying the marvelous book Vanguard published about the life and art of Margaret Brundage.
Excellent stuff – not only the pulp magazine artwork is gorgeous, but Brundage’s life is quite interesting.
The book is beautifully produced, and was an early Christmas gift.
Related articles
- Weird Tales: Meet Margaret Brundage, The First Lady Of Pulp Pin-up Art (fastcocreate.com)
- Mike Gold: Margaret Brundage – Pulp, Pulchritude & Politics (comicmix.com)
- MTV Geek Bookshelf: Pulp Pin-Ups, Bubblegum, And The Men Behind Superman (geek-news.mtv.com)
- Scandelous Pulp: Why We Love it (pulpimages.wordpress.com)
Express delivery for the editor
A friend just pointed out this old pulp cover to me, and I had to blog it here.
And Break the Noose Gently is a hell of a title.
Addendum: yes, both my current editors are gorgeous young ladies.
And no, I never though about boxing them and sending them elsewhere.
Just in case someone wondered.
80 years of Doc Savage
80 years ago this week, the first issue of Doc Savage Magazine hit the newstands.
How I became a hack – part the first
I wrote my first “lost city in the Himalayas” story when I was fourteen or fifteen.
I had not read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon* yet, but I was actually reading a lot of E.R. Burroughs and Rider-Haggard, and quite some Howard at the time.
Their style struck me as easily emulated.
Oh, and I also read a lot of Peter Kolosimo and some Von Daniken and other “mysterious archaeology” books back then.
Food for stories.
So I sat at my mother’s Olivetti Lettera typewriter (hey, it was 1982!) and started hammering away – no outline, no no plan, no nothing.
I was actually writing in the most unpractical way I can imagine, but I had never ever read a writing handbook, so I was winging it.
And I was painfully slow on the keyboard – which helped, actually, as it gave me more time to think the next paragraph.
Anyway, in two months flat I did put together 80 single spaced sheets.
Which strikes me as interesting, as it was very much in the “original novel” pulp format – not only in contents, but also in terms of word count. Continue reading
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