2 October 2013
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Pulp History: nobody does it better

Me and my big mouth!
I promise a short post in a few hours.
Yes, you genius… about what?!

About the pulps, and adventure, and exotic locales, of course – because that’s what we deal in, here on Karavansara.

And when it comes to adventure, and the pulps, to me nothing beats reality.
It’s a tough statement from someone writing books with tentacles on the cover, but it’s one of my most rock-solid certainties: no matter how good is your pulp, the real world can trump that.
In fact, to be a good writer, you have to be as outrageous, unlikely, absurd and strange as only reality can be.
It takes practice.

One of the best places in which to practice is history – not so much the slam-bang, big numbers history of great men and nations, but the small-scale, local, oft-forgotten, “useless” sort of history.

Consider, if you will, a book like Running the Show, by Stephanie Williams, roughly 500 pages of paperback dealing with those faceless bureaucrats that managed the affairs of the British Empire.
Boring, right?
Not so.
In this globetrotting overview of the men (and women) that ran the Empire, we find no end of adventures, madness, tragic death, slapstick, espionage, two-fisted diplomacy and the natives are restless tonight.
Not faceless paper-pushers but often young men in search of their place in the world, the heroes (and villains) of this book are a good example of the way in which history can hit you with a curved ball when it comes to plausibility.

It’s good – and thanks goodness, there’s a lot of books dealing with this shadier, pulpier side of history.
I should know – I wrote one.

Guest Blog: The Need for Pulp Literature (barryreese.net)
Comic Books and Genre Freedom (ianeller.com)
Saving Pulp Fiction (blogs.loc.gov)

27 September 2013
by Davide Mana 10 Comments

Writing Prompt – The Letter

Calligraphy

I do not have Idea where this pictures comes from (pointers welcome), but it sure works as a prompt – for anything from fantasy to espionage by way of romance.
What’s the story here?

Good, simple advice for those awkward moment when your story goes pear-shaped.

5 Quick Fixes for a Story that Goes Wrong

24 September 2013
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Copy & Content

My new ebook is ready to roll.

Time to give credit to my editors.
While beta readers, artists and marketers are a relatively new thing, to me, I’ve been working with different editors for a few years.
And I learned to respect and appreciate their work.
And I ‘m finally learning to work with them – because it’s not something that comes to you straight away.

Now, there’s this strange theory, going around, that the editor rewrites your story.
Which is, to me, eminently dubious.
Oh, granted, I did work with editors that just went and changed my text straight away – in one case requesting a 10.000 words article and then arbitrarily cutting it to 6.000 because the available space on the magazine had “contracted”.
My reasoning then was, they could have asked me for the cuts – or for a shorter piece from the start.
And no, I’m not selling my stuff to that mag anymore*.

And yet, the practice of rewriting has become such, that one can actually recognize the editor’s style when reading the text.
The author is reduced to the role of content provider, not of text stylist.

In my experience, good editors point out the problems, and get me on the right track for rewriting my own stuff in a more efficient way.
The sort of professionals that can accept the fact that yes, it does sound weird, but it’s supposed to sound weird.

Anyway, I’m very lucky – not only I worked with great editors in the past, but right now I’m exploiting shamelessly some of the best editors – both copy- and content- – I ever met.

Which is why I’m taking some blog space to thank both Marina and Chiara.

Thank you ladies!

[yes, both my copy editor and my content editor are gorgeous, brilliant young women, and excellent writers in their own right – it’s one of the perks that come with writing pulp fiction]

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* In another case I worked with one editor that was so enthusiastic about my work, he did not see a number of problems – causing me to withdraw my ebook after publishing it, in order to insert the corrections suggested by my (paying) readers.
It was awkward.