Wait 'til next year!

The first year of True Pulp Fiction was fun, but I found myself not doing everything I wanted to. That's inevitably when you juggle three blogs, a job, and everything else in life. But now that I've completed the Pulp Calendar I can look forward to a greater variety of content in 2017, with more attention to pulp stories than pulp covers. The first thing I'm going to do in 2017 is take January 1 off, to mark the definitive end of the Calendar. Don't expect daily content next year, though I do have a gimmick planned to guarantee a steady stream of posts. This will be another cover project, but the focus will be on a magazine that's not a pulp. Thanks to the resources of unz.org, I plan to introduce a This Day in Collier's Weekly feature highlighting the contributions of pulp (and pulpish) writers to one of the nation's most popular slick magazines during the golden age of storytelling. Slicks like Collier's are where most pulp writers wanted to end up, though some got there at the expense of their real talent. At the same time there was plenty of blood and thunder in the slicks, especially in the 1930s, and the magazine published some of the era's greatest or at least most popular western writers, from Zane Grey to Luke Short, who was in the middle of a serial when Collier's folded at the end of 1956.

Along with the Collier's project and the ongoing Vintage Paperback of the Week series (which I hope to keep more consistently on a weekly schedule), I want to do more in-depth story reviews calling attention to what's good, bad and weird in pulp fiction. In some cases I'll be working my way story by story through magazines in my collection. Sometimes I'll rely on published collections, paper and electronic, so I can comment on writers out of my price range like Robert E. Howard. I've been toying with the idea of doing thematic days of the week for different genres, but if that happens it'll evolve over the course of the year as I figure out what I want to do and what I'll have time to do. Now that the Calendar is finished this blog is free to go off the map, so to speak, and I hope following it will prove as much an adventure for you as writing it will be for me. Happy New Year!