Tuesday, January 17, 2012

A hardboiled year.

All right, me and the Royal Portable Deluxe have decided that we're going to collaborate on something. As some of you may know, I made my first money from writing when I published a hardboiled detective story in Blue Murder Magazine back in 1999. I don't even remember the title of the story, but I've always liked hardboiled detective fiction- not just reading it, but writing it. I haven't written much of it since college, but now and then I'll read something that makes me think "you've still got some stories in you, self."

I don't know if that's completely true, but I'm on my way to finding out. My goal is to write twelve pulp-style stories this year: presumably one per month, though if I crank 'em out faster, it's all gravy. Now that I've got a typewriter, I can sit down to write without the distractions that come with an internet-connected laptop, and I already notice the difference in terms of productivity (God, I hate that word, but it's apt here). There's something very satisfying about piling up pages next to the typewriter as I finish them, and the visible errors and odd indentations and the like make the typed page a much more attractive artifact than one printed from a computer. Of course, everything I type is just a first draft and will be transferred to a digital format once said drafts are finished- this isn't an exercise in antiquated technology just for the sake of it.

I hope to make each story unique with regards to plot and characters, but I'm not committing myself to anything just yet. I have several ideas, some of them thematically related to different times of the year, but I'm only working on one at a time. That's part of the deal: I won't move onto another story until the previous one is done. I need to work on completing things.

I'll provide more details, and maybe the stories themselves, as they arise. Happy 2012, folks. Take it easy.