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Edgar Rice Burroughs

Pulp Heroes II (Photo credit: Terry McCombs)

English: Cover of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, featuring Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Italiano: Copertina della rivista Amazing Stories (1927) con La mente di Marte (The Master Mind of Mars) di Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Photo credit: Cherry Crimson)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I love pulp fiction. I spent many days of life lost on an alien world or solving mysteries as a gumshoe: all in the pulp pages. It’s not the best, highest quality, literature to be sure, but it’s fun and a great escape.

Maybe the greatest pulp writer of the all was Edgar Rice Burroughs. My grandmother hooked my dad on him when he was a teen, and my dad did the same to me. Seeing as how it’s a family tradition I plan on introducing my sons to his works as well. He wrote hundreds of stories and never assumed he was anything but a story-teller. In fact he felt he was a terrible writer.

Like so many of the great pulpsters he not only wrote but he was able to make a living at writing. As I’m reacquainting myself with writing that is become as impressive to me as the sheer volume of his work.

If you don’t know his work here’s the wiki on him:

Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois (he later lived for many years in the suburb of Oak Park), the fourth son of businessman and Civil War veteran Major George Tyler Burroughs (1833–1913) and his wife Mary Evaline (Zieger) Burroughs (1840–1920). His middle name is from his paternal grandmother, Mary Rice Burroughs (1802-ca. 1870).^[1][2][3]

Burroughs was educated at a number of local schools, and during the Chicago influenza epidemic in 1891, he spent a half year at his brother’s ranch on the Raft River in Idaho. He then attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for the United States Military Academy (West Point), he ended up as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus found ineligible to serve, he was discharged in 1897.^[4]

Some seemingly unrelated short jobs followed. Some drifting and ranch work followed in Idaho. Then, Burroughs found work at his father’s firm in 1899. He married childhood sweetheart Emma Hulbert in January 1900. In 1904 he left his job and found less regular work; some in Idaho, later in Chicago.^[5]

By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. By this time Burroughs and Emma had two children, Joan (1908–1972), who would later marry Tarzan film actor James Pierce, and Hulbert (1909–1991).^[6] During this period, he had copious spare time and he began reading many pulp fiction magazines. In 1929 he recalled thinking that

…if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.^{[7] Full text}

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Pimping Like Bradbury: Trying My Hand At Self Publishing.

Ray Bradbury, Miami Book Fair International, 1990 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury years ago.  In fact it was the last time I really seriously thought about being a writer, rather than being something else and writing just to let the stories out. I took a lot away from the book, and if you think you may be a writer you should check it out.

One of the things I think I took away strongest from the book is that he wrote because he had to, you have to let the stories out or they’ll forcibly blow a hole through your skull to get out, but he published to support his family. He’d bang away at a rented type writer giving birth to his stories and send them off to be published in the pulps.

A lot of writers in his generation worked that way. Write a few shorts, maybe a novella and send them off and get a check.  Last time I seriously thought about writing the pulps were all, but a rare few, gone and my kids needed milk so I quit writing and started teaching. My kids still need milk and glasses and piano lessons and books and and and.

And I suspect they always will need things and the pulps are still gone so I should probably let the stories find their own way out or make my muse so god damned uncomfortable so she’d at least take a hike.

That would be the sensible thing to do, but by definition writers are not sensible, and the pulps aren’t exactly all dead.

E-readers and E-books have created an entirely new golden age of pulp fiction. Anyone can self-publish at Amazon as well as a few other places. The only catch you have to find your own market of readers, you have to not just write, not just publish, but actually pimp your own work.  Which is what I’m doing right here.

There Is A Season is my first Ebook published at Amazon. It’s not great literati, don’t expect to leave having had your mind blown or radically having had you world view on literature shifted. It’s a good old fashioned pulp, ripe with some clichés, and a too convenient plot, but it’s a good read.

Hell it’s great read and at only .99 cents or free to Amazon prime member it’s a great deal.

It’s a story of a lesbian Wiccan couple trying to save a community center in a neighborhood which is just being to bloom again. Of courses there’s a greedy developer who’s out to stop them.

Like I said it’s pulp and it has it’s clichés, but it has some plot twists and turns I don’t think you’ll see coming and is a fun little ride.

It also has a message, but you’ll have to read it to find out what.

So if you have a kindle and you want to buy it here. If you have a kindle and are a prime member get it for free here.

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