• Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Some Publishing History

    I Tried And Mostly Failed… To get the importance of publishing history across to the young fiction writers at Writers of the Future. Here is a tiny part of what I said in a rushed fashion, I am sure I was skipping parts. Note: I am only talking about commercial FICTION!! Note: I am only talking about distribution and business structure of commercial FICTION!! In general, fiction publishing distribution patterns and delivery systems tend to run in 50 year cycles. Post Civil War (in this country) was the Penny Dreadfuls, Dime Novels, and Journals. They were slowly being replaced with pulp magazines around 1900 and were mostly gone (with few…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Henry Kuttner

    One of My Major Influences… Not so much for his writing, but for Kuttner’s ability to write a lot of stories. And his partnership and marriage to C.L. Moore. Henry Kuttner died in 1958 at the very young age of 43, so I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Or C.L. Moore for that matter, mostly because she stopped writing and left the field in 1963. But she was maybe the most important of the early women writers in science fiction. Kuttner (and Kuttner and Moore together) did well over 300 short stories and a ton of novels, publishing under more than a dozen major pen names, plus their…