Welcome to Pulpstack
Don't worry. Everything will be fine.
I used to spend more time reading fiction, on paper, than pretty much anything else. Now I spend much more time reading… stuff… on my phone. Some of it is good stuff, some of it is a complete waste of time1; most of it isn’t fiction. It’s less fun, and yet the draw of the phone screen is irresistible. If only someone would send me little bursts of something rich and strange and escapist and perhaps downright disturbing, once in a while. You know, the kind of thing you used to hunch over in paperback form, in all those moments when now you reach for your phone - on the loo, waiting for your train, under the bedcovers when you were supposed to be asleep - that gripped your hand tight and led you into the realms of terror and beauty that lurk beneath the paper-thin surface that we are pleased to call Real Life.
My hope for this publication is that it will do that. When this notification pops up, it will be one you know will take you Elsewhere. A pulp magazine, created with sedulous attention to detail, delivered piecemeal to your phone. No ruminations on the issue of the day, no culture war salvoes, just fiction. (Maybe some ruminations about fiction, actually. Maybe.)
Content will be a mixture of short stories with the occasional longer thing when I get carried away, mainly horror and sci-Fi, with anything that feels too long for a single post to be serialised across two or more. I always try to write beautiful sentences. If you like Stephen King, Patrick O’Brian, Vladimir Nabokov, Lois Bujold, M. R. James, or Vernor Vinge… if you dearly love an uncanny child, a hard-bitten space admiral, a Nameless Thing from the primordial depths… but also with a good admixture of friends and family, exile and homecoming, vaulting ambition and plunging despair… then I will endeavour to grip you.
Everything is free for the foreseeable future. At the moment, I see this as more about building an audience, and motivating myself to write regularly and well, than making money.
As a friend recently put it, ‘reading 30% of a culture war article and then tapping through to something else…’