Pulp Modern III: On sale and vanishing

Pulp Modern issue three, featuring one of the strongest lineups of any zine I've ever seen, will be unavailable in a week from now.  It is currently on sale for an insanely low price at Amazon.  Now is the time to get your copy.

Submissions still open for Pulp Modern #5

The summer issue of PULP MODERN is open for one more week for submissions.  Now is the time to get your work in!  Sociological science fiction and original westerns go to the front of the line.

Win a copy of Uncle B's Drive-In Fiction at Goodreads

For those of you who refuse to blast open your wallets and support the work that went into Uncle B's Drive-In Fiction, good news!  You may now enter to win one of three copies at Goodreads.  Don't say Big Papa never did nothing for ya!

PULP MODERN #5 Looking for westerns

So I'm hoping to have the next issue of Pulp Modern lean a bit towards the western, since that genre has never gotten sufficient attention in the journal.  If you or any writer(s) you know and love have something NEW in terms of western short stories, have them send them to Pulp Modern.  I will be reading over the next couple of weeks and putting the summer issue together in June.

Changes to Pulp Modern guidelines

After a year or so of seeing Pulp Modern barely make a dime, I've decided to simplify things and do what everybody else does--I am changing the compensation to one (1) contributor copy.  The payment system I had set up didn't work (mostly because there were hardly any profits to share).

ALSO -- PM no longer accepts simultaneous submissions.  Now that PM is a bi-annual publication, it takes me a while to get to every submission.

For the complete guidelines, go here.

By the way, I will begin choosing stories for the summer issue in just over two weeks.  NOW is the time to submit a story if you haven't already done so.

30 Days of the 5-2: Amy Pollard's "Aftershock"

I’ve never killed anyone.  I’m pretty sure of it.  But I’ve done things I wasn’t supposed to do.  Hell, when I was younger, I broke quite a few laws and was lucky to have never been caught.  Most of those laws were/are moronic and shouldn’t exist in the first place.  I never felt guilty disrespecting legislation enacted by and for business interests.  Really couldn’t give a shit.

When I was a kid, now, I understood guilt.  My parents were good at just sort of putting their laws out there and allowing me to either obey them or suffer the consequences.  Any time I broke a rule, the guilt I felt, I’m sure, had to do with the fact that I knew I was going to get my ass kicked the moment my parents found out (which they almost always did.  They’re smart folks, what can I say?).

In my days of breaking local and national Uncle Sam’s laws, I ran with a lot of criminals who had very good reasons to feel guilty (most of them are dead now—I wonder if their guilt, however, lives as a form of energy, just hanging out in the atmosphere somewhere, maybe pestering innocent birds or something; but I digress.  It’s a habit).  I once hung out with a Korean gangster who had just come back from head-butting a man who owed him money.  He had a horrific gash in his forehead that had opened so far I could see his skull.  I asked him why he didn’t just threaten the man with a gun, maybe even shoot him in the foot or something.  He said that would have made him feel bad.

Hmm.  I guess guilt arrives in different forms for different folks.

I’m really digressing here.  Let me get to the point (or at least try to)—

I was asked to write about one of the poems on the 5-2 website.  I read through a heap of them before coming across Amy Pollard’s “Aftershock.”  I guess what struck me about her poem was how she just shrugged off any psycho-babble Dr. Phil bullshit pretense and just gave us the explicit thoughts of a man who has just done something terrible to another human being.  Maybe it’s murder.  I like to think it doesn’t matter.  His reaction makes the poem.  There’s no way it could be me, he says.  It’s all chance.  And maybe it is.  The thought Amy’s poem ultimately left me with was this:

Once the deed is done, in the face of the tragedy left behind, is guilt even relevant?

To read Amy's wonderful poem, please head over here.

Vote for Matt Funk's "A Woman and a Knife"

Matthew Funk's story "A Woman and a Knife," from Uncle B's Drive-In Fiction is up for a Spinetingler Award.  Buy the book, read the novella, then vote.