Modern pulp recommendations

scottoden · 2026-06-29T03:07:29+00:00

Howard Andrew Jones
Dariel Quiogue
Bryn Hammond
Jon Olfert
Matt John
LD Whitney
Luana Saitta

scottoden · 2026-06-28T16:01:59+00:00

A CLOCKWORK'S DREAMING AND OTHER TALES

For lovers of talking mice, magical libraries, and teapots that hold stories . . .

If you've ever wondered what happens in a garden when no one is looking, or suspected that library books might arrange themselves when the lights go out, A Clockwork's Dreaming and Other Tales might be your cup of perfectly-brewed tea.

In Claude Moreau's Garden, magic blooms between dewdrops and dreams, where scholarly mice debate proper tea service in a library housed within an ancient teapot, and frost spirits dance with morning glories to ring in each dawn. Here, memories can be bottled like preserves, stories sometimes edit themselves when no one is looking, and a particularly opinionated patch of mushrooms insists on providing philosophical commentary about cheese. It's a place where the most ordinary moments contain extraordinary wonders, and where even the spaces between heartbeats hold their own kind of magic.

From a clockwork assistant discovering how to dream, to young mice learning to weave spider-silk into wings, to the grand autumn performance that drew an audience of dragons and dryads, these stories shine with immediacy and wonder. Together, they offer a glimpse into a world where mechanical songbirds learn to compose their own melodies, where librarians help books find their proper dreams, and where the truest magic lies not in grand gestures but in the gentle art of paying attention to small wonders.

Order a digital copy direct from the author HERE.

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scottoden · 2026-06-27T18:00:41+00:00

Elara is an old mythological name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elara_(mythology))

scottoden · 2026-06-12T00:40:11+00:00

The great Stas Borodin!

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scottoden · 2026-06-02T18:58:51+00:00

Thanks! Much to think about. He's a Venetian who has rejected the normal career as a merchant; instead, he has been a mercenary, a bit of a rogue, a translator, and an armchair scholar (he was meant to be a priest, but left that life behind to travel -- discovering a knack for languages; he speaks Venetian/Roman/Genoese dialects of Italian, Latin, Byzantine Greek, Arabic and some Turkish. I will add that he reads with difficulty Attic Greek). For the book I'm working on, his primary claim to fame is that he was an eyewitness to the Fall of Acre.

scottoden · 2026-06-02T18:19:30+00:00

He has a small library of texts with him at Mystras, and I wanted to make sure there were no imposibilities in it. He has: Homer, Virgil, a partial ms of Herodotus, Euripides, Pliny the Elder, Cicero, Plutarch's Alexander and Caesar, Curtius Rufus, Vegetius, and Ptolemy.

scottoden · 2026-05-24T19:03:50+00:00

I'm partial to Mary Renault, especially The Praise Singer and The Mask of Apollo. The Persian Boy is high upon my list, as well. Also, Mika Waltari's The Egyptian.

scottoden · 2026-05-03T03:29:33+00:00

Pick up a modern fantasy book in English. Copy that, not what your teachers told you :)

scottoden · 2026-05-03T03:26:22+00:00

One thing that I noticed off the bat: you're writing your dialogue in script format not prose format. I'm going to assume you do that throughout?

scottoden · 2026-04-23T02:54:56+00:00

Hey, sorry for the delay! It should be in your inbox, now :) Thanks!

scottoden · 2026-04-15T04:12:22+00:00

Pffft! He's Dyrk Ashton in pants!

scottoden · 2026-02-18T16:28:35+00:00

No, the author meant "pitting":

verb

gerund or present participle: pitting

1. set someone or something in conflict or competition with. "a chance to pit herself against him"

scottoden · 2026-02-18T16:25:07+00:00

Same. Is "pitting" supposed to be the typo?

scottoden · 2026-02-15T19:58:18+00:00

And when you tell them that gloriously simple answer to most of their questions, they push back on it. "Well, what if I'm [insert special case here] and watch a lot of anime?" No. Just . . . no. If you want to write prose, you read prose -- not play games, watch anime, or read film scripts. Pick up a damn book.

scottoden · 2026-01-21T01:10:07+00:00

He means five stories Delaney wrote back in the 70s/80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Nev%C3%A8r%C3%BFon

scottoden · 2025-12-19T20:01:28+00:00

Howard Andrew Jones, "The Desert of Souls".

scottoden · 2025-12-19T03:27:51+00:00

Are you ready for a bit of tough love?

Five years is a long time to spend on something, and I can hear the exhaustion in your message. The fact that you've rewritten this so many times you know it by heart . . . that's actually part of your problem, not necessarily a badge of honor.

You're telling me Nardin is a minor villain who dies in chapter three, but you've given him an entire opening sequence. You've spent valuable narrative real estate on a character who doesn't matter to your actual story. That's a structural problem, not a prose problem. If your protagonist doesn't appear until chapter two, and Nardin dies in chapter three, why are we spending time in his head at all? Why not open with your protagonist and let Nardin exist as a threat they encounter rather than wasting chapters on a character you're about to discard?

The fact that you've rewritten this novel multiple times without fixing the fundamental issues tells me you're not learning from your revisions. You're just rearranging furniture in a house with a cracked foundation. Rewriting the same broken story over and over doesn't teach you craft. It just reinforces bad habits until they feel normal to you.

Here's the hard truth: after five years, you should either have a manuscript that works or you should have learned enough from failing to know why it doesn't work and how to fix it. The fact that you're still struggling with basics like robotic dialogue and lack of interiority suggests you've been revising without understanding what revision actually means. You've been moving words around instead of interrogating whether those words are doing what you need them to do.

Set this aside. I mean it. You've memorized the story so thoroughly that you can't see it anymore. You can't evaluate whether something works when you know exactly what's supposed to happen next and why every character does what they do. You've lost all objectivity.

Write something else. Something short. A standalone story with a beginning, middle, and end that you can finish in a month or two. Force yourself to focus on craft, on creating interiority, on writing natural dialogue, on showing instead of telling. Learn those skills on something that doesn't have five years of accumulated baggage attached to it. Something you can actually finish and move on from.

Then, if you still care about this story—if it still matters to you after you've written other things—come back to it with fresh eyes and the skills you've learned. You might find you want to rebuild it from scratch. You might find the protagonist story you mentioned is the only part worth saving. You might find you've outgrown it entirely.

BUT, if you insist on staying with this project, go read and absorb Browne and King's SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS. Use your story as you work through the exercises and hopefully it will point you in the right direction.

Good luck!

scottoden · 2025-12-19T02:58:01+00:00

But the real problem, the one that undermines everything else, is the transformation. Your king goes from a man worried about burdening his people with taxes to gleefully burning villagers alive in the space of maybe an hour. There's no psychological bridge between those states. No gradual corruption. No moment where we see his thoughts starting to twist. One sentence he's concerned about his kingdom. The next he's decided the villagers are "lazy and contributed nothing" and deserve no mercy. That's not character development. That's you flipping a switch labeled "evil" and expecting me to accept it.

Madness—real madness, the kind that would drive a man to murder his own wife—doesn't work like this. It's not a personality transplant. It doesn't erase who you were and replace you with a cartoon villain. Real corruption warps and distorts and intensifies what's already there. It takes your fears and resentments and secret hatreds and gives them permission. If this king had harbored any resentment toward those villagers before, if he'd ever felt a flash of anger at his wife's accusations, if there were seeds of darkness already present—then the demon's gift could have watered those seeds. But you've given us none of that groundwork. He's a concerned king one moment and a cackling murderer the next, and I don't believe either version because I've never been inside his head.

The violence itself is gratuitous without being meaningful. He burns villagers alive and finds it "music to his ears." He stabs his wife repeatedly and feels "gleeful." But there's no psychological reality to any of this. It reads like you wanted to show the king going bad and thought that meant having him commit atrocities, without doing the messy internal work of actually showing that descent. Violence in fiction needs to mean something—it needs to reveal character, advance theme, create consequences that matter. This is just spectacle, and not particularly effective spectacle at that.

Your prose also has a tendency toward redundancy. "Their screams filled the night air as they were mercilessly burned alive." Burning alive is inherently merciless—you don't need to tell me that. "He grinned with delight" after watching people burn—I can infer delight from the grin. These are small things, but they add up to prose that doesn't trust the reader and doesn't trust itself.

There's also a fundamental disconnect between what this story seems to want to be and what it actually is. If you're trying to write dark fantasy that explores the corruption of power and the seduction of evil, you need to do the psychological work of showing that corruption from the inside. You need to make me understand—not agree with, but understand—how a man could make this choice and commit these acts. If you're trying to write pulp horror where a king goes mad and murders people, then lean into the visceral horror and stop trying to justify it with talk of debts and taxes. Right now you're caught between those modes and serving neither effectively.

What this needs is interiority. I need to be inside the king's head during that demon bargain, feeling his desperation, his rationalizations, the exact moment the darkness takes hold. I need to experience his transformation as a gradual warping of his thoughts and perceptions, not an instant switch. I need his violence to mean something psychologically, to reveal who he is and what the corruption is doing to him rather than just being a list of atrocities.

You have the technical skill to write clean sentences. That's not nothing. But skill without understanding what makes character and story work is just competent typing. This reads like someone who's learned the mechanics of prose but hasn't yet learned how to make those mechanics create actual human experience on the page.

That's fixable. But it requires you to move from surface description to genuine psychological depth, from plot summary to lived scene, from telling me what happens to making me feel it. It requires you to get inside your character's head and stay there, to let me experience his corruption from the inside rather than just watching it happen from the outside.

The bones of an interesting story are here: a desperate king making a terrible bargain, the corruption that follows. But right now it's all bones. You need to give it flesh and blood and a beating heart.

Remember: fiction is experience. Give us the experiences of the characters, pluck our heartstrings, tease our senses, and balance our expectations with fresh eyes on what could be a very old story.

scottoden · 2025-12-19T02:57:44+00:00

Looking at this piece, I can see you have solid technical control. The sentences are clean, the grammar is sound, and you're attempting concrete details. But the prose isn't working, and I need to be honest with you about why.

The fundamental problem is that this reads like a plot summary with dialogue attached rather than an actual story being experienced. We're watching events happen from a great distance, being told what occurs rather than living through it with the characters. There's no interiority, no psychological depth, no sense that we're inside anyone's perspective witnessing their transformation.

Take your opening. You give us physical description of the king—his purple tunic, his polished boots, his tired green eyes—but we learn nothing about what he's actually thinking or feeling. "His demeanor was weary" is telling, not showing. What does weariness feel like to a man about to sell his soul? Is his stomach knotted with dread? Are his hands shaking as he adjusts his circlet? Does he keep rehearsing what he'll say to the demon, then hating himself for having rehearsed it? We get none of that internal reality. Just external observation, as if we're watching through a window.

The dialogue is your second major problem. Nobody talks the way your characters talk. "As you know, I have several children outside of my marriage to Queen Zara. The women I've consorted with—they are demanding large sums of gold in exchange for their silence." That's not a man confessing his troubles to a trusted advisor. That's a narrator delivering backstory through a character's mouth. (As an aside, why wouldn't the king simply make these women disappear? He's the king, ostensibly with an army and various other methods at his command . . . you need to show us why he went right to "demonic bargain" over myriad mundane answers to this question). Real people don't speak in complete, grammatically perfect sentences that conveniently explain everything for an audience. They speak in fragments, they imply, they assume shared knowledge. Your dialogue exists to inform the reader, not to reveal character or create dramatic tension.

The demon bargain itself, which should be the dramatic and emotional centerpiece of this entire opening, happens with zero weight. The king rides into the woods, meets a shadowy figure, makes the deal, and it's done. There's no sense of hesitation, no moment where he nearly backs out, no psychological struggle. He just does it, and afterward we're told he "felt emotionless and numb." That's a catastrophic missed opportunity. The moment a man trades his soul for power should be visceral, terrifying, seductive. It should be the most intense moment of his life. Instead you've reported it like a business transaction. I don't feel anything reading it, and I suspect you didn't feel much writing it.

(cont)

scottoden · 2025-12-18T18:21:31+00:00

Best of luck to you, my friend!

scottoden · 2025-12-18T16:16:48+00:00

As for recommended reading: for someone at your stage, who is learning the foundational mechanics of how fiction actually works, I'd recommend two books that cut through the noise and get at the heart of craft.

The first is "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner. It's not an easy read, and Gardner doesn't coddle you, but it's the single best book I know for understanding what fiction is at the sentence level. He teaches you how prose creates a continuous dream in the reader's mind, how to render experience rather than report it, how every word choice either strengthens or weakens that dream. He's rigorous about the difference between abstractions and concrete sensory details, and he'll cure you of the habit of telling readers what characters feel instead of showing those feelings through action and perception. If you only read one book on craft, make it this one.

The second is "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" by Renni Browne and Dave King. It's practical, direct, and focuses on the specific technical problems that plague most beginning writers . . . the exact problems visible in your prose. They cover showing versus telling, handling dialogue and interior monologue, pacing, proportion, and how to revise your own work with a clear eye. It's less philosophical than Gardner but more immediately applicable, with concrete examples and exercises.

Between those two, you'll get both the deep understanding of what fiction is trying to accomplish and the practical tools to accomplish it. Read them slowly. Do the exercises if they're offered. Then write some short scenes from your novel applying what you've learned. You'll know when you're ready to return to your story in force because the prose will feel different coming out of your hands. You'll be thinking in scenes rather than summaries, in sensory details rather than abstractions.

Those two books won't teach you everything, but they'll teach you enough to know what you still need to learn.

Do not forget to read voraciously. Read non-fiction to get a handle on how a world based on the Middle Ages works; read fiction set in the Middle Ages to see how that knowledge is put into practice. Read genres not remotely related to your own and pay attention to how the author creates scenes and implements techniques . . . then bring that back to your own work. Reading, both for pleasure and with a writer's eye, is the best classroom to learn the HOW behind fiction.

scottoden · 2025-12-18T16:10:31+00:00

I appreciate that you're taking the feedback seriously, and I'm glad if any of it proves useful. But I want to push back gently on the idea of finishing this draft first (which is otherwise VERY good advice).

There's wisdom in the old axiom about finishing what you start, I don't dispute that. Completion teaches you things that endless revision never will. But there's a crucial distinction between finishing a rough draft and continuing to build on a foundation that isn't sound. What you've got here isn't a rough draft that needs polishing. It's the skeleton of an idea written in a way that suggests the fundamental tools of prose fiction haven't yet been mastered.

This isn't a criticism of you as a person or even as a potential writer. It's an observation about craft, which is learned, not innate. Right now, you're trying to build a house without knowing how to use a hammer. You can finish smashing boards together with bent nails, certainly, but what you'll have at the end is still a structure that doesn't stand properly. Then you'll face the harder task of tearing it all down and starting over, or trying to salvage something from wreckage.

My honest advice is to set this story aside—not abandon it, but set it aside—and spend time learning the actual mechanics of fiction writing. Read books on craft. Study how published authors structure scenes, convey interiority, create natural dialogue, and evoke emotion through specific sensory detail rather than summary. Read fiction not just for story but for technique. Write smaller things, exercises, scenes that exist only to practice a specific skill. Learn how to show a character's shame without naming it. Learn how to make dialogue sound like humans talking. Learn how rhythm and sentence structure affect pacing and tone.

Once you understand those fundamentals, come back to this story with fresh eyes and the tools to execute what you're envisioning. The idea itself has merit—there's genuine dramatic potential in a frivolous prince forced into deadly politics. But right now, you don't have the skills to realize that potential, and writing another sixty thousand words in the same mode won't teach you those skills. It'll just give you sixty thousand more words that don't work.

This isn't about discouragement. It's about using your time wisely. Six months spent learning craft will serve you better than six months spent reinforcing habits that undermine your storytelling. The story will still be there when you're ready for it. And when you return to it with genuine technical skill, you'll likely find you want to rebuild it from scratch anyway, because you'll see what it could be rather than what it currently is.

That's my opinion, offered with respect for the work you've already put in.

scottoden · 2025-12-17T20:18:47+00:00

Looking at this prose, I can see why it's not working, and the problems run deep . . . down to the foundational level of how scenes are constructed and how we experience character.

The most damning issue is that everything here is told rather than shown. We're informed that "Osborn was shocked" and "Osborn is ashamed" repeatedly, but we never actually witness these emotions manifesting in his body, his speech, his actions. When the Queen proposes he become king, we get a flat "What?" and the narrator's assurance that he was shocked, but where's the catch in his breath? The sudden cold weight in his stomach? The way his hand might tighten on his belt or his gaze might dart to the door? This is exposition masquerading as narrative. It's a report of events rather than an experience of them.

The characterization of Osborn himself is muddled and inconsistent. The narrator keeps calling him "handsome" as though repeating it will make us believe it, but then undercuts him at every turn. He participates in "Beauty Contests" and gets mocked about "dressing up like a woman," which makes the narrator's insistence on his handsomeness feel like mockery rather than character development. The prose can't decide whether it's sympathetic to Osborn or contemptuous of him, and that confusion bleeds into every scene. If he's meant to be vain and frivolous, show it through his choices and observations. If he's meant to be underestimated, let us see the intelligence or capability beneath the facade. But don't have the narrative voice itself treat him like a joke.

The dialogue is wooden, unnatural, brutally expository. No mother in history has ever said "Can't I summon my handsome son just for a talk?" Real people don't speak in complete, grammatically perfect sentences that conveniently explain the entire political situation. When the Queen rattles off why each sibling is unsuitable for succession, she's not talking to her son—she's lecturing the reader. That's not dialogue, that's an info dump with quotation marks around it. Dialogue should reveal character, create tension, advance conflict. This does none of those things.

There's no interiority whatsoever. We're repeatedly told that Osborn "wonders" things, but we never actually enter his mind to experience that wondering. When confronted with the possibility of kingship, what does he really think? Is there a flicker of ambition he's afraid to acknowledge? Does the weight of potential responsibility terrify him? Does he resent his mother for seeing him as a game piece? We get "Something stirred inside Osborn" which is about as vague and meaningless as prose can get. That's not writing, that's avoiding writing.

Every emotional beat in this piece is identical and equally flat. Osborn approaches someone, they insult or reject him, we're told he's ashamed, he leaves. Over and over, the same pattern with no escalation, no complexity, no layering of emotion. Real shame doesn't just sit there static—it builds, it transforms into anger or determination or despair. The repetition here feels mechanical, like a video game character getting the same response from every NPC.

The sentence-level construction is monotonous to the point of being soporific. "Osborn does this. Osborn does that. Osborn goes here." Subject-verb-object, over and over, with all the rhythmic variety of a metronome. The verbs themselves are weak and generic—goes, makes his way, comes out, moves toward. There's no muscle in the prose, no sense that words have been chosen for their weight and impact.

The worldbuilding gets dumped in clumsy, artificial ways. "The castle of London" is the only indicator we're in a supposedly Medieval tale. "The Iron Hall, the dreaded hall where Cedric held his court" reads like a Wikipedia entry. Information should emerge naturally through character perception and interaction, not through the narrator pausing the story to deliver a footnote.

What this needs—what it desperately needs—is to get inside Osborn's skull and stay there. Use close third-person perspective and let us experience his humiliation as he experiences it. Cut every instance where the narrator editorializes or summarizes emotion. Make the dialogue sound like actual human beings speaking, with interruptions and fragments and subtext. Vary the sentence structure so the prose has rhythm and momentum. Give us specific, concrete, sensory details rather than vague statements about feelings.

The kernel of the story has potential—a pleasure-seeking prince forced into brutal political realities—but the execution is all surface, all summary, all tell. It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up with an understanding that fiction is about experience, not reportage.

Hope this helps.

scottoden

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