My page view recently experienced a significant spike, due
mainly to my review of a little thing called Cirsova. Driven mainly by links from the Lead Editor,
and Hugo Nominated author Jeffro Johnson*, it may be time for a quick, but more
detailed introduction to Seagull Rising.
This is the personal blog of a guy starting a second career
as a writer. My writing seeks to fill a
void left behind when the publishing houses adopted a business strategy
dominated by a hunt for the female dollar.
To better understand how fiction of the past was written to appeal to us
menfolk, I’ve recently been inspired by/stolen a plag from Jeffro’s book, and
undertaken a mission to read more pulp magazines. Where Jeffro’s focus has been on the fantasy,
sci-fi, and weird fiction side of things, I’ve been targeting the more grounded
real world adventure marked by seedy detective and man-against-the-wild
stories.
Men’s adventure magazines have a bad reputation in today’s world,
but it is possible that the same sort of dry-erase version of history applied
to sci-fi has also been applied to men’s adventure magazines. The only way to be sure is to read some of
them for myself. It’s a journey I’ve
only just begun – I haven’t even figured out the traditional place to put the apostrophe
in the phrase “Men’s Magazine” – so definitive answers are still a ways
off. Despite that, reading these old
tales is shaping up to be a fun adventure in its own right. You’re welcome to join me.Eventually, I’ll have a library of my own titles, but as a guy just starting out, you can count on my early work being a bit rough around the edges. This is a marathon, it’ll get better over time, but you have to start somewhere.
Be warned, I’m a lifelong tabletop gamer who occasionally
flirts with the lovely Vivian James, so you’re likely to encounter some
digressions into the realm of gaming nerdery.
I’m also heavily influenced by this weird amorphous thing metastasizing
out of the intersection of the manosphere and the alt-right, so regular readers
are probably going to be exposed to the cheeky sort of Platonic rhetoric and casual
disdain for the Overton Window that drives the tubby rainbow haired brigade
back into their safe spaces. I try to
dump the worst of the political stuff onto my alter-ego, but it’s part of who I
am, so some of it will inevitable bleed through to these posts.
*If you guys are reading this, thank you for the free
publicity!
