I’ve always been a writer, but I didn’t get the DIY publisher itch until the mid-1990s, when anyone with a Sharpie and access to an office photocopier could produce their own magazine. In California, a few friends and I created four issues of a 5×8 fiction and poetry zine and after I moved to Portland, I put together two issues of a fiction/poetry zine called Salome, which I will have to dig out of storage one day. I studied Factsheet Five like a sinner hunting loopholes in the Bible.

So when publishing moved online a few years later, it wasn’t entirely random that I would eventually start publishing digitally. I started blogging at portmanteau.org (and I’m still mad I let that URL lapse) and later had another site under my actual name, but none of them stuck. I wasn’t a true blogger, yet. But I still liked publishing.

I very clearly remember when the idea was planted. I was browsing books at Barnes & Noble, looking for a new SF or fantasy novel to read, and as anyone who has shopped big box bookstores can attest, the selection was fairly limited. Classics like the LOTR and Dune series had their spaces, along with long shelves of media tie-in books: Star Trek, Star Wars, Warhammer, etc. Into the rest of the section was crammed a selection of recently published original fiction, almost all of which were appended with some variation of: Book 2 in the X Series, Book 3 in the ABC Tetralogy, the Prequel to…

Naturally, not a single Book 1 of any of these series was in stock.

What started as a seemingly simple quest for a recently-published, stand-alone, not to-be-continued, not-licensed-media science fiction or fantasy novel quickly evolved into a frustrating dig through literally dozens of books requiring a multi-novel commitment or immersion into a wider story world I could watch on television, if I wanted to at all.

And completely unbidden, a thought arrived: “If I want to read something decent, I’ll have to publish it myself.”

If necessity is the mother of invention, spite is its milk.

Big Pulp

And thus a small press was born. It didn’t happen right away – I first had to shed 160 pounds of alcoholic partner – but the seed continued to gestate. I toyed around with two dozen names and various formats while I investigated print publishing, but in those pre-POD days, print was cost-prohibitive. With a grudging bow to reality, I bought Adobe Dreamweaver and a Dummies book, learned some *very* basic HTML, registered a website, and started soliciting work. I couldn’t pay a lot, but it was important that I paid the writers and artists something, so I shut off my cable and put that money towards the press.

And on Monday, March 3, 2008, I posted “Dragonsick” by Simon Petrie, the first of 785 stories and poems published in print and online over the next 8+ years.

Big Pulp published fantasy, mystery, adventure, horror, science fiction, and romance stories and poems. Yes, that’s a lot. But I like SF&F. And mystery stories. And horror stories. And Man v. X adventure stores. And the occasional romance, as well as literary fiction and poetry. I couldn’t decide which genre to focus on, so instead, I leaned into the vibe, creating a virtual version of the classic magazine newsstand, where Weird Tales and The Shadow could sit next to Flying Aces and Redbook.

I could have narrowed it down to SF&F, mystery, and horror, but once I went that far, why not invite romance and adventure fiction? My tastes in genre are both expansive and idiosyncratic, so I knew that if I framed the call for submissions the right way, I wouldn’t be disappointed. And I wouldn’t have to publish anything I didn’t like, right?

I received a lot of genre mashups in the slush pile: SF/Romance, Romance/Horror, Fantasy/Mystery. Perfect for the magazine I envisioned. A good portion of submissions lived in the border between genre and literary, which thrilled me. And who knew there were so many people writing horror, crime, and SF poetry? I understand neither the snob who looks down on genre nor the neanderthal who thinks literary fiction and poetry are pretentious. A pox on all of them. Good writing is good writing.

For almost three years, Big Pulp was entirely online. Less expensive to produce, much less work, but a bit unsatisfying. I knew that if I ever allowed the site to lapse or if it crashed, all the work I published would be lost in the ether. I wanted something tangible and I wanted the writers to have something to keep, so in mid-2010, I made the move.

Big Pulp Magazine

In late 2010, I published the first print edition of Big Pulp, with Jarrid Deaton’s “Ted Bundy’s Beetle” as the cover feature. Coincidentally, around the time I was putting that first issue together, Ted Bundy’s actual Beetle was on tour, with a stop at the now-defunct Crime Museum in Washington, D.C. I don’t know what the museum workers thought of me crouching and crawling around on the ground trying to get a dramatic photo of the car, but whatever it was, they probably weren’t wrong. I’m sure I wasn’t the strangest person they encountered.

Sidebar: Possibly the second most infamous criminal car – behind Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled Ford – the car was simply a car, a typical Volkswagen Beetle with a bit of rust around the edges…and a missing front passenger seat where Bundy stuffed unconscious women so they wouldn’t be spotted. Grotesque in its mundanity. I wouldn’t want to spot it in a dark parking lot, but under fluorescent light and cordoned by velvet, it was easy to see how Bundy blended into the background, even as he perpetrated one of the nation’s most notorious killing sprees.

The story it inspired was bad-ass, a bit of psychological tickling with all kinds of ugliness lurking beneath the surface of character. Still one of my favorites.

By Fall of 2011, I found my publishing groove and Big Pulp came out on time every quarter for the next 2 years, with 9 issues total. Most of my copies were sold in-person, at book fairs and comic cons, and I did alright. By that point, though, I started to get itchy.

The Anthologies

In 2013, I published my first three anthologies. The first – Clones, Fairies, and Monsters in the Closet – came about because I had coincidentally received a ton of gay/lesbian themed stories and poems in the submission process. With Big Pulp magazine, I strove to achieve balance in every issue. In addition to publishing multiple genres, and stories and poems, I also made sure every issue had a mix of shorter and longer stories, and heavy and humorous work. As a reader of anthologies, I often feel like I’ve read the same story twice in one book, and I tried very hard to avoid that. I never wanted any issue to be too much of anything, but rather a solid, satisfying, surprising, and hopefully memorable read.

So when the gay content started piling up, I vacillated between publishing a special issue of the magazine or an anthology, and eventually went with a stand-alone book. Of course I couldn’t do just one, so I also solicited for stories and poems on two grossly self-indulgent themes – monkeys and the Kennedy family, two of my obsessions. The second trio of anthologies came about in a similar way. The Walking Dead television adaptation debuted around the same time as the first issue of Big Pulp, and after a predictable lag, my inbox started filling up with zombie stories, enough to fill two volumes. Not long after, a slate of weird westerns crossed my desk, and since I was hard-pressed to include more than one in any issue of Big Pulp, we have Way Out West. Great minds, yes?

The Expansion Pack

The anthologies sold respectably but not that much better than Big Pulp magazine. I was holding my own as a one-person DIY publisher. But by then, I was about six years into my publishing venture and the grind was started to…well, grind. I loved the creative side – reading submissions, working with the cover artists, designing the books – but the admin side – website maintenance, distribution, book fairs, taxes – was taking more and more of my time and my finances.

The publishing was never intended to be replace my day job but some years it simply didn’t pay. So I went back to my original dream for the publishing: a series of genre magazines with a lower price point that would – fingers crossed – be more broadly appealing to readers with slightly less catholic tastes. Hence came Child of Words (SF&F), M (horror and mystery), and Thirst (romance). M was an unconventional mashup, but it worked – I prefer psychological horror to monster-of-the-week, and the mystery stories I published tended towards true crime/horror more than whodunnits, so the work fit together, regardless of genre.

Sidebar: If you’ve been following the blog for any length of time, you might think that romance stories are a bit outside my regular wheelhouse, until you read a few titles from Thirst #2, like “Honey, Is That A Dead Hooker Under the Bed?” by J.A. Kazimer, and “When Molly the Necrophiliac Went on a Date with Suicide Stanley” by Match Ryan. Going back to the third print issue of Big Pulp (Winter 2011), we had a story from Iranian college student Elaheh Steinke titled “Interrogate My Heart Instead”, in which a political prisoner is waterboarded by his former lover.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to spend Valentine’s Day with me, now you know.

Pros: I liked having a ‘line’ of publications. I love the comic-size magazine format. They were a bit less expensive and time-consuming to produce (approximately 48 pgs. x 5 per  year vs. 180-200 pgs. x 4 per year).

Cons: Sales numbers were about the same, but at $4.99 per issue instead of $12, you can see how the math didn’t math. I felt like I was going backwards instead of forwards. There’s no easy way to distribute small circulation magazines that aren’t comics, as opposed to POD book-sized publications, which get an ISBN and go directly to Amazon and elsewhere, so sales were almost entirely by hand. I had fun at the book fairs but lugging boxes from venue to venue as a solo act gets old fast.

I still love them and get a good feeling when I pull them out of storage. If I hit the lottery, you could expect to see a whole line of fiction magazines, profits be damned. But, as 2016 rolled around – eight years into running a tiny small press publisher and 2-ish years into the expansion experiment – I hit the wall.

I started a new job mid-year – EIC of a niche news publisher, a title I’d been working towards and in a market I knew like the back of my hand – and while my finances held up, my time simply did not. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day to be the guy in charge of publishing at work and the guy in charge of publishing at home.

The Pause Becomes an Ending

I had always intended to come back to Big Pulp when time allowed and had several schemes of how I could make it work with the resources I could give it, but the cards never quite played out in the right order to make it work.

And that’s ok. If I’d known 8+ years would go by with no new books, I would have made some kind of formal announcement, maybe had a farewell toast with my contributors. But I didn’t know that, so the magazine kinda drifted off into the sunset.

It’s possible I could go back – or forward – to publish another magazine or some anthologies in the future, but if I don’t, I can still look back proudly on 8 years of publishing a solid run of books and magazines with strong writing and gorgeous covers. If you’d like to check them out, you can find them all here, with links to buy the print and ebooks.

These days, I’m working on my own books, and I hope that the writing lives up to the work I published all those years.

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