Possible Project: A Post Modern Pulps Review eJournal

Blogs are great. I read at least a dozen of them regularly, and probably check in to another two dozen or so on an intermittent basis. The power that Web 2.0 has given the individual to express themselves and reach out to other like-minded individuals is extraordinary, and while there is always bad mixed in with the good, it has allowed people to form communities and share resources in ways that twenty years ago, you'd never believe were possible.

Part of the problem with blogs, especially blogs that are frequently updated, is that the content goes by so fast that you might just miss it if you're not paying attention. A lot of bloggers out there have scads of content in their "back issues" so to speak, but if a reader doesn't see it in the first couple of weeks, it will likely go unread thereafter, even if it is technically still available. This is somewhat mitigated if your blog is niche enough that a Google search of a certain topic will place your article at the top of the search listings, but that is a relatively rare occurrence.

The other day I was contemplating ePublishing and thinking of various ways and means to dip my toe in the water, and it occurred to me that one experiment might be to put together a simple, cheap, no-frills eJournal of blog content written by myself and other like-minded bloggers, sold through Smashwords and/or Kindle. I've seen other niche interest groups put together blog-inspired journals before, and the reception has actually been quite positive. It allows the buyer the chance to read content by people they might not have encountered before, and gives new life to old, but still relevant content that is sitting on the Internet, mostly forgotten.

So I am now in the process of putting out feelers to bloggers who have a strong interest in the men's adventure novels of the 60's through the 80's, what I term "Post-Modern Pulps". If anyone is interested in sending me materials for this journal project, please e-mail me (my address is available in my "About Me" page) and let me know. I'd love to see book reviews, movie reviews, even TV series reviews (Airwolf, A-Team, Knight Rider, etc.), essays and editorials, and even short fiction or excerpts from longer works.

I am considering about a dozen articles, each somewhere in the 1,000 word range, but this is a flexible word count. If I get more articles - great! If the interest is there, I can always put together more issues. My ideal would be either monthly or once every two months, depending on how much content I have to work with and the turnaround time for putting these eJournals in the pipeline.

If the project is a flop, well, c'est la vie. But if it is a success, I think it'll be able to bring bloggers of a similar interest group together, and introduce readers to writers they haven't yet discovered.