Dreamflower's Mathom-house

While doing that "Books Meme", I was reminded of the author of the Doc Savage books I used to read and collect in the 60s and 70s. Lester Dent (pen name Kenneth Robeson) wrote hundreds of short pulp adventure novels, and at one point wrote down his secret of success. It can be found here: Dirty Thirties: The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.

While a bit crass and cynical in expression, the advice he gives really does show how to write a page-turner in most genre fiction, and when I think about it, most of the successful adventure-oriented fanfics I've read tend to more or less follow the outline (word count excepted, since there's no such strict word count for fanfic as for pulp novels which were closer to novellas than true novels). But the story more or less divides up along the same lines!

Of course, the catalyst in his adventure stories was almost always a murder, but it could be adapted to other genres with a slightly different catalyst.

Dent never really thought of himself as an artist--he considered his pulp writing a job, and considering the times, he made a very good living at it.

The cool thing is, I didn't have to manipulate my answers one little bit! This is a really *good* quiz!

Gacked from pegkerr :

To mark the tenth anniversary of World Book Day, a survey has been conducted to find the ten books the nation cannot live without. Over 2000 people voted online, which resulted in the following top 100.

I'm bolding the ones I've read and italicizing the ones I'd like to read.
( Read more... )

Not too shabby, I suppose, considering. But a lot of books I would *think* should be on the list aren't...