The first horrific dreams I ever had which were inspired by a book or magazine as opposed to arising from the depths of my own depraved brain came about when I was nine due to the image on the cover of this July 1964 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, edited by Forrest J Ackerman.

As a result, my parents forbade me from reading it or any other monster magazines for at least a week, hoping to protect my impressionable mind.

I couldn’t keep away, though (sorry, Mom and Dad!), and snuck back to them as often as I could. (more…)

I was looking back through some of my earliest publications and came across this ad for GEnie’s SF & Fantasy RoundTable as printed on the inside front cover of the November 1989 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Raise your hand if you can remember GEnie, or having to “set your modem for half duplex (local echo) at 300 or 1200 baud.” Does anyone still have to do that sort of thing, or have such manipulations gone the way of the buggy whip?

I can’t remember the exact year I joined GEnie, only that it was so early in the online timeline that there really wasn’t any other reason to be online. Back then, GEnie was where all the cool kids hung out … sort of like LJ today.

The solicitation may look primitive now, but it sure seemed tantalizing and state of the art back then.

I can’t wait to see how primitive today’s online interfaces (and the ads for them) will look nineteen years from now!

Dr. J. Berg Esenwein, in Writing for the Magazines, his 1916 manual for writers, gives us a peek into the minds of editorial assistants from 92 years ago. And aside from the fact that gender seems frozen and does not allow for the possibility of female editors, not much has changed.

Here’s how that assistant editor would have been looking at your manuscript: (more…)

So it’s 1916, and you’ve just finished (or think you’ve finished) your latest short story—now what? Well, before you send it to market, eminent editor Dr. J. Berg Esenwein suggests that you ask yourself several questions.

Here, taken from an appendix to his instructional book Writing for the Magazines, are his “Points for Self-Criticism in Fiction Writing”: (more…)

Yesterday, I shared some of Dr. J. Berg Esenwein’s advice for writers from his 1916 book, Writing for the Magazines. But what about those of you who hope to someday use a time machine to head back 92 years and work the other side of the editorial desk?

Esenwein has some words of wisdom for you as well. And he should know, because when he wrote his book, he was not only the editor of The Writer’s Monthly and sometime editor of Lippincott’s magazine, but he was also the former director of the Periodical Publishers’ Association of America.

Here are his thoughts on becoming tomorrow’s—make that yesterday’s—editorial star: (more…)

I previously shared the wisdom of Dr. J. Berg Esenwein in excerpts from his 1908 manual, Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story. (To revisit that advice, click on the tag below to see all eight installments.) But Esenwein clearly had more that he wanted to tell us, because he bothered to write a follow-up book in 1916, Writing for the Magazines.

“Magazine writing, it must constantly be reiterated, is both an art and a craft,” or so he wrote in his more recent book. “This volume is offered in a friendly spirit to all writers who need help in either the one or the other phase of authorship.”

I note that the previous owner of this copy looked at that advice with a jaundiced eye, because written by hand beneath the title is now the suggested subtitle, “or, How to be a Hack.” (See image at right.) Of course, perhaps being thought a hack was something devoutly to be wished 92 years ago! (more…)

Yesterday, I received an advance copy of Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, to be published by Orion, an imprint of Gollanz. The 1,008-page book will contain all of the writer’s major stories and short novels, including the entire Cthulhu mythos. I read the complete Lovecraft a long time ago, so there’s no need for me to dive into it again immediately (though someday I will, and if you haven’t yet, you should make plans to do so now), but I did enjoy reading editor Stephen Jones’ lengthy afterword, which brought to my attention some information I’d never read before.

One such tidbit was a reproduction of the cover to an issue of Home Brew, a magazine from the ’20s which had published a few of Lovecraft’s short stories. (Click on the image at right for a closer look.) I’d heard of the magazine, but I’d never seen a copy. I was very much taken by the taglines of Home Brew, which states that it is “Full of Moonshine,” and promises “Peppy Stories – Pungent Jests – Piquant Gossip.” Home Brew also claims to be “America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine.”

Ah, they just don’t make magazines like that anymore! (more…)

With George Clooney’s film Leatherheads opening this weekend, taking us back to football of the 1920s, it seems like a good time to return to the time machine here as well.

As I’ve shared before, I love digging through century-old magazines, and one of my favorite essays from that period is this one by Elbert Hubbard, which was printed in the March 1903 issue of The Cosmopolitan, a magazine we’ve visited here before.

If you attack football in this country today, you might as well be attacking Mom and apple pie, but things were obviously different 105 years ago, as reflected in “A Gladiatorial Renaissance,” which was published in the magazine’s “Men, Women and Events” section.

Check out the excerpt below to learn just how many men were killed playing football in 1902, and how many driven mad. (more…)

For our last look at Dr. J. Berg Esenwein’s 1908 book Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story, let’s see what he has to say about how it all should begin.

This is what he advised a century ago:

In opening your story:

Don’t be pert.

Don’t be lengthy.

Don’t be general.

Don’t be garrulous.

Don’t be roundabout.

Don’t describe when you can suggest.

Don’t be heavy, pompous, or too serious.

Don’t tell the reader what he can imagine.

Don’t be content with a commonplace opening.

Don’t think that sincere simplicity is commonplace.

Don’t let the introduction weight down or overshadow the story.

Don’t strike one note in the introduction and another in the body of the story.

Don’t touch anything which is not a live wire leading direct to the real centre of the story.

If you can’t figure out the proper length for your current short story, Dr. J. Berg Esenwein has some advice for you in his book Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story. So pay careful attention … as long, that is, as you’re planning to mail that story to one of the better magazine markets of 1908!

Here what he has to say: (more…)