New publisher in the works

A new Finnish publisher announced its first three books just before the holidays. I had something to do with all of them, so I'm a bit obliged to say something about them, even though the books are in Finnish. The new publisher is called Putki Kustannus (never mind the translation, it doesn't make much sense) and it works only via Lulu. The books are print-on-demand, which is still a novelty in the Finnish book industry, but it's a bit cumbersome to make the books in Lulu, since they don't offer Finnish ISBN codes (or any ISBN codes for that matter), so they are a bit invisible and won't automatically be catalogued in the Finnish National Library system.

But on to the books! Remember my 12-hour novel I wrote some years ago? I thought initially I wouldn't publish the book, but when Jukka-Pekka Kervinen e-mailed me about his idea to publish pulp-styled literature in print-on-demand and asked for help, I thought immediately about my manusript. It fits here perfectly, and the story was actually better than I remembered. The book is called Älä soita sinivuokoille, Joe Novak, which translates roughly as "Don't Call the Coppers, Joe Novak" (Novak being the private eye hero of my one previous novella and various short stories).

I also put together a small anthology of crime and horror stories, some of which were previously published, mostly in my fanzines Isku and others. Some of the stories were previously unpublished, though, for example Harri István Mäki's wonderful story about Edgar Allan Poe's relationship with Annabel Lee. The book is called The Last Shot according to Tuomas Saloranta's sleazy story of a revenge falling over a porn dealer. The first line: "Start jerking off."

The third book is Petri Hirvonen's short story collection Kuolevan jumalan yö ("The Night of the Dying God" in English) that I put together from the stories I've published in various mags through years. There are some western stories, a pirate story with horror overtones, some eighties-style action, some revenge stories, all told with energy and a good eye for violent action. Petri is a little-known pulp writer who's done some Finnish Jerry Cotton stories and the FinnWest western series. Putki Kustannus is also putting out his novella Kalmankylväjä ("Deathsower" or some such) that takes place somewhere in the Central America. The body count is massive in just 100 pages. Both Petri's and my book have forewords or afterwords that explain what's going on.

There are other books coming out from Putki Kustannus: a criminous short story collection by Teemu Paarlahti, a collection of my Mikko Jarmo short stories that mix private eye genre with silly alternative history themes, a collection of flash fiction crime stories I ran in my mag, Ässä, and a collection of my reviews and articles on American hardboiled fiction. I've been also working on a small collection of obscure Finnish pulp short stories from the thirties and fourties, but there are some copyright problems I'll have to resolve. There's possibly also a western short story collection coming from Sami Myllymäki.

Here's more in Finnish on my other blog.

On my 12-hour novel

As you recall, last Friday I wrote a 17,000-word novel in 12 hours. Some thoughts on the process follow.

I can't believe how someone like Barry Malzberg or Arthur J. Burks have been able to write more in a day. (Remember this: Malzberg wrote a 60,000-word novel in 16 hours.) Writing for so long feverishly was very, very tiring. I got my back sore and my stomach almost started to cramp. And those guys wrote with a typewriter, not with new laptops! (Okay, Burks may have dictated.) And how's anyone been able to continue producing those lengths for days and days in a row?

But I proved myself that something like this is indeed possible. You have to remember that the Finnish 17,000 words should be something like 26,000 words in English, as we don't have the "a's" or "the's" or "from's" or any of those in our language. So, the NaNoWriMo challenge of 50,000 words in a month mutates into 35,000 words in Finnish.

Yeah, okay, NaNoWriMo? What's the point writing 50,000 words in a month, when one can do that, say, over a weekend? (Maybe one of these weekends I'll do exactly that.)

There's just one point: how could those guys I mentioned above write stuff that they were able to sell? I haven't as yet tried to read what I wrote last Friday, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to sell it. Well, maybe to a ultra-cheap paperback publisher like Vega Books or PEC or Epic, but not anywhere else. (And in this day and age, the answer is simple: nowhere.) Some of the early pulpsters were able to do only one copy and sell it. Arthur J. Burks was one of them. He is said to have written a story in a bar, walk to the office of a magazine and come back to the bar with the money in his hand. I'm sure I'll have to go through my story many, many times, before I'm happy with it.

Is it just experience and practice? As you know, I haven't published any fiction commercially. My two short novels are self-publications and my few short stories have come out in fanzines. I have two novel manuscripts sitting in the office of a publisher, but so far nothing has happened. So one might think I could do a better story in one sitting in, say, 2020, after I've written more of this stuff.

Wait. I'll be almost 50 by then. Even at 38 I got the feeling I should've been in a better shape for the writing session.

Someone might ask, why I wrote the thing in 12 hours. Why didn't I write it in 16 or 18 hours? Because I was going to step in a train at nine p.m. and leave to Oulu (a city in northern Finland, many, many miles away). I could've started earlier, but I had met a friend of mine over a couple of ciders and beers just on Thursday night and had gone to sleep a bit too late. My bad. I could've started on 8 a.m. or even earlier had I slept more. There were also some interferences during the day: a friend of mine called about our trip to Oulu, I had to go the post office to post some books (it took only 15 minutes at most, since we live very near the office), I had to buy some food and prepare the dinner, since I'd forgotten to buy a microwave dinner. So actually I had only 11 hours to finish the novel.

I posted the progression on my word count in Facebook. I seem to have written the first 2,000 words in one hour and then almost 3,000 words in two hours. Then I seem to have slowed down, but the overall writing speed was 1,500 words per one hour. I got into problems in the last pages: I wrote: "15 203 words and I'm stuck in a dead end. One hour and twenty minutes before the train leaves." Then I wrote: "Still 30 minutes and I'll have to come up with a sad ending. [As befits a private eye novel.] 'Everything was in vain.' 'Stuff that dreams are made of.' Oh, I already used that one."

I wrote the last lines in six minutes. I got them done 25 minutes before the train left. You can imagine I left in a hurry. And I was sweating like a pig during the last two hours. (A friend of mine actually came to pick me up and he laughed when he saw me having just stepped out of the shower: "Are we leaving or not?")

The story, the style? You can pretty much guess the style is hardboiled and pulpy. The main character of the novel is my private eye hero Joe Novak. He gets mixed up in two intrigues at the same time: an old Nazi comes to Los Angeles to avenge the wrongs Novak did to him during the WWII, plus a beautiful young lady asks him to bodyguard her when she's trying to recover a lost Inca treasure from the bottom of the sea. The story is set somewhere in the mid-sixties. I'm not sure if the two separate storylines mingle together seamlessly - I'll have to read the whole thing to find out. But of course this kind of thing is easier to write with 1,500 words per hour than serious literary fiction, even though it is very difficult to keep various things going at the same time. (Someone might actually say that that's what's difficult.)

There's just that the book got a bit too violent and grim. I had had the storyline about the German Nazi avenging the wrongs in my head for a long time, but I had been thinking that there wouldn't be much violence and the book would be more about the sentimental and sad feelings about how revenge isn't going to do anyone any good and how these old men (I was thinking I'd set the story in later times, say in the 1980's) aren't actually able to fight anymore. But no. The story got totally out of my hands, with lots of explosions, shootings and sadistic violence. Which kind of makes me sad - this is not the book I meant to write.

But I'm not complaining. I did what I set out to do: write at least a 15,000-word novel (or novella) within one day. I was able to do it and am sure I'll be able to do it again.

(The book in the picture is an Epic Book from the early sixties, just to show which kind of publisher would possibly touch the manuscript I wrote.)

I'm gonna be a real pulp fiction writer tomorrow

Something I've wanted to do for a very, very long time: I'm going to write a novel tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. I'll start after I've had breakfast and stop only for eating and showering. My goal is to write a novel (or rather a novella) of 15,000 to 20,000 words, so it's something Harry Whittington might've done to be published as an other side of an Ace Double. (Or perhaps a bit shorter.)

I remember I tried to do this already in the eighties, when I was a teenager. I'd read how Chandler had written the screenplay for The Blue Dahlia and I dreamed of a hotel room with only me and my typewriter. Nothing came out of it. I tried again in the nineties. I bought a bottle of whiskey, but that certainly didn't help my writing. I don't think I got anywhere with that.

But now I know more about writing and all that comes along with it. At least I know better not to touch alcohol during the process. And I'll be at home alone, since Elina and Kauto left just now to visit Elina's parents. It's a great benefit.

What will the book be about? It will be a Joe Novak novel, about my private eye hero, whose sometimes pathetic adventures I've been chronicating for almost 20 years. He appears in my self-published novel Outoa huminaa, Joe Novak and in a dozen short stories. (One of these days I'll do a collection.) The story will be based around this unused cover Jukka Murtosaari did for a magazine I never got around to doing - I guess one of those guys is Joe Novak. I'll take the lettering out and smack the illo on the book cover. As for the actual plot, I've been carrying an idea with me for some time now and I think this is the best time to use it.

So, wish me good luck! I'll be on Facebook giving away the word counts during the day.

PS. Don't forget Barry Malzberg's 60,000-word novel written in one day! And he didn't have to resort to self-publishing!

The new issue of Ässä ready

The cover of soon-coming third issue of Ässä, my flash fiction magazine. This issue contains stories by James McGowan, Joe R. Lansdale (two!), Sandra Scoppettone, Patti Abbott, Patrick Shawn Bagley, Paul David Brazill and Greg Schwartz plus Finnish stories by Tapani Bagge (previously unpublished funny story "The Mustache" [sic]), Harri Erkki (five word horror story, with very black comedy and almost pornographic content - try to beat that!) and someone called Mikael Ylinen and myself, with a Joe Novak story which I thought turned out to be very good.

Will be out in a week or two. The title means "ace" and the cover is by unknown.

Joe Novak continues

A new entry in my Joe Novak story here. In Finnish.

Started another blog

Here's my new blog. It will consist of a Joe Novak story I've written ten years ago. It's a continuation to a shorter story that was published in my fanzine, Isku, last year. I'll post the longer story in short installments, a sort of a serial, and will edit the story as I go. I won't promise great or even good literature, it's some sort of a parody.

And yes, it's in Finnish. One of these days I'll try to translate a shorter Novak story in English.

Joe Novak

I've mentioned my private eye hero Joe Novak here so often that I thought the thing could need some explaining. Here's an entry I wrote for Kevin Burton Smith's extraordinary Thrilling Detective site:

Joe Novak
by Juri Nummelin

Joe Novak is a private eye working in Los Angeles, getting mixed up in sleazy swindles, but usually looking at things happening as an outsider.

Joe Novak stories are somewhere between parody and pastiche, and some of them are not really stories about a P.I. solving cases, but they can also be about a P.I. getting out of the troubles in his own personal life. Novak is a WWII veteran and he has horrible memories from the Ardennes. Novak delights in reading hardboiled paperbacks, but he has also studied philosophy at university under the G.I. bill. He dates several women and has trouble finding a suitable one.

The series of short stories is written by Juri Nummelin, who is normally a non-fiction writer. The Joe Novak stories have been published in the Isku magazine, a Finnish small press zine specializing in hardboiled crime fiction.

The stories:

Änkyttävän naapurin tapaus/The Case of the Stuttering Neighbour, Isku # 5 (2006).
Eripuraisten naapurien tapaus/The Case of the Quarreling Neighbours, Isku # 4 (2006).
Merirosvoaarteen tapaus/The Case of the Pirate Treasure, Isku # 3 (2005)
Kävelykeppien tapaus/The Case of the Walking Sticks, Isku # 2 (2005).
Ikkunattoman monadin tapaus/The Case of the Windowless Monad, Isku # 1 (2004).