In this week's episode, we take a look at seven bad ways to open your novel and how to avoid their pitfalls. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 203 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 31st, 2024 and today we are looking at seven bad ways to start your novel. Usually here we have Coupon of the Week. Unfortunately my Internet is currently down as I'm recording this, which means I can't get to my Payhip store and I can't create a Coupon of the Week. So we will resume with Coupon of the Week in June when I start recording new episodes. So now let's move directly to my current writing progress on my current writing projects. I am 38,000 words into Shield of Darkness, which currently puts the Chapter 7 of 24. I have 24 chapters in the rough draft outline, but that will probably increase because I’ll have to split a few of the longer ones in editing. I had hoped to have that out in June. That doesn't look like it's going to happen because I have a lot of home repair to do in June and a couple of multi-day commitments where I won't be able to do any writing. So I think we are looking more likely for some time after the 4th of July in mid-July is when that book will come out. I am also 20,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which will come out after Shield of Darkness comes out. I am also 6,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, which will come out sometime this fall, if all goes well. In audiobook news, we are done recording Tales of the Shield Knight, which will excellently be excellently narrated by Brian Wills and that will be a collection of the various short stories I wrote to accompany the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna series. That is all done and should hopefully start appearing on various audiobook platforms before the end of June. 00:01:44 Question of the Week Now before we get into our main topic, let's go to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics, and this week's question: what was the first smartphone you ever used, and what was the first time you decided a smartphone was useful and not a waste of money? And we had one response for this one. Our first response is from Justin, who says: my work issued me a BlackBerry in 2004. Some folks considered them a first smartphone. I considered it a pain. They figured with that they owed me 24/7 and demanded an answer within 5 minutes to any email. I stopped that by asking how much they were paying me to reply outside of work hours. Then I was brought in for a work reprimand for not replying to an urgent e-mail sent during the day. My defense was that I was driving back from a remote site. When asked if I should be using the device while driving (already a no-no back then) or should I pull over and check every time I got a message, my boss decided that just maybe I wouldn't get in trouble that time, anyway. So far, I was not a fan. In 2011, we switched from Blackberries to Samsung with the first Galaxy S. I was unsure about the change, but the increased battery life and ability to put the phone in my shirt pocket won me over. What made it a true useful tool was when I installed the flashlight app on it. Working in a prison made it a pain to bring in a flashlight. You had to have paperwork and disassembled at every checkpoint to show that there's no contraband being smuggled in. The phone got a sticker and was blessed to pass security scrutiny thereafter. The flashlight was so handy. Now it's part of the OS, but then it needed a separate program to run. Yeah, smartphones have definitely contributed to the erosion of work/life balance, in my opinion. I used to do a lot of support for BlackBerry devices and they were a huge pain. I wasn't terribly upset to see the iPhone and Android displace BlackBerry and you know, sort of push it out of business because those phones, from a support perspective, let me tell you, were a big pain. For myself, it was in 2013 when I got my first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. I hadn’t wanted to get a smartphone, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find non-smartphones. So I finally bit the bullet and moved into the new technology. At the time, I usually resented it since I just wanted another flip phone. When did I find it useful for the first time? I remember that incident distinctly. I was working in IT support at the time, and the next day I had to go activate some network ports in another building. The building in question had been built in the ‘90s before Wi-Fi, and so every room had something like a billion Ethernet ports in it. But network switches are expensive, and even though the building has a little like 500 Ethernet ports, only 48 of them could be active at any one time, since that was how many ports the network switch had. So when anyone moved offices, an IT support minion (i.e. me) had to go over there and move the active network ports in the ...
