As a Sealed Book: It’s here, it’s (a)live!

Just what the title says, my collection of Beulah Poynter stories, As a Sealed Book: Five Mysteries From the Pulp Era is finally available for purchase!  Get it in ebook or paperback here!  Share, tell your friends, leave a review, etc.!  Most of all, though, please enjoy it!  Due to varying public domain laws, it unfortunately isn’t available worldwide, but it is available in the United States (obviously), Canada, the UK, and Australia.  (I’ll have to research the laws of other countries to see if I can make it available elsewhere, but for now, I figure the major English markets are a good place to start.)

I restrained myself from posting about it here as often as I truly wanted to (you’re welcome 😅), but man, what a ride.  I basically had everything done a mere couple days after my last update, but then I had to wait for paperback proofs (ended up having to order two, because the first had a printing issue related to how I’d saved the file), then I had to wait for the approval process, and then I realized the ebook had a formatting problem (weird spacing in first paragraphs, which I just fixed today).  I learned a lot and will definitely be applying it to future endeavors, because—oh, yeah—I’ll for sure be compiling more of these.  Next up will be another Beulah Poynter collection; unlike the standalone stories of As a Sealed Book, it’ll be five loosely-connected pieces that, together, function as proto-police procedurals (recurring characters, but the individual focus shifts with each installment).  After that, I have a couple other ideas, and I’d frankly love to get a romance anthology together, but I…uh…need to hunt down more love pulps that are officially in the public domain.  I have a couple at this point (and some have been digitized), but they’re a bit scarcer than later issues, and their prices tend to be unreasaonably inflated.  :/  Still, I’m very excited by the prospect of making some of these stories, particularly the romance ones, more widely available!

As a Sealed Book updates: Tfw you know/remember just enough graphic design skills to be dangerous to yourself.

(First off, apologies to those who follow me for reviews—they will return, I promise!)

In Beulah Poynter news, however, we are so close to launch!  The full cover is complete (see below), the paperback version is all laid out, and all I need to do is figure out how to make an epub—something I am led to believe will be a lot easier than everything that has come before it.  I am hopeful things will be available for sale, at least in some fashion, as early as next week.  (I’ll want to do a proof of the paperback before I release that format to the wild, so a lot depends on how long it takes for that to physically get to me.)

On the one hand, I’m disappointed this project has taken twice as long as I initially intended (real ones will remember I was originally aiming for the beginning of May—oh, the naive optimism!).  On the other hand, approximately two months from literal conception to finished product is still pretty damn good, yeah?  Especially considering I’m literally doing ALL the work myself, and there was a steep learning curve, as it’s my first attempt at self-publishing.  (On that note, part of the delay is not only because I decided—insanely—to make two fonts for the cover, but because I also took a week out to teach myself Scribus, AKA the open-source equivalent of InDesign, just so I could make the paperback look more professional.  Once upon a time I was formally studying graphic design, and it turns out that shit will ruin you for life.)

Anyway, enjoy the formal front and back covers (sans barcode)!

Announcement: As a Sealed Book (or, join me as I hop on the self-pub bandwagon).

The blog has been pretty quiet as of late, and that’s mostly because I’ve (shock!—gasp!) been busy putting a short story collection together!  (Actually multiple collections—at least two—but we’ll get to that.)  Long story short, I fell deep into a Beulah Poynter hole, hunted down some neat mysteries she wrote in the late-1910s and early-’20s, found myself thinking what a shame it was that they were never formally collected, and then decided to…collect them myself?  After all, I have no industry clout, but I do have graphic design skills, and self-publishing is a viable option these days, so…why not, yeah?

So click through to see the (working) cover reveal!  (I may yet tweak the font sizes a little.)

Announcement!

Since I was on quite a roll for a while there, I just wanted to drop a line to say that reviews are unfortunately going to slow down (if not pause altogether), as the summer will see me busy with Real Life stuff.  I will definitely be back, though, as I at least have Cornell Woolrich’s novella, “I’m Dangerous Tonight,” to review.  (It’s…a lot, guys.  Like, A LOT™, and as such will take a bit of time and mental energy to properly organize all the thoughts I have, regarding it.  Time and mental energy I don’t currently have, but it’s on the docket!)

I have also discovered a digital copy of a beloved (and obscure) YA historical romance novel I was veritably obsessed with as a teen, so there might yet be a review/revisit of that in the future?  In a throwback to this blog’s original modus operandi, which was to be a retrospective blog?

In the meantime, in case you didn’t catch it, I’ve added a Pulp Romance Guide to the site menu (for anyone interested in the genre, but who maybe doesn’t want to jump in blind, like I had to).  Basically, as there is so little information out there on individual stories (and as I don’t formally review every single one I read), I’ve decided to start cataloguing them with little summary blurbs.  I’ve made some good headway, catching up on previously-read stories, and even if I don’t get around to anything else over the summer, I’ll likely be adding to that, at least.  (It turns out that writing mere paragraph-long descriptions is a lot easier than writing 2000+ word reviews.  Who would have guessed!)

Also, I have a Twitter account now (@lucynkareviews), in the event you want to follow me or whatever.

Catch you cats on the flip side,
Lucynka