All About Yer Uncle Harv
In Today's Journal
* Quote of the Day
* A New Short Story
* All About Yer Uncle Harv
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“You will understand that my plays are not constructed plays: they grow naturally. If you 'construct' a play: that is, if you plan your play beforehand, and then carry out your plan, you will find yourself in the position of a person putting together a jig-saw puzzle, absorbed and intensely interested in an operation which, to the spectator, is unbearably dull.
"The scenes must be born alive. If they are not new to you as you write, and sometimes quite contrary to the expectations with which you have begun them, they are dead wood.
“A live play constructs itself with a subtlety, and often with a mechanical ingenuity that often deludes critics into holding the author up as the most crafty of artificers when he has never, in writing his play, known what one of his character would say until another character gave the cue.” George Bernard Shaw in a 1923 letter to Alexander Baksky, author of The Theatre Unbound.
Personal to Matt: We talked about this before, yes? About whether one could write plays into the dark?
A New Short Story
"Hey, Militia This" went live Friday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out. It's free. This short story was excerpted from my novel Blackwell Ops 38: Paul Stone.
If you enjoy the story, please click Like. Comments are welcome too. Both help with my Substack algorithms. Then tell Everyone else.
All About Yer Uncle Harv
The catalyst for this self-serving bit of tripe was an email I received from a nice lady who wants to help me market some of my work.
She first wrote me about the Echoes of Hemingway anthology. I declined her offer because I'm painfully aware that multi-author anthologies very seldom sell well.
In my initial response, I also mentioned my forthcoming single-author collection Echoes of Ellison and that I might enlist her help with that one.
She asked what had prompted me to include an "interspersed" extra story in Echoes of Ellison.
She also seemed a little agog at how much I write, and she asked about my history in that regard.
Finally, she also asked whether I have a website and a dedicated "mailing list." (Um, no. Wish I'd done that.)
So here's what I told her. I thought some of you might find it interesting, given that some of you see me as your writing instructor:
The catalyst for the interspersed short story in Echoes of Ellison was the structure of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, the Finca Vigia Edition. He did the same thing in the first part of that collection in the section titled "The First Forty-Nine."
I love experimenting to see whether I can do what someone else did. For example, I also once wrote a collection of short stories that, when read as a whole, constituted a complete novel.
The catalyst for that one was The Stories of Eva Luna, an excellent novel by Isabel Allende, composed of short stories. Along with Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, Allende is another of my major magic realism influences.
I have several websites. Two of those (the free story of the week and Your Morning Serial) are primarily for readers. The others, including my author website, are primarily geared toward helping other writers. My version of paying it forward.
So I have those lists of subscribers, but no (to my regret) I never "captured" emails to build an email list. Doing that and using "pop-ups" and so forth felt a little underhanded to me, so I just never did it.
Note: I don't look down on anyone else for capturing email addresses. As I said, I wish I'd started doing that long ago. Well, except for using those annoying popups. The damn things are everywhere. They make me wanna chew wheels and spit nails.
I made my bones, so to speak, as a formalist poet, back in the '80s and '90s. I garnered several prize nominations, including the Pulitzer in 1996(?) for Beyond the Masks, though the book wasn't short listed.
In 1998, I also wrote and compiled Lessons for a Barren Population. From what I can find, it was the first-ever book-length poetry collection published as an electronic book (HardShell Word Factory, 1998).
That collection was presented in the Fiction category (they didn't have a Poetry category) at the Frankfurt Book Fair at the time, and it placed with an honorable mention. My major influences in poetry, among many others, were Nemerov, Yeats, and Frost.
I started writing fiction in earnest in 2014. I'm not really prolific at all when compared with the old pulp masters, but I do my best to adhere to Heinlein's Rules, and I simply "show up" for work each day.
Echoes of Ellison is currently with my first reader. I plan to publish it soon for release "wide" on July 26 (I'll keep your offer in mind for that).
But before that I'm making advance copies available to my readers as a bonus for supporting a Kickstarter [for] True Pulp, in which I'm a co-contributor. (For details on that, see yesterday's issue of TNDJ.)
Okay, I'm sure that was WAY more than you wanted to know.
With any luck I'll be back tomorrow with something more substantive. (grin)
Of Interest
ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Twelve Valid advice regarding pen names.
Turn Your Book Into a Marketing Machine in Minutes Look it over and make up your own mind. Prices seem reasonable to me. Note: This is NOT the person to whom I wrote the email above.
Scans Reveal What The Brains of Psychopaths Have in Common
Time is three-dimensional, and space is just a side effect
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 970
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date…… XXXXX
Fiction for July..………………………. XXXX
Fiction for 2025………………………. 520807
Nonfiction for July………………........ 4800
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 156430
2025 consumable words…………….. 669623
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 13
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 30
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 117
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 300
Short story collections……………………. 29
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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.
Am I the Matt you're referring to? If so I do remember us discussing whether or not you thought it would be possible to write screenplays into the dark, and I agree with Shaw.
I've written many screenplays since we last discussed them and out of all of them the only one I had 'difficulty' with was one I outlined.
The 'difficulty' was boredom and I never did finish the script. It did, however, teach me I shouldn't outline if I wanted to enjoy the process, that I should trust myself and my characters as I do in prose.
It worked out well.
"I also once wrote a collection of short stories that, when read as a whole, constituted a complete novel."
I did something like that on accident. I did one of Dean Wesley Smith's collections and the stories neatly formed a greater story. After that I continued in the same fantasy world, but with other characters.
I had the same structure in both collections.
Introduce character A
Introduce Character B
A and B together, from A's point lf view.
A and B together, from B's point of view.
Last story alternates between A and B characters, so the reader gets the last story from both the characters they've spent time with.
It was great fun and I'll do it again some day.