The Most Prolific Writers Ever and How They Did It

 
I'm back from my regular research trip to Oxford and am now hard at work here in Madrid. One of the projects I've been working on is a nonfiction work titled Writing Secrets of the World's Most Prolific Authors. There are lots of books on increasing your word count, but none, as far as I know, focus on the actual methods of the amazing writers who manage to pen hundreds of books and thousands of articles.

I’m focusing on writers who have written at least 300 books and left behind plenty of information on their work methods. Also, they must be dead so I can look at their careers as a whole, they must have been active in the 20th century so their work is more applicable to the modern era, and they must have written in either English or Spanish so I can read their stuff. At the moment I have the following list: Isaac Asimov, Walter Brown Gibson, Corín Tellado, Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, Lauran Bosworth Paine, Ursula Bloom, Enid Mary Blyton, Barbara Cartland, Frederick Faust, and John Creasey. Other writers who have something worth quoting are given passing mention.

One interesting bit of advice comes from David Graham Phillips, who at the beginning of the 20th century worked as a journalist, pumping out hundreds if not thousands of articles. At night he wrote bestselling novels and short stories. He said of his method:

"I write every night, from about eleven until about four or five or six in the morning. Sometimes seven or eight. . .Let me urge you to work the same hours every day and never, never, never to let anything or anyone interfere between you and working at those hours. I write every night--seven days a week. I don't wait for mood or inspiration, and I don't give up because I don't begin right or am writing rubbish. I think it's fatal to give way to moods. And I'm not a bit afraid to throw away everything I've written, or to edit my stuff to the bone."

Can you think of any authors I should add? Can you suggest any good source material? This book will take a lot of research so it's going by fits and starts. I had a burst of writing when I first came up with the topic and searched through my personal library. Then I had another burst of productivity at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I bought some reference materials I'll be using for the next month. Then I might have to wait until I get back to the Bodleian before I can do another round of intense research. So unlike most of my books, I can't say when I'll be done.

You can read more about the project and these incredible writers in an article I wrote for Black Gate.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Book Review: Too Far From Home By Paul Bowles

Too Far From Home by Paul Bowles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bowles is famous for his surreal study of foreigners enthralled by Morocco, The Sheltering Sky. He wrote numerous books about the country and other North African nations during his decades of residence in Tangier. Too Far From Home, first published in 1991, was one of his last.
Like many of his works, this follows the lives of foreigners who, for various reasons, have settled in distant places. In this case it’s Anita, a recent divorcee who has come to a remote town on the Niger River to stay with her brother Tom, a painter.
Anita’s reaction to her new setting is mixed. She finds the harsh scenery strangely alluring, but the people disturbing. Her middle-class American racism makes her uncomfortable around the locals, especially Sekou, a minor chief who helps around the house. Soon Anita is dreaming of Sekou, and a run-in with some callous tourists starts a series of events that bind Anita and Sekou in a relationship far closer than the one she initially feared he desired.
All this is told in Bowles’ precise yet dreamy style. This is a short novel, less than a hundred pages, and acts as a good introduction to the master’s writing.
My 1994 Peter Owen edition has some wonderful line drawings by Marguerite McBey, herself a longtime resident of Africa. These sketches really add to the text, so get this edition if you can.


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Book Review: The Pulp Jungle

The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publishing is changing. Advances are going down, it's getting harder to push through the traditional publishing bottleneck, and more people are choosing indie publishing. Going it alone means having to do all your own marketing and even more importantly, being prolific in order to boost your visibility.

It's for this reason that I've been studying the old pulp days, when writers often got paid only half a cent a word and had to write reams of tales in order to make ends meet. Many starved, while others made a decent living and a few made it big.

Frank Gruber was one of the lucky few. He wrote for all the best pulp magazines (sometimes earning up to two cents a word!) and ended up writing novels and for Hollywood too.

The Pulp Jungle gives a fast-paced, fun account of Gruber's struggle to make it as a writer during the Depression and is filled with anecdotes of those long-gone days. For example, when he was really down in the dumps he'd go to the Automat--a coin-operated, self-serve restaurant--and get a free meal. It turned out that hot water was free, as was ketchup, so presto! Tomato soup.

The story follows Gruber as he works his way up from poverty to middle-class comfort through grindingly hard work, cultivating contacts in the industry, and sheer optimism and persistence. The book is filled with portraits of other writers, such as one who was hosting a party and announced around midnight that he had a 12,000 word story due the following morning. Gruber assumed the party was over, but instead the host went to a corner with his typewriter, banged out 12,000 words, and then poured himself a gin and rejoined the party!

As Gruber says, "They don't make them like that any more!"

Anyone who is a writer will find this book inspiring. Readers interested in classic pulp fiction will find this book to be a fascinating glimpse into how those stories were made.

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Book Review: Jean Genet in Tangier

Jean Genet en Tánger by Mohamed Chukri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this in the Spanish edition by the excellent small press Cabaret Voltaire, which has translated many Moroccan authors. Since all my Goodreads friends and blog readers speak English as a first or second language, I'll review it in English and point my readers to the English edition titled Jean Genet in Tangier, translated by Paul Bowles.

Chukri was a Moroccan author who befriended many of the famous expats in Tangier's glory days as the International Zone. Here we meet Jean Genet, author of Diary Of A Thief and many other works. Chukri and Genet hit it off because they both came from the streets and wrote candid memoirs about it.

The scenes from famous meeting places such as Cafe Central make for fun reading for those who have been to Tangier, and we learn some interesting background about both authors and their literary and social views.

Sadly, this book is a bit thin on the ground. It's only 80 pages and many of the conversations are somewhat superficial. It's worth the money for glimpses of two famous authors, and for its vignettes of Tangier 50 years ago, but remains of interests to specialists only.


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William S. Burroughs in Tangier

Photo by James Grauerholz

In my review of Crime Zone, I wondered if CID Richardson had ever shadowed Burroughs. Well, upon further reading it turns out he had. In his book he refers to him as “Morphine Minnie,” which another book, Tangier: A Different Way by Lawdom Vaidon, tells me was Burroughs’ nickname at the time.

Richardson has this to say about Burroughs on pages 162-3.

“He was an educated American, a remittance man, like so many of them. It was sometimes said that he was putting up a fight against the habit. I suppose many of them did. Part of the ugly melodrama of their condition lay in this struggle with themselves.

“Whether in the course of his individual struggle or not, Morphine Minnie certainly got up to some strange tricks. He had a large box specially made for him with holes punched in the sides: in appearance it was like a very long cabin trunk. On occasions he would induce a young boy to enter the box and lie down in it—fully clothed, I hasten to add—and he would put the lid back on. After he judged the boy had been in there long enough he would open the box again, let the boy out and send him on his way. He would then get into the box himself, and lie down. When he later emerged, so far as I was able to understand it—and he was a strenuous advocate for the practice—he was supposed to be rejuvenated.

"I am bound to say, however, that I never saw that there was much difference in him. Presumably, like so much of this kind of nonsense, it was ‘all in the mind.'"

This last but was concerning Burroughs’ orgone accumulator. I really don’t have the inclination to explain what that pseudoscientific contraption is, so hit the link if you’re interested.

Tangier: A Different Way has this to add. Burroughs was “a nice, long-winded, ex-Harvard creature of 40. . .[he] was trying to cure himself of morphine addiction, but had discovered some German medicine to be had in Tangier without prescription that was stronger and even more delicious than what he’d been using.”

I didn’t know that Burroughs was trying to kick the habit at that time. If that’s true, he picked a really bad place to try! In later years he got onto a methadone treatment program. I doubt if he would have ever returned to the United State if that weren’t available.

Burroughs himself had mixed feelings about his drug use. While he wrote so much about it, and foolish readers have even tried heroin after reading Junkie and thinking it was cool, he always warned people off it. Kerouac once asked Burroughs if he could get him some, to which Burroughs replied, ‘Don’t try it kid, it’s poison.’”

I agree. You’ll never see me sticking a needle in my veins unless I turn diabetic!

Books for the bus

I just finished a very enjoyable book from one of my favorite authors, and it only took me a year to do it!

Why so long? Because it was my bus book. My son's school is a 15-minute ride away. When I take him to school I don't read, of course. Plus when I'm going to pick him up or coming back after dropping him off, I generally walk. So I should say my book was my "taking the bus because I'm feeling lazy and/or it's raining" book. That's why it took a year to read 204 pages.

As you can see from the illustration, the book was Ghost Towns of the American West by Robert Silverberg. Better known as a science fiction author, Silverberg has written it all, from fantasy to erotica to history. I enjoyed this book and found it to be a perfect bus companion. It follows the development of boom-and-bust mining towns in the West. Since it hops from town to town, from amusing anecdote to amusing anecdote, it's very easy to read in short bursts without losing the overall thread. A perfect bus book, in other words.

As writers we need to think about all the ways people may use our work. Not everyone sits down for an hour or two to get through a big chunk of text. I used to do that a lot more than I do now, but work and fatherhood has limited that. I bet I'm not the only one!

Serious writing is never wasted

Yesterday, friend and fellow writer Sue Burke sent me an interesting article on writing by Holly Lisle. Holly is a multipublished midlist author who writes nonfiction and several genres of fiction. That in itself is a good example of how to make it in this crazy business.

Her article offers plenty of good advice. If you spend much time reading "how to write" articles, you'll have heard much of this before--read a lot, know your genre, write constantly, etc., etc. Two things she mentions, however, really shine out.

First, she says "nothing you write is wasted." Try everything. If you prefer prose, try poetry. If you don't like romance, try writing a romantic scene. Pushing your personal envelope will help broaden your writing horizons and may even uncover a passion or talent you didn't know you had. The only thing I'd add is, "nothing you write seriously is wasted." Farting around will get you nowhere. As William S. Burroughs once said, "do not try to shortchange the muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

The second high point of this article is when she asks us to challenge our preconceptions. She suggests we write from inside the heads of the characters, especially the ones who are different than us. Robert Anton Wilson suggested this as a good daily practice no matter what your path in life and it's advice I've always tried to follow. If I can, for example, manage to get into the mindset of a Born-Again Christian Republican, I can understand the U.S. a bit better. It also gives you a healthy objectivity regarding your own cherished views. It's not easy, but it's worth practicing. It's come in handy as a travel writer, I can tell you.

So check out the link above. Holly has plenty of good writing articles on her site.

Websites for Writers: Piers Anthony

It's Monday, so it's time for another website for writers. Today we're looking at Hi Piers, the official homepage of Piers Anthony.

In the unlikely event you haven't heard of him, Piers Anthony is a longtime author in many genres. He's most famous for the Xanth series of humorous fantasy, but he's also written science fiction, horror, and an increasing amount of erotica.

Piers has seen it all, and luckily for us tells it all. He's famous in the writing community for tangling with editors and even suing when he felt he was being wronged. Because of this, he's been blacklisted by many publishers. He says that no major house is interested in his work except for the bestselling Xanth series. To make sure his several novels a year see the light of day, he has resorted to various small presses and epublishers.

Of greatest practical use to aspiring writers is his no-holds-barred review of epublishers and vanity presses that he updates every month. Cheated writers often tell him their stories, which he then posts online, although he's always fair-handed when it appears the writer has unrealistic expectations of their publisher.

For inspiration, check out the section on books by Piers Anthony. He's published more than 140 in the past 50 years! This is what persistence and a solid work ethic will get you.

Also of interest is his newsletter, where he talks about his life, what he's reading, and his views on publishing. At times his views of the publishing industry seem to me to be overly negative, but then again he's been in this crazy business forty years more than I have, so maybe I'll feel that way some day. He's also a strong advocate of self-publishing, once being a co-owner of Xlibris. In his latest newsletter he states, "I think of mutation, wherein 99% of the changes may be deleterious, even lethal, but the 1% that survive power the forward evolution of all living things. We would not be here today without mutation. Editors reject 99%, but the 1% they accept is not necessarily the best; natural selection operates imperfectly in publishing. So yes, we need self publishing, even if it is 99% bad, for the sake of the 1% that may otherwise be lost."

Good point, but I think that for most writers self-publishing is a bad idea.

While I don't always agree with what Piers has to say, I always check out his newsletter and value his insights. It's rare to find a writer so brutally honest about the business.

Press trips: good or bad for writers?

Back in September I took my very first press trip. While I've been to many press events over the years, this was the first time I did a long trip on someone else's dime. VisitEngland and Welcome to Yorkshire footed the bill for ten Canadian and American travel writers to spend a few days in Yorkshire seeing sights related to the Brontë sisters. The result was a series I wrote for Gadling titled Exploring Yorkshire: Ghosts, Castles, and Literature in England's North.

Press trips are controversial in the industry. Many markets don't accept articles written about press trips, citing conflict of interest and inherent bias. Those markets that do use press trips are selective and tend to use them sparingly.

Fellow Gadlinger Tom Johansmeyer has written an excellent post about press trips that all travel writers should read. His main point is that press trips make our job possible. How else are brokeass writers supposed to fly over Zambia in a Cessna or review some luxury resort in the Caribbean? I fund much of my travel by double-dipping, combining book and blogging projects. That's how I managed my travel series on Ethiopia. Not everyone can do that.

Tom also makes the point that while writers have to mention that they had their trip paid for, some guy sitting at a desk working off a press release doesn't have to mention he never saw the place he's writing about! Press trips actually improve reliability and objectivity because the PR filter is somewhat broken down.

My personal experience on this was educational. Our schedule was pretty tight and so we didn't have much time to wander around independently. This is the complete opposite of my usual relaxed wandering. People make a lot of noise about press trips leading to biased coverage, but I didn't experience that. There was some boring stuff they made us see that I simply didn't cover. Good restaurants got a mention, but one hyped-up place that served mediocre food didn't get appear in my series. If a sight was important and popular enough that I had to cover it, I was honest. The Jorvik Viking Centre is one of York's biggest attractions and my article reflects what a cheesy tourist trap it really is.

So press trips aren't the bugbear many people think. It does lead to some bias because all writing is biased. My travel in Somaliland was shaped by my preconceptions and experiences on the ground, plus the eagerness of the Somalis to paint their emerging nation in the best possible light. My series on Yorkshire was shaped by what they showed me and what they didn't show me. The mere fact that I went on it changed the coverage. Would I have written a positive series on England this fall? Yes. Would it have been about Yorkshire? Probably not.

So press trips are a vital part of the industry. They can work as long as writers and readers all know what's involved.

Websites for Writers: Shakespeare Quotes

It's Monday, so it's time for Websites for Writers. This week's site is courtesy of enotes and is a database of famous and not-so-famous quotes from Shakespeare. Quotes are organized by theme, play, and the character who said it.

As one of the greatest writers in the English language, The Bard is eminently quotable. He seemed to have come upwith a pithy phrase to suit any occasion, from the dangers of gossip ("Done to death by slanderous tongue") to meditations on beauty ("Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.")

Not only is his use of prose both inspiring and edifying for any writer--or reader for that matter--but you can find a quote to fit almost any situation. I've mentioned before on this blog how my Missouri Civil War novel got tied up with the whole James gang legend. Well, Frank James loved Shakespeare as many did back in those days and would often quote his favorite passages in casual conversation, or even when robbing trains! This site came in handy when writing his dialogue. It made me look much more literary than I actually am. :-)

So check out this site for quotable quotes for your own work. Shakespeare is in the public domain, so go to town!


[Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Writing advice from William S. Burroughs

While hiking the East Highland Way this month I carried The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs in my backpack. Every good hike needs a good book! One passage struck me as good advice for writers, told in typical Burroughs style.

"Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

Well put!

Websites for Writers: Fantastic Fiction

It's Monday, which means it's time for Websites for Writers, where we look at websites that inform and inspire writers. This week we're featuring Fantastic Fiction.

This database includes more than 30,000 authors and more than 350,000 books. It's not comprehensive (not even Books in Print can boast that) but it makes for some pretty interesting surfing. Not only can you look up lesser-known authors, like sf writer Mark Geston, and find out that his long out-of-print titles have recently been rereleased in an omnibus edition, but you can make new discoveries too. Right above this old favorite of mine was comedian Ricky Gervais, who wrote a series of children's books. The list is fiction only, so yours truly isn't on it (sniff), but there's a Patricia MacLachlan who has written 35 children and YA books.

The website also includes a Coming Soon section and lists of award-winners and series. You also get to see lots of nice cover art and even reading suggestions from the authors themselves.

The most inspiring thing about this list is its vastness--thousands of authors writing hundreds of thousands of books! There's room enough for everybody. It's inspiring to see how long some of these folks endure. Mrs. MacLachlan started her publishing career in 1979 and just came out with a new book this year. She was writing kids books when I was a kid. Now I'm the father of a book-hungry kid of my own and she's still going strong!

Websites for Writers will take a break for the next couple of weeks. I have a deadline next Monday and the following day I'm heading up to Scotland to hike the East Highland Way. I'll be blogging more this week though, so come on back.

Websites for Writers: Burtoniana

Sir Richard Francis Burton has always been one of my personal heroes. The famous nineteenth century explorer was a linguist, naturalist, fighter, lover, early anthropologist, and writer. He's famous for sneaking into Mecca posing as a Muslim and contributing to the discovery of the source of the Nile. He was also surprisingly open-minded and multicultural for his time, although he wasn't afraid of criticizing a culture's faults, including his own.

Burtoniana is an excellent website dedicated to his life and work. Writers can get a lot out of this site. It's filled with detailed descriptions of Burton's travels in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, perfect for someone penning a historical tale or wanting inspiration for creating a fantasy world with some real cultural basis. Burton's style was intellectual without being dry, adventurous without being exaggerated, and clear without being condescending.

He also wrote every day. It didn't matter if he was covered in boils, hadn't eaten in three days, and was being chased by angry tribesmen, he still wrote every day. This is his true inspiration for writers. If he could be half dead and lost a thousand miles from home, and still churn out a thousand words of good prose in a single morning, what's your excuse?

Head-hopping with Sartre

Before I went to Ethiopia for two months, I wrote in my travel blog that I was searching for the perfect travel book. It had to be a thick yet compact paperback, challenging but not dense, and something I give away knowing I could find another copy. I settled on The Reprieve by Jean-Paul Sartre.

I found it a very interesting read and also an object lesson on how to break the rules of fiction, much like Twilight World by Poul Anderson.

The Reprieve follows the story of several people in France in the days leading up to World War Two. They come from a variety of backgrounds: an angsty teenaged poet, a supressed homosexual with a wife and child, a paralyzed veteran from the First World War, an illiterate laborer who doesn't know he's been drafted, and many more. We watch their daily lives slowly change with the realization that war is inevitable, and that nothing will be the same again.

Each individual story is interesting enough, but they are hard to follow because Sartre constantly hops from one story line to another--in the same page, the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence. A character can say something and be answered by another character in a different story line who happens to be having a similar conversation!

Editors call this "head hopping" and it will usually get a manuscript rejected because readers find it confusing. And it is confusing, but in the hands of a master like Sartre the confusion resolves itself into a bigger picture. Sartre jumps from character to character because their individual stories are of secondary importance. He combines these stories together to create a greater story, that of France in its last days before defeat and occupation. The portrait he paints of France is one of a decadent, out-of-touch nation. Each individual tale shows its characters lacking in some way, lacking in a way that when added up with millions of other Frenchmen, makes defeat inevitable. It's a powerful novel and the only one I know where such rampant head hopping has actually strengthened the story.

Poul Anderson: Breaking the rules of fiction

Every now and then I dip into some classic science fiction. It's fun stuff, and despite its rather shoddy reputation there's quite a lot of good writing to be found, although Andy Warhol's maxim that "Ninety percent of everything is crap" definitely applies.

Poul Anderson's work is in the other ten percent.

SF fans will know Anderson as one of the Grand Old Men of the genre, having a career that spanned half a century and more than a hundred novels until his death in 2001. I just finished his 1961 novel Twilight World and found it entertaining and at times lyrical. I also found it incredibly frustrating. Anderson breaks many of the so-called rules of fiction, yet manages to pull it off.

Earth has gone through World War Three and humanity has to rebuild. The first part of the book is heavy on the expository dialog, with characters giving long monologues on things everyone knows, like just how little technology they have left and how many children are born mutated. This makes for tedious reading, and sometimes even the characters object and tell the speaker to shut up because they already know all this! Yet Anderson manages to pull it off because the scientific ideas in these lectures are sufficiently interesting that an SF reader will forge ahead.

Anderson also commits the crime known as "head hopping", where the POV shifts from one character to the next within the same page, sometimes within the same paragraph. Yet his characters are clearly enough drawn that the reader never gets lost.

A strange thing happened to me as I read this novel. About a third of the way through I realized I'd read it before, probably back in the nineties when I bought it at a bookstore where I worked. I never forget I've read a novel. A pleasant surprise was coming across a couple of poetic, almost transcendent passages that remain clearly stuck in my mind after all these years despite having the rest of the novel, indeed the very memory of reading it, drop away. Anderson was a true writer, who could create a scene that will stick with you for years, despite the outdated science, flat characters, and the narrative no-nos. He succeeds despite this, and that's where true greatness in writing lies.

Zane Grey: A Great Western Writer

Yesterday I and a fellow writer were rummaging through a new bookshop here in Oxford called the Albion Beatnik (love the name!) and I picked up The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey. I've only read one of Grey's westerns before and I'd forgotten how good of a writer he was. His descriptions are fluid and vivid and really give the flavor of the Old West. Despite having been written in 1910, it doesn't feel very dated, only authentic. Grey was writing at a time when wagons were more common on the streets than cars, many people raised animals, and everyone had country cousins. It must be hard for a city-bound Western writer of today to get so close to the feel of the range.

I highly recommend Zane Grey to any writer who wants to learn more about how to write scenery. His prose manages to be rich without being purple, exact without being lengthy, and vivid without distracting the reader from the plot.

I'd love to learn more about his life, but I'm skipping his Wikipedia entry. It claims he was an usher in a movie theater in the early 1890s, before the invention of motion pictures, and in the section on Riders of the Purple Sage, it claims this 1912 novel was one of the earliest works of Western fiction. I've read Westerns from the 1880s and I suspect the genre goes back well before that!

Excellent series of posts on writing history

As a history writer with a keen interest in the American Civil War, I was happy to discover Eric Wittenberg's blog, Rantings of a Civil War Historian. Wittenberg has written eleven books on the subject and numerous articles. His main interest is the Union cavalry.

One of my favorite bits in his blog are his rantings against idiotic neo-Confederates and the silly ways they try to rewrite Civil War history to suit their own narrow world view. This hilarious article is one of the best.

Of more direct interest to readers of this blog is a series of articles on writing Civil War history, which is useful to both nonfiction and fiction authors alike. The series is called Things I Wish I Knew Then But Know Now. Part one is "Don't Give Up Your Dayjob", a rather pessimistic view of how much money a writer can expect to make doing books. Well, if you write detailed studies of Union cavalry operations in the Gettysburg campaign like Mr. Wittenberg does, you really can't expect to make a living. You have to go for broader, more popular-level subjects and commercial publishers like Osprey, who still insist on accuracy while selling a lot of copies. It's great that dedicated specialists like Wittenberg are writing books, but narrow topics will get a correspondingly narrow readership. Despite Wittenberg's pessimism, this post is worth a read to sober up enthusiastic beginners who think they'll hit the bestseller list on the first try.

Other posts in the series are about self publishing, learning to take criticism, marketing, working with your editor, the hidden costs of publishing a book, and the costs of researching one.

Public domain photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Two unpublished Poirot stories discovered

Score one for the obsessive fans. Agatha Christie buff John Curran took a sabbatical from work to study Christie's 73 surviving notebooks, teaching himself to read her "bloody awful handwriting" and puzzling over her often fragmentary notes. He was rewarded with finding two previously unpublished short stories starring Hercule Poirot, the dapper Belgian who is one of Christie's most enduring characters.

The description of the notebooks in this Guardian article is interesting--a random assortment of experimental passages, ideas, shopping lists, and anything else that could be put on paper. That, and the bloody awful handwriting, sounds just like my notebooks. Out of chaos comes genius, at least in Christie's case.

The stories as well as other extracts from Christie's notes will be published in Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making (HarperCollins, September 2009).

Corín Tellado, 1926-2009

Last year I wrote about Corín Tellado, Spain's most popular romance writer. She became big in the Sixties and was as notable for her output (averaging sixty titles a year) as for the fact that she was an independent, successful woman in a country that had yet to break from it's machista past. Today it's been reported that she has died.

While I have never read one of Tellado's works, I have to admire her output and contribution to Spanish pop culture. With a total of about 4,000 titles and 400 million sales, she was an institution, still writing up to the day of her death. El País reported she was the second most read author in Spanish after Cervantes. Good job, Ms. Tellado!

Amadis of Gaul--Classic Fantasy

Friend and fellow writer Sue Burke has started the epic task of translating the classic fantasy Amadis of Gaul from Medieval Spanish into modern English and she's putting it up chapter by chapter for free on the web.

I hadn't heard of Amadis until I moved to Madrid. Sue describes it best. "Published in Spain in 1508, this novel is a masterpiece of medieval fantasy. It inspired a century of best-selling sequels in seven languages and changed the way we think about knights, chivalry, damsels in distress, and courtly life in castles. These books made Don Quixote go mad and imagine himself a heroic knight-errant like Amadis."

I've been reading along and find it very entertaining. It reminds me a bit of Orlando Furioso, which was probably inspired by Amadis. Lots of quests, knightly battles, and honorable derring-do.

Sue is publishing a new chapter every Tuesday and a commentary every Thursday. Her translation is excellent (she's a tireless student of Spanish) and her commentary brings the world of Late Medieval Spain to light. This book is well worth a read for anyone interested in the origins of fantasy fiction or anyone who simply loves a good read.

As Sue says, "This book drove Don Quixote mad. What will it do to you?"