Nathan Shumate: The Arkham Tales
Goals, B-Movies and Common Sense Advice for the Novice Writer
Nov 26, 2008
What are some of the goals you wish to achieve with Arkham Tales?
First and most obviously, I plan to get it into the black financially, where advertising revenues equal payments to writers. I understood going in that most potential advertisers would be leery of committing funds to the first issue of an untested magazine, so I wasn’t surprised that I ended up carrying most of the finances for the first issue myself. Hopefully, within the next issue or two I’ll be able to attract advertisers who see the benefit of a one-time payment for an ad that will essentially be “in print” forever, as back issues will always be online for download.
I hope that it will also come to be seen as a magazine of dependable high quality. I was surprised at the sheer volume of quality submissions we received in the first month after we publicly announced the magazine; it seems that a lot of practised writers were writing in this genre, but there were relatively few outlets for their work. I had worried that the first couple of issues might be “iffy” on quality if I had to accept marginal work just to fill up each issue, but that fear was swept away pretty quickly. In fact, I had originally planned a first issue of about 60 pages; instead, Arkham Tales #1 was a full hundred pages, and I had to trim viciously to get it down to that.
Aside from Arkham Tales, what other projects are you working on?
Oh, lordie. My friends swear that I don’t sleep because I have so many balls in the air. I already mentioned my movie reviews which usually update every week barring a planned sabbatical or medical emergency, and that site includes adjunct sites at which I review books and old chapter serials. I do occasional small-press comic book scripting, and I’m collaborating on an exhaustive survey of the career and movies of B-movie producer Charles Band. I’ve also got four kids (they’re a project, right?) and the necessary day job, and I’m also heavily involved in my church. And I keep taking on smaller one-off projects because I’m insane.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
First: For the love of all that’s holy, learn the basics. Study punctuation. Learn grammar. Find out what a verb tense is. Don’t assume that just because you’ve been speaking English all your life, you know how to use language as a precision tool. That’s like thinking that you’ll be an artistic master the first time you touch a canvas because you can write legibly.
Second: Learn what “voice” means. The diction you use in your fiction is the single greatest factor in its acceptance or rejection, at least when it crosses my desk, because your writing style is the only thing that’s going to hook me in the first two or three pages, which is as far as I’ll read before making a conscious decision whether to continue or not.
To hear more from Nathan Shumate go here.
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