Serialized Pulp Novel: The Rogue and the Merchants (Part 1)

So I've decided to serialize a novel I wrote in 2008, but I need to offer a kind of intense preamble. Think of this as an author's introduction.

A brief yet strange history of my holiday break in 2009: After I finished my M.A. in Literary History at Ohio University in 2008, I decided to take a year off as a student (I started my Ph.D. in 2009). In lieu of "studenting," I taught writing part time at a variety of colleges and universities. Most of the schools I taught at had breaks through December and January, and so--because I had no seminar papers to work on or research to undertake--I fortuitously found myself with a lot of free time that holiday break of 2009. There's more to this story: when I visited my folks that Christmas their house caught on fire and the whole family had to relocate to a hotel, which was paid for by the insurance. And so, through December and January of 2008-09, my wife and I found ourselves living in a Drury Inn in Columbus, Ohio. 

And there's more:

Recently a buddy of mine had given me a great Christmas gift. Vaguely understanding that I wanted to write pulp fiction, he gave me a 1930s era Remington typewriter as a present (also, he was cleaning out of his house). I loved it!

What does lots of free time in a hotel plus the strange gift of a 1930s era typewriter equal? A bad novel.

Yes, I spent a lot of time that break pounding typewriter keys in my hotel room. 

My goal was pretty simple: write a novel in December and finish it, no matter how bad it came out. I finished my novel, a 30 page manuscript that looks like this:

I'm not sure, precisely, how long it runs. Doing some word-counting and measuring the text, I estimate it to be approximately 35,000 words, a novella really. 

After that Christmas break I returned to Athens, Ohio and put the manuscript aside thereby quickly forgot about it. 

I always intended on transcribing it into a digital format that I could revise and edit. But, knowing how horrible it no doubt was, I could never get myself to go through the drugery of doing it.

What does this have to do with my blog?

Well, usually I'm reluctant to put my fiction up. Aside from flash fiction, I just don't like doing it. Nevertheless, I feel no scruples putting this novella up. 

I flatter myself that my readers might get a kick out of it, this truly pulpy novella, a sword and sorcery I wrote in a month that relates the adventures of a rogue, his travels with a band of merchants, and their strange encounters.

And so, I've chosen to serialize this novel, one post at a time. 

Here's the plan: I'll probably just transcribe a paragraph here, a paragraph there. Furthermore, I will not revise as I transcribe. Aside from correcting what grammatical errors I find, I give you the novel as it exists in manuscript form--as raw and lacking in style as I know it is. I have some artist friends who may or may not illustrate a serial or two. Which would be cool, I think.

If I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try to get through a page. But this is a difficult manuscript to read. A lot of the pages are very difficult to read as I only had one ribbon at the time and sometimes I didn't jam the keys as hard as I should have.

Without anymore preamble, I give you the opening paragraph of The Rogue and the Merchants:

The Rogue sold himself into slavery to pay for debts. This is why he was hanging out with a group of thirteen Tabun merchants. They had purchased him before fleeing their city-state, which was being overwhelmed with political upheaval. There a dictator had set himself above the traditional senate and had filled the city with a garrison of mercenary troops. Brol, the leader of the thirteen merchants who the Rogue now served, was a member of a family who were persecuted by the the dictator. Rather than stick around and attempt to reclaim the city in the name of the senate, Brol decided to seek new opportunity in the east. Brol was a coward, more pragmatic than idealistic. He saw little hope of a quick return of the senate's power, and he feared the seizure of his modest amount of wealth. And so he gathered a group of like-minded individuals. They pooled their money. And they decided on the east. They had heard that the Griess Empire Builders (who technically ruled the city of Tabun Stoh--their home city, the city now at the mercy of a dictator) had pushed into the frontier of the Rahael forest. There a small principality known as Drossus was just now being built. Made up of five small towns overseen by a lenient lord in the capital town of Cawsinever, it sounded just the place for a group of men with entrepreneurial spirit, capital, and the eagerness to begin an enterprise.