Dave Zeltserman's Blog, page 4

Over on my free davezeltserman.substack.com I have part o...

Over on my free davezeltserman.substack.com I have part one of a science fiction short story Killing Time until the Next Eon.

Where ideas come from

 

On my always free davezeltserman.substack.com I've posted a new article on where story and novel ideas come from.

 

Friday's Hard-boiled Bullet

 

Over on my always-free substack (so please subscribe!) I have this Friday's hard-boiled bullet of prose.

145-word Flash Fiction and how it became my Guns+Tacos novella

Over on my always free substack Dave Zeltserman's Dark and Amusing Fiction (so please subscribe!) I have my 145-word flash fiction story Cinnamon Girl and talk about how it became my 16,000 word novella for the Guns+Tacos series.

Small Crimes Journey + sketches

Over on my substack, I share the long journey Small Crimes took to publication and sketches that were made for a French graphic novel proposal by the extremely talented Jean-Pierre Jacquet.

Over on my substack, I write about my thoughts on the Sm...

 Over on my substack, I write about my thoughts on the Small Crimes movie.

Defining hard-boiled and noir fiction

 I have a new post over at my substack defining hard-boiled and noir fiction, as well as posting my first Friday hard-boiled bullet of prose.

Restarting my Substack

Back in 2021 I briefly played around with Substack but wasn't quite sure what to do with it and was busy writing software. Since I wrote my last line of software last year and am back to writing more short crime fiction, I've had a chance to think about what I want my substack to be and restarted with posts that include my meeting Robert Forster and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

You can visit my substack here and I hope you subscribe!

The Noir Novels

 For a while it was trendy to call any crime fiction noir if it showed shades of gray. I have a much stricter definition of noir: there's an inevitability of doom. The noir protagonist has crossed a line that there's no coming back from. Whether it's murder or betrayal or something else, the noir protagonist is damned, and no matter how much he might struggle, by the end if he's still alive, he'd be just as well-off dead.

While I have several noirish crime novels that more than meet the trendier definition, I have six novels that fall squarely as noir (as well as many short stories)

Alles endet hier translates to Everything Ends Here. For now, this is only planned for Germany. Hopefully this will find a US publisher at some point.

The Roommate

 

Black Cat Weekly allows me to write and get published unusual mystery and crime stories that don't fit the standard mystery magazines. In this week's Black Cat Weekly, my story The Roommate is a mystery in both the narrowest and broadest sense. I can't promise that this story will surprise every reader who tries it, but I think it will.