Looking back at Lulubelle Rose Jensen and Big Top Tales

Every Tuesday we look back at a great post from the previous years of this blog. This time around we go back to a character not quite in my regular wheelhouse, yet the star of one of my favorite stories. 

I am incredibly proud of the work I did as part of Flinch Books' Big Top Tales, now available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats.

Co-editor Jim Beard developed basic characters based around the various occupations of the Henderson & Ross Royal Circus, and based on choices and the time people joined the project, assignments were made. While I had ideas in my head for both the Human Skeleton (scored by the amazing Rocko Jerome) and the Knife Thrower (written by the always great Frank Schildiner), it was my third and final pick that Jim assigned to me. I got to write the Trapeze Artist.

Part of me suspects I might have received my writing assignment because no one else wanted to spend the amount of time I spent researching the trapeze before I started to write. I must have visited a half dozen websites and watched a couple dozen Youtube videos, before I stumbled upon a biography that helped me really get into the head of a trapeze artist in the days before television regularly brought amazing performances to the screen. Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus by Dean Jensen helped get me into the mind of the strange mix of isolation and adulation being a star of the trapeze might bring. The true story of Lillian Leitzel isn't exactly a happy one, but it was one that could help me get inside the head of my own Jensen: Lulabelle Rose Jensen.

From Jim's two paragraph description and Leitzel's story, I created a far more modern woman than one might expect from a story set in the mid-1950s. Rose is a woman more than willing to take what she wants, including a man to bed for a one night stand. But it is just that action that embroils her in a murder mystery from the very first page of my tale “Deadly Triangle”. As the story continues, she must balance the fine line of her circus career, her own wants and desires, and a serial murderer that may just want her as his next victim!

And while I think Rose's tale is more than worth the $12.99 print price and the $3.99 Kindle price, the best part of Big Top Tales is it is not alone. In addition to the talented Mr. Jerome and Mr. Shildiner, it also features tales from Ralph Angelo, Jr., John A. McColley and Sam Gafford. Together it makes one complete collection telling the tale of one amazing summer for the Henderson & Ross Royal Circus that cannot and should not be missed.

Flying fists of gravity manipulation! (WIP Wednesday)

More inspiration courtesy the
amazing Rafael Gallur.

Work continues apace.

When I first built Lightweight, it was meant to be a serialized story. I would deliver a chapter every month to six weeks and then collect them into book form as I worked my way through a story arc. I produced ten stories this way which became the books Lightweight: Senior Year and Lightweight: Black Death. Each of those volumes collected five stories and together they formed the first year of Lightweight's career.

The third book Lightweight: Beyond followed the same five inter-linked story structure, but it never took on serialized form. This caused a few changes in the storytelling, but I felt it lacked the flow of the first two books. Some of that might have been the vast change in setting, but I think some of that was the loss of the serial flow.

I am currently looking at new ways to serialize Lightweight for audiences. The sixteenth chapter is now finished and picks back up with Kevin and will set the Lightweight saga off in a new direction. The seventeenth chapter is already mostly written during a tough Nanowrimo run in 2016 that saw me abandon that project for another. This left a version of chapter sixteen that will never see print as I realized I needed to take a fresh approach to the book going in.

My plan at the moment is for the new collected volume to be at least six chapters long, but I often let Lightweight flow at its own pace. Whatever the case, the collected edition likely won't see the light of day until sometime early in 2019. Don't worry though. Once I've determined a strong way (or ways) to serialize it, I will start advertising several months in advance of that launch. That being said, I want to make sure to have at least close to the entirety of this volume done before I consider moving on.

My urban fantasy project has slowed a bit as I try to work out a snag in the plot made by character development changes. This one has absolutely no set timetable, so I will continue to work on it slowly as it turns to a backup project against the primary one.

With each chapter of Lightweight working as a standalone or a part of a whole, my plan is to stagger my work on it with work on other projects. One is the planned continuance (and eventual collection) of Quadrant.

The other I showed a piece of inspiration for a few weeks back. It is a new series of old school pulp tales featuring a solo hero and his merry band of misfit sidekicks. While that sounds a bit like Doc Savage, Shadow or The Avenger, I promise this masked men will be entirely different. For now, I will only give a name.

Rey Diablo.

More in the near future, but for now, happy reading and happy writing!

Check out the great showmen of Big Top Tales!

One of the most offbeat projects I ever worked on was Big Top Tales. Focused on six different talents from a shared circus as it makes its way across the country, the book featured some truly fascinating stories on the edge of the supernatural. I wrote the story of Lulabelle Rose Jensen, the acrobatic aerialist.

I quickly threw her into a dangerous fight for life as a crazed murderer sets her in his sights. It's a fast paced adventure tale and one of my personal favorite works.

I did a ton of research on acrobats and aerialists before I started work on the tale. Real life acrobat Lillian Leitzel played a major role in my development work. I quickly realized I couldn't write a tale about just a normal girl from the 30s. Rose would have to be a unique figure in the era which is why from the start of the tale I made it clear she was anything but a typical 30s pulp girl. She's got agency and she's not afraid to break societal norms to get what she wants.

As The Greatest Showman works its way through theaters, I encourage everyone to take a different look at the historical circus by picking up a copy of Big Top Tales. It was a fun ride and right deserves more readers.

Go give it a look on Amazon. If you like it, please give it a review as well to help others find it!

Pulpsploitation: On writing Airboy

This article was originally posted on the official Pulpsploitation site.

All three of these characters will play a
part in future Airboy stories.

Why Airboy?

He certainly isn’t a character that went without a revival in the 1980s. Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman created a rather amazing series at Eclipse (now being collected by IDW) with art by the likes of Stan Woch, Ben Dunn, Ron Randall and Tom Lyle.

Flying Dutchman will be the first other Air Fighter to
make an appearance in the new book.

But that series didn’t tell the story of the original Airboy. Instead it focused on Davy Nelson Jr., the son of the original character and his interaction with a mix of the original Air Fighters and new “ripped from the headlines” adventures. Despite being written by well known Republican writer Chuck Dixon, it was even famous for being the anti-Reagan comic. But while it offered great stories, it wasn’t the take on Airboy I wanted to see.

I wanted to go back to the original, I wanted to make him a fish out of water and I wanted to update the Air Fighters in a very different way.

In my initial short story, Misery and the Airtomb play their part in the first story, but they are really a subplot as Airboy finds himself young and alive again in the early 1980s. He’s immediately thrust into a plot to stop the massive super-weapon that nearly killed him once before.

The tale will hopefully kickoff a new series of adventures starring the high-flying adventurer beginning in 2017.

Pulpsploitation is now available at Amazon.

Teel James Glenn's road from comic hero to pulp writer

Twenty years ago, he dressed like this for a certain comic publisher.

Now he is one of my favorite writers, and I guy I am proud to publish in many of Metahuman Press anthologies. He is also the first person I interview as part of a new series of long form discussions.

Check out my extensive interview with the urban swashbuckler himself, Teel James Glenn, over at Medium.

Enter... Tornado Town!

Short Shots are quick story ideas I will sometimes release as a pay what you want release or for free.

Road to Tornado Town is an idea that has been floating around my head for quite some time. Post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be everywhere right now. I have always enjoyed a lot of it, but I really wanted to try my hand at putting my own touch on it. Hence, Tornado Town was born.

This Short Shot is an introduction to the universe and the concept, but will be far from its last appearance. I plan to put together a Tornado Town anthology at some point that will expand the world and introduce a slew of characters for the series.

Stay tuned for more news about that in the months ahead. Meanwhile head over to Smashwords where you can pay whatever you want for this great short story!

The Road to Tornado Town by Nicholas Ahlhelm is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

'Big Top Tales' gets some praise!

My favorite reviewer, the always great Ron Fortier took the time to review Big Top Tales in his most recent Pulp Fiction Reviews. I'm glad this great little anthology is getting some attention as I had a lot of fun with my tale of the Trapeze Artist.

He called my contribution “Fast paced with a terrific finale worthy of the Big Top.”

Check out his full review at the Pulp Fiction Reviews site. And please remember, every review you give a work on Amazon, Goodreads or abroad helps more people find that author's work. I always appreciate my great fans when they give some love to my writing!

Meet "The Editor"

With The Editor I wanted to do something different. I have long loved the idea of Creative Commons and I wanted to release a few short stories under a Creative Commons license. The Editor is the first in that series, which I decided to call “Short Shots”. The goal with these ultra-shorts is to introduce new characters to the pulp and super-powered fiction community that people can use and develop in their own way, all with only a note of the Creative Commons information given.

I have written a few of these "Short Shots" since I originally published The Editor back in 2014. I shared a few of them online back then, but have yet to do so on this new version of the blog. I am happy to start that process today with the release of The Editor to Wattpad. Everyone can read it there or use the embedded reader below to do so.

If you enjoy The Editor, please consider either buying more of my work (which can be found above under The Books) or throwing a few shekels its way with a purchase on Smashwords (where you can pay whatever you would like for the story.)

Meet Lulabelle Rose Jensen, Big Top Tales' Trapeze Artist

I am incredibly proud of the work I did as part of Flinch Books' Big Top Tales, now available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats.

Co-editor Jim Beard developed basic characters based around the various occupations of the Henderson & Ross Royal Circus, and based on choices and the time people joined the project, assignments were made. While I had ideas in my head for both the Human Skeleton (scored by the amazing Rocko Jerome) and the Knife Thrower (written by the always great Frank Schildiner), it was my third and final pick that Jim assigned to me. I got to write the Trapeze Artist.

Part of me suspects I might have received my writing assignment because no one else wanted to spend the amount of time I spent researching the trapeze before I started to write. I must have visited a half dozen websites and watched a couple dozen Youtube videos, before I stumbled upon a biography that helped me really get into the head of a trapeze artist in the days before television regularly brought amazing performances to the screen. Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus by Dean Jensen helped get me into the mind of the strange mix of isolation and adulation being a star of the trapeze might bring. The true story of Lillian Leitzel isn't exactly a happy one, but it was one that could help me get inside the head of my own Jensen: Lulabelle Rose Jensen.

From Jim's two paragraph description and Leitzel's story, I created a far more modern woman than one might expect from a story set in the mid-1950s. Rose is a woman more than willing to take what she wants, including a man to bed for a one night stand. But it is just that action that embroils her in a murder mystery from the very first page of my tale “Deadly Triangle”. As the story continues, she must balance the fine line of her circus career, her own wants and desires, and a serial murderer that may just want her as his next victim!

And while I think Rose's tale is more than worth the $12.99 print price and the $3.99 Kindle price, the best part of Big Top Tales is it is not alone. In addition to the talented Mr. Jerome and Mr. Shildiner, it also features tales from Ralph Angelo, Jr., John A. McColley and Sam Gafford. Together it makes one complete collection telling the tale of one amazing summer for the Henderson & Ross Royal Circus that cannot and should not be missed.

Christmas, Claus and heroism

A few years back I conceived a simple one page concept called Doc Claus. It was a simple concept: take Santa Claus and wrap him into a classic pulp hero role. I even gave him his own group of sidekicks, The Holiday Patrol. I invited a wide variety of new pulp authors to contribute and Metahuman Press proudly released Doc Claus in December 2012.

Terry Alexander, Travis Hiltz, Greg Daniel, Robbie Lizhini and M.H. Norris outdid themselves with five stories of Doc's adventures. Wrapped in a cover by Teel James Glenn with a logo by yours truly, it remains available to this day and in my opinion, is criminally underpurchased by fans of great modern pulp fiction. So go get a copy already!

Kickstart the Week 27: Comare

Kickstarter certainly has opened the world to the return of older, less used genres to comics. One such genre that seemed dead up until the last year or two were romance comics, but Kickstarter has already given rise to Fresh Romance. Now a new project looks to follow in that footsteps, complete with a healthy noir vibe.



Comare: The Other Woman is a tale about a woman trying to end her affair after her boyfriend returns home from the Korean War. Set in Los Angeles in 1953, it looks to play up the infamous criminal ties of that era as our lead Amelia seeks to end her affair with Buster, even as Buster’s wife seeks revenge.

It looks like a crazy ride, one that will only be a sixth of the way done if it funds on Kickstarter. But the preview pages from writer Mario Candelaria and artist Ashley St. Lawrence are incredibly promising.

With just five days left it still isn't fully funded, so give it a look at Kickstarter and help make a successful romance comic for the 21st century!

New fiction for 2015 kicks off with Pulpsploitation!

The announcement already went out on Metahuman Press and the newly launched Pulpsploitation.com, but I am proud to announce here that Pulpsploitation is now available in print and digital at Amazon as well as digitally at Smashwords and most leading ebook publishers.

While I am joined by the likes of Teel James Glenn, Caine Dorr, Frank Byrns and Steven Gepp on the inside, it is my tale of Airboy that I am talking about today. While many fans might remember the character from his previous 80s era revamp by Chuck Dixon, my new take on the character flashes the young hero forward thirty years after being left in suspended animation for thirty years! In the present, he meets the daughter of an old friend and the legacy of a great villain, all of which culminates in a massive battle outside Tokyo! It is a rip-roaring adventure that will be just the first shot of Airboy adventure from yours truly! Stay tuned for more news on the character in the coming months!

Praise for my Armless O'Neil tale!

My tale for the Armless O’Neil anthology Blood-Price of the Missionary's Gold was one of my favorites of the Pulp Obscura line. O’Neil is just such an odd character, he almost breeds fascinating stories. I put him through the paces in “The Palladium” in a story that features a whole bunch of trouble for the one-handed adventurer.

The always awesome reviewer Raven gave some glowing praise for my tale (as well as several others in the anthology) saying, “Ahlhelm does a wonderful job of keeping the action fast paced, the mystery subtle, and the solution to it all a fitting wrap-up. I give him five out of five stars for his originality!”. That is generous praise indeed! Thank you, sir.

Of course, my tale isn’t alone. The anthology is filled with some great pulp tales of a truly unique character well worth checking out. The book is now available from Amazon or through special order at many other retailers.

Pulpsploitation launches February 15!

I am proud to announce that my last Kickstarter project Pulpsploitation will finally make its debut the day after Valentine’s! And what better way to kick off your post-Valentine excitement than with all the sex, violence and action you can ask for featuring classic pulp and comic characters!

Featuring stories by yours truly, Teel James Glenn, Frank Byrns, Steven Gepp and Caine Dorr, the book is packed to the gills with great tales of the Black Bat, Airboy, the Gunmaster, Tabu and E.A.G.L.E. It can be preordered digitally now at Smashwords or stay tuned to Sunday when we will have links to it from Amazon in print and digital formats!

Stay tuned for a world of pulp adventure opening up very, very soon!