Monthly Archives: August 2018

You Are Scheherazade

Welcome, budding writer, into the sultan’s palace in 9th Century Persia. The sultan’s former wife was unfaithful, and he now distrusts all women. For the last 1,001 nights, he’s taken a woman to bed and ordered her execution the next morning, to ensure she couldn’t cheat on him.

 Now, Scheherazade, it’s your turn.

Luckily, you know a story that might keep the sultan interested. You also know when to interrupt your story so the sultan will be forced to delay your execution so he can hear the ending the next night.

During the next night, you’ll finish that story and start telling a new one. Again, you’ll pause at the right point, leaving a cliffhanger, and the sultan will temporarily spare you again. How long can you keep that up, knowing the moment the sultan gets bored, you’re dead?

Recently, I read the book Talking About Detective Fiction, by the late P.D. James. At one point, she compares readers to the sultan in the Scheherazade tale. Like him, readers can be insatiable, hungry for a good, new story. They always want more, and each tale must be different from the previous ones, fresh and interesting.

That metaphor casts an author like you in the role of Scheherazade. You’re the one running the risk of boring the sultan and of getting (metaphorically) beheaded at dawn. If your next book fails to live up to the standards of the last one, readers will stop buying, and all that royalty money will stop rolling in.

Are you feeling the pressure yet?

Perhaps not. Maybe you’re thinking the metaphor doesn’t apply to you. Sure, it applies to a successful author with an established readership, like P.D. James. If only you came up with an engaging series character, like Scheherazade’s Sinbad or P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh, then readers would keep demanding more stories featuring that character.

But you’re a beginning writer. You don’t yet have flocks of devoted readers anxiously awaiting your next book. You’re no Nora Roberts, Ken Follet, David Baldacci, or Stephanie Meyer. You’re no Scheherazade. You think.

Sorry, you don’t get out of my metaphor that easily.

How, Scheherazade, did you come to this point? You’ve read voraciously and amassed a vast collection of books. You’ve memorized many stories. You’ve come to understand the structure of a tale, how writers accomplish their craft. You’ve practiced your storytelling techniques and have honed your skill in hooking listeners with your words and keeping them spellbound.

You’ve prepared for this moment. Indeed, you volunteered for it.

See? The metaphor’s still apt. If you’re not yet Scheherazade, the accomplished story-weaver who sits before a sultan, then you’re a younger Scheherazade training yourself and learning the writing craft.

You learn it because you want to; you crave it. You love stories; an inner impulse drives you to understand more deeply how they work.

Now you see Scheherazade did indeed feel pressure to tell new and interesting tales, but that pressure came from within her, not from the sultan’s threat of execution.

It’s all about the stories. May you have 1,001 tales to tell and may they fascinate your sultan. After all, budding writer, you’re Scheherazade. And so is—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 26, 2018Permalink

Happy Bicentennial, Frankenstein

Two hundred years ago, author Mary Shelley wrote a remarkable novel— Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus—which endures in popularity and bears an increasingly meaningful warning for us today.

Title page from the original 1818 edition

(Yes, I know I’m a few months late. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones published the novel on January 1, 1818. Amazing that a publisher was working on New Years Day!)

Today, we know Shelley’s novel mainly from its numerous movie incarnations and from the term “Frankenstein monster” itself, which has become shorthand for creating something with unintended negative consequences. I’ll be commenting on the original story, though, not its later derivative works.

Boris Karloff depiction of the monster, from the 1931 movie

In my own stories, I explore the relationships between people and new technology. That is a key aspect of Frankenstein. In fact, that novel is one of the first ever to consider that theme.

Inventors typically create new technology to improve human life, to meet a need. However, the introduction of new technology can also bring about undesirable changes, including fear, active opposition, unforeseen faults in the tech (bugs), and inventor’s regret.

Not only does Shelley show us all of these aspects in Frankenstein, she turns the table on the whole technology impact concept; her sentient technology reacts to its own existence in a world of people.

To us, her novel seems well ahead of its time. Two hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution had just begun. Electricity was a new and exciting phenomenon, not yet harnessed for effective use. Scientists were discovering elements and chemicals at a rapid pace.

Up to that time, fiction authors had written of golems and homunculi, humanoids created from magic. No stories yet existed of creating human-like life through science.

Perhaps, to readers of Frankenstein in 1818, then witnessing an explosion of scientific discovery, it might have seemed as if the animation of dead human tissue might well be next week’s news. Two centuries later, we have a better idea of how difficult the feat is. We can manipulate DNA to some extent. We’ve achieved remarkable results in extending human lifespans. We can revive the recently dead through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and other techniques.

Mary W. Shelley

Still, we can’t do what Dr. Frankenstein did…yet. Nonetheless, when I said Shelley’s novel contains a particularly relevant warning for us today, I was referring to science’s quest to create artificially intelligent, sentient, self-aware “life.” This achievement may be decades, or only years, away. The ability for humans to create thinking, human-like life by means other than reproduction will be a breakthrough of far greater impact than any previous scientific development in human history.

We now find ourselves in the role of Dr. Frankenstein before he created the monster. We can consider the ethics of our actions in advance. We can ask if we’re insane even to pursue the enterprise. We can examine and plan for as many possible consequences as we can imagine.

Mary Shelley gave us a novel full of these consequences to consider. From twenty decades in the past, her visage warns us to be careful. She’s cautioning us with a worst-case scenario. If we fail to prepare for these consequences, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Thank you, Mary, for your wise counsel. On Frankenstein’s bicentennial, we’re still recklessly curious beings who discover how to do things before thinking whether we should, and before taking appropriate precautions. Maybe things will turn out fine, and much credit will go to you, for your prescient advance notice. Conveying my belated gratitude back through two centuries to you, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 19, 2018Permalink

Author Interview — Emma Whitehall

The humble author of your favorite blog has done it again. I got to interview author Emma Whitehall, another writer who has a story appearing in The Gallery of Curiosities, Issue #3.

Emma Whitehall

Emma Whitehall is a writer and editor based in the North East of England. She has been published in the UK, USA, Ireland and Mexico, and has been longlisted for the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award and shortlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize and the New Millennium Writings Award. She is fascinated by the fantasy genre, and uses it to explore themes of love, grief, and transformation. She recently edited Sisterhood, a collection of women’s fiction, with all proceeds going to Newcastle Women’s Aid. Her Steampunk Novella-in-Flash, Clockwork Magpies, is looking for a new home with a publisher.

And now, the interview:

Poseidon’s Scribe: How did you get started writing? What prompted you?

Emma Whitehall: I’ve been writing, in some form, my whole life—but it was really in college where I began to play around with genre fiction. I started writing scripts (I was a budding actor), which evolved into monologues that I’d perform at local open mic nights, which in turn transformed into short stories that were written more for the page than the stage.

P.S.: Who are some of your influences? What are a few of your favorite books?

E.W.: I think my biggest influence is John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of Let The Right One In. He blends folklore together with themes of love and death in a way I find really inspiring. I used to primarily read horror, but now I branch out—I love YA, fantasy, and a smattering of commercial fiction, too. I think it’s really useful for a writer to read as widely as they can—the wider your scope, the more you have to draw on in your own work.

P.S.: Your story, “The Rat and the Frog” appears in The Gallery of Curiosities, Summer 2018, issue #3. Please describe your protagonist, Ida, the Rat Prince. Any plans to write more stories involving that character?

E.W.: Ida is a maid. She is also the master cat burglar, The Rat Prince. She hides in plain sight—The Rat Prince is assumed by everyone in the city to be a man, simply because no girl, and especially no maid, could possibly be as clever and cunning and ruthless as she is. I love that, with Ida, I can play with themes of identity; her alter ego, in her mind, is her maid role, not The Rat Prince.

Ida is also part of a much larger world. Her city is the home to my short story collection, Clockwork Magpies, which is looking for a new home as we speak. Ida and Lucinda make appearances, as do a whole host of characters you are yet to meet…

P.S.: Your website states that you specialize in blending the supernatural and the sensual. Can you please give a couple of examples, from your stories, of what this means?

E.W.: My favourite things to write about are emotions and relationships. I love concocting lush, beautiful scenarios for my characters to get lost in! As for supernatural, I find that genre fiction is a fascinating lens to help a reader view those emotions and relationships in a new, exciting way—for example, “The Rat and the Frog” is really just a story about a girl who refuses to be defined by her day job. That’s a theme that is very close to my heart (I worked in retail for a long time). It’s just written with a Steampunk lens that gives the story a new twist that having Ida as a modern girl working in a shop wouldn’t have.

P.S.: You have written (and had published) several nice reviews of horror novels. You’ve also written some horror short stories yourself. What appeals to you about that genre?

E.W.: It’s partly that idea of the lens. One of the books I reviewed, Hunter Shea’s We Are Always Watching, is a terrifying story of home invasion—but it’s also a story about a fractured family forced to live in each other’s pockets. But my love of the genre is also because I love a good monster story—I still have this little dream of writing the story that redefines the Werewolf genre…

P.S.: In what way is your fiction different from that of other authors?

E.W.: No one is truly original—we are all magpies, taking parts from other works we love to help build our own. But, for right now, I am not writing stories with huge, world-changing arcs, or Big Bads to fight. I prefer to write very small, personal stories—Ida’s adventures in “The Rat and the Frog” won’t impact on anyone outside of the main characters—and, for some of them, not even that. But, if I’ve done my job correctly, we’ve looked into the mind of a fascinating, funny, intelligent person, and come away from the story feeling as if we know her.

P.S.: Recently, you edited Sisterhood, a collection of stories exploring female friendship. Did you find the editing experience rewarding, and what should readers expect from this book?

E.W.: Sisterhood is my pride and joy. It’s a truly grassroots feat of publishing, where everything from the editing to the PR to the artwork was sourced and organized by the contributors—who also wrote ten wonderful, diverse, lovingly crafted pieces of short fiction. We have road trips with ghosts, noir fiction, thoughtful pieces on the loss of a friendship, rallying cries for solidarity and protest…and all the money raised goes to Newcastle Women’s Aid, who help survivors of domestic abuse get back on their feet. We raised £355 from our launch alone!

P.S.: What is your current work in progress? Would you mind telling us a little about it?

E.W.: Right now, I’m brushing up Ida’s world, ready to show it off to publishers. But there’s always that werewolf story on the backburner…

Poseidon’s Scribe: What advice can you offer aspiring writers?

Emma Whitehall: Read and see and feel as much as you can. Don’t be afraid to play with your work—try something new! Be humble and open to edits. And it doesn’t matter if the only person who has ever read your work is yourself: you are a writer. Wear that badge with pride.

 

Thanks, Emma.

Readers, you can find more about Emma Whitehall at her website, on Twitter, at her Amazon page or on Facebook.

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 4, 2018Permalink