Buon giorno, faithful readers and fellow blog travelers. We’ve reached Turin on our voyage Around the World in Eighty Days with Phileas Fogg and his servant, Passepartout. We’re commemorating their famous fictional trip of 150 years ago.
Mont Cenis Pass train
The book states Fogg and his party reached Turin “by Mont Cenis” on Friday, October 4, 1872, at 6:35 am. The Mont Cenis part seems unlikely. A railway had been operating there since 1868, but it closed in 1871 after the opening of the Fréjus Rail Tunnel. That tunnel proved a much better connection between France and Italy through the Alps. I’m guessing Verne wrote the novel a year or so ahead of when it appeared in print.
Fréjus Rail Tunnel
In any case, Fogg must have felt gratified, in his stoic way, to have traveled 736 miles since leaving London. That put him 3% of his way around the world in just 2.5% of the time. Good to be ahead of schedule so early in the trip.
Turin, in 1872, held a population of 208,000 and had served as the capital of Italy up until 11 years earlier. King Victor Emmanuel II then sat on the throne of the newly united Kingdom of Italy.
Turin today
In 2022, Turin’s population numbers 900,000. Sergio Mattarella serves as President of the country, and Mario Draghi is the Prime Minister.
Today’s traveler wouldn’t need 22 hours, as Fogg did, to reach Turin from Paris. You can fly between the two airports in about an hour and a half.
Welcome to Paris! Today we’re continuing our trip Around the World in Eighty Days, following the fictional route taken by Phileas Fogg 150 years ago. I hope you remembered to turn off the heat in your room back in London. Passepartout forgot that.
He and Fogg left London the night before, took a train to Dover, a steamship to Calais, and a train to the French capital. Jules Verne spent few words describing this leg of the journey. Little wonder, since his readers knew this portion of the route well. Verne focused on character development here and introduced a major subplot, the pursuit of a bank robber by Detective Fix of Scotland Yard.
Passepartout regretted not spending more time in Paris, capital of his native country. He and Fogg rode in a carriage through the rain for an hour and forty minutes between two train stations.
At this point, Fogg had traversed some 294 miles, about 1.2% of the total distance, and he’d consumed 1.3% of his allotted time. On schedule with no mishaps or delays. The day before, when making the bet, he’d asserted, “The unforeseen does not exist.” So far, that had proved true.
“The Train” Claude Monet, 1872
In 1872, the population of Paris (minus outlying areas) numbered about 1.8 million. Adolphe Thiers served as the President of France, with Jules Armand Dufaure as President of the Council of Ministers.
Today, Paris claims a citizenry of 2.2 million. Emmanuel Macron is the President of the Republic, and the Prime Minister is Élisabeth Borne.
Had Fogg waited 150 years, he could have caught a flight directly from London to Paris with a flying time of one hour and twenty minutes. Truly, that unforeseen did not exist.
Trains, too, have changed. They no longer belch smoke like the one in Claude Monet’s 1872 painting, “The Train.” A traveler today can go by rail from London to Paris, through the Chunnel, in about two and a half hours.
If you’re enjoying this blog voyage, perhaps you’d like my latest story, 80 Hours, inspired by Verne’s tale, but updated to modern times. It’s available as an ebook from Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Rakuten Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, Vivlio, and Amazon.
All aboard! Next stop—Turin. We should arrive there tomorrow, according to your conductor—
150 years ago today, Phileas Fogg made his famous fictional wager and started his journey Around the World in Eighty Days. To commemorate the anniversary, let’s travel along with him for the next eighty days and find out how the world he circled has changed.
The Reform Club, as it looked then
He made his bet and started his trip at the Reform Club. Jules Verne didn’t invent that club—it had existed for thirty-six years. A gentlemen’s club originally devoted to promoting the passage of the Reform Act of 1836, it conducted business in a building on Pall Mall Street in central London.
The Reform Club today
The club still exists today, but with some changes. Once political, it’s now mostly social. Once all-male, it admitted women in 1981.
In 1872, greater London boasted a population of 3.9 million. Queen Victoria sat on the throne of England, and William Ewart Gladstone of the Liberal Party served as Prime Minister. The 20th Parliament performed legislative duties.
In October 2022, greater London’s population numbers 8.8 million. The monarch is King Charles III, and the Prime Minister is Liz Truss of the Conservative Party. They’re up to the 58th Parliament now.
The date of October 2 fell on a Wednesday in 1872. Fogg set a departure time of 8:45 pm, since he planned to take the train to Dover leaving at that time.
In 2022, the second day of October falls on a Sunday. Trains still run from London to Dover, and the trip takes less than two hours. You could also drive by car, rideshare with others, take a bus, or fly. Fogg lacked all of those latter options.
On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) succeeded in impacting a probe on the asteroid Dimorphos in an attempt to redirect the path of that body.
You’re late to the party, NASA. It’s been done already. Over a century ago.
As chronicled in The Cometeers, an international team already attempted to redirect an Earthbound comet.
In 1897.
When Comet Göker threatened to strike our planet in September of that year, there were no rockets, no nuclear weapons. They fired projectiles from the Jules Verne cannon and tried to deflect the comet with a gunpowder explosion. Commander Hanno Knighthead struggled to motivate his argumentative, multinational crew of eccentric geniuses to work together.
Then he learned the crew included a saboteur. Only a truly extraordinary leader could get this group to cooperate, identify and thwart the spy, and jury-rig a way to divert the comet. Lucky thing Hanno brought his chewing gum.
Good work, NASA. DART struck its target. But let’s not call it new or innovative. The credit for saving the Earth from collision goes to The Cometeers, by—
Next Sunday, October 2, 2022 marks 150 years to the day after Phileas Fogg began his trip Around the World in Eighty Days. I’ll celebrate this fictional event in two ways:
My story “80 Hours,” will be available for purchase, though you can pre-order it now.
I’ll begin a series of blogposts on the days when Fogg and his companions arrived in each city on their trip.
To Jules Verne’s reading audience in 1872, it must have seemed astounding to think someone could circle the globe in as little as eighty days. Today, we’re accustomed to the space station and manned spacecraft orbiting the earth in a little over eighty minutes.
For the rest of us non-astronauts, imagine facing the challenge of circumnavigating the earth in eighty hours with no preparation and with unknown, promised obstacles along the way. That’s the problem confronting shy and sheltered Wendy Pegram in “80 Hours.”
You may pre-order “80 Hours” in ebook form now at Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Tolino, and Vivlio. Starting next Sunday, you’ll be able to get the book at those sites, and at Amazon, Scribd, and Rakuten Kobo.
If you’ve been itching to make the trip around our globe, you can do it for real. Or (far cheaper) you can read your way around the world by two different methods, courtesy of—
Ah, the metaphor. The perfect asset for rendering the abstract concrete, for elevating prose above mere banal description, for igniting the fire of words.
tiger photo by Charles J. Sharp
I’ve written about metaphors before, but only to distinguish them from their showy, weaker fellow creatures, similes. The poor, attention-starved simile. It’s like a male peacock, brandishing ‘like’ or ‘as’ to signal the reader, to flash its tail feathers, saying, “Look at me! I’m making a comparison!”
A metaphor shows no signal, gives no sign. It’s unannounced, sneaky, and subtle. A trained tiger lurking within a jungle of words. Hidden power, and beauty.
I attended a webinar this week titled “The Magic of Metaphor,” by author Marin Sardy, and that inspired this post. She refreshed my knowledge of this trained predator, one I’ve too often left languishing in its cage. Thanks to her, I’ve fed the beast, stroked its fur, let it get some exercise, and vowed to present it more often.
All metaphors hinge on an absurdity. A thing is not a thing, says the metaphor, it is some other thing. It’s not like something else. It is something quite different. X is Y. Shakespeare asserts the whole world is a stage. They’re the same thing, equal.
Absurd. The whole world is not a stage. You know that. Shakespeare knew you’d know that. But your mind, that highly evolved pattern recognition engine, saw the link and made the connection. The world resembles a stage in some respects—got it.
Ms. Sardy discussed the various types of metaphor, the different tricks your trained tiger can perform. Simple, Compound, Extended, Implied, and Conceptual. You can look those up elsewhere. Each takes the basic ‘X is Y’ formulation and twists it a different way.
Metaphors help readers understand and appreciate your story. The ‘X’ is something in your story—hard to describe, difficult to picture, outside the reader’s experience. In the cited metaphor by Shakespeare, “all the world” is fuzzy, nebulous, too big to grasp. Your powerful trained tiger equates that with ‘Y,’ something known to readers, tangible, and easier to imagine. “A stage.”
If your tiger performs well, Ms. Sardy says, the metaphor is clear, apt, original, and authentic. On a bad day, the tiger bites its trainer-author in the form of a cliché, or metaphors that are mixed, stacked, or forced.
Ms. Sardy addressed how to train your tiger—that is, how to choose the right metaphor. Given the ‘X’ of your story, how do you select the perfect ‘Y?’ The four pieces of advice, put in my own words, follow:
Push past the obvious. List a bunch of candidate ‘Ys’ (perhaps by mind-mapping) and don’t pick the first ones that occur to you.
Think for yourself. Don’t copy, or even attempt to imitate, the metaphors of other writers.
Understand the ‘X.’ Put yourself as deeply into your story as you can. Immerse your mind in it. Only by being there can you convey an appropriate and vivid comparison.
Draw from past experience. Think about similar things from your own past. That may help you select the right ‘Y,’ one familiar to readers.
Note: In this post, I’ve transposed Ms. Sardy’s marvelous webinar into my own words. She didn’t use a trained tiger to describe metaphors—that’s my idea. I take the blame for any misinterpretation of her wonderful talk.
Ready to show off your trained tiger? At the literacy circus, a spotlight shines down on the center ring. A vast, reading audience waits in their seats, anxious to find out if your trained tiger act is better than that of—
A writer’s retreat sounds good, doesn’t it? Get away from your day job, your house-mates, your friends, for a week, a weekend, or even just a day. Pure writing bliss.
Except it often isn’t. I’ve blogged about writing retreats here, and even earlier, here. If you approach them with realistic expectations, maintain discipline, and avoid distractions, you may accomplish many of your retreat goals.
You can divide writer’s retreats into two types—Group and Do-It-Yourself, and I’ve done both. Group retreats provide camaraderie with like-minded writers, and the opportunity for critiques and idea-sharing.
DIY retreats, described in two great posts—this one by Kristen Pope, and this one by Alicia de los Reyes, feature ‘alone time’ where it’s just you and your words. You may find a well-executed DIY retreat quite productive and rewarding.
Now for the counter-argument. In group retreats, when all is said and done, there’s often much more said than done. If you’re going to talk and not write, don’t call it a retreat. Call it a weekend with friends, a party, or a beer-bash.
DIY retreats avoid that problem, but may suffer other pitfalls. If you’re accustomed to writing in short bursts during the rare moments life allows, you may find it difficult to stay focused when you’ve set aside a whole day. If you’ve trained your brain to adjust to one-hour writing sessions, don’t be surprised when the gray matter gets distracted or sluggish after an hour.
Also, when you think about it, DIY retreats resemble your daily writing sessions, except they’re longer. Just a question of scale. Seems a little strange to give it a special name—retreat—when it’s so similar to your normal routine.
Consider professional authors, those who call writing their day job. They write all day, every day. Think the term ‘DIY retreat’ means anything to them? What you call a DIY retreat, they call a career.
Perhaps you should aim at that target. Rather than writing for a few minutes squeezed from life each day, all the while looking forward to the next retreat when you can really write, why not think of each day as a DIY retreat? Maximize those seized moments. Do everything you can to approximate the life of a serious, professional author. Maybe you can’t give up your day job or ignore life’s other requirements, but you can prioritize your time to permit more writing.
With that mindset, every day starts looking like a DIY retreat. Who started calling them ‘retreats,’ anyway? Yes, they involve backing away from the non-writing parts of life, but ‘retreat’ sounds so weak, like surrender. From a writing perspective, you’re advancing, not retreating. Let’s call them advances, or charges, or attacks.
Let’s go, writers! Grab your spear and shield—er, I mean pen and laptop, and advance toward glory. No retreat, no surrender. Charge forward! Follow—
Interesting fact—over the years, I’ve submitted stories 441 times, and in all of the responses to all of those submissions, I’ve never been rejected. Hard to believe? Consider this—no matter how many times you submit your writing for publication, you will never be rejected either.
To clarify, my stories have been rejected plenty of times. Yours might be rejected as well. But I, as a person, have never been rejected by any editor. Nor will you.
When one of your stories gets rejected, it sure feels like the editor is rejecting you, doesn’t it? It’s like the editor’s saying, ‘You’re not good enough for my publication. You really aren’t a very good writer. You ought to quit now and consider doing something else with your time.’
Editors never say that. Nor do they mean it. But we writers can’t help but think that’s what they mean. After all, we think, I just wrote something from the heart, from the deepest part of my soul. I am the story, and the story is me. When you reject it, you reject me.
In dealing with this conundrum, you’ve got two options to choose from:
You can identify with your stories in a personal, intimate way. When an editor rejects one of your stories, you can regard it as a rejection of your very being. You’ll have to find some way of coping with that (see below).
You can place some emotional distance between yourself and your stories. They’re not you and you’re not them. They’re good, and you’re proud of them, but they’re a product of you, not the very essence of you. A rejection of a story is nothing more than a minor setback. It doesn’t constitute a condemnation of you as a person. Your identity as a writer remains intact.
Though I practice Option 2, I’m not sure that’s best. It can lead to a disinterested approach to writing—’It’s just a story, after all. It’s not me. Who cares if it gets rejected?’
Option 1, however, reminds me of the quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway—“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” That attitude calls for baring your soul using words, pouring out your essence into every story. Perhaps Option 1 could result in the best, most masterful writing you can do.
If you choose Option 1, how do you deal with rejection? You’re in for a rough time when an editor rejects (what you consider to be) you. At a minimum, alcohol may get consumed and perhaps your forehead will bang into a wall a few times. I hope nothing worse occurs.
It seems likely that, for Option 1 writers, rejection becomes less soul-crushing after the tenth, or the hundredth time. I hope so, even if only for the sake of minimizing wall damage.
Perhaps wisdom lies in a sort of balance between Option 1 and 2. You could maintain a close relationship, an identity, with your stories, while growing a hard shell when it comes to others’ opinions. You’re going to need a thick skin at some point anyway, even after acceptance, when critical readers leave scathing comments.
Whichever option you choose and however you deal with rejections of your stories, it remains true that you will never get rejected, and neither will—
For novelists, chapter endings can be tricky. If you’re agonizing over how to end a chapter, read on to see what I’ve learned.
For readers, the end of a chapter seems like the end of a lap in a race. They enjoy a brief feeling of accomplishment having reached a milestone marker, but the moment passes upon realizing how much more remains to be read.
For writers, a chapter ending serves two purposes. First, it must close out the chapter. That seems obvious, but I mean it in a deeper way. The writer called that section of the book a ‘chapter’ for a reason—perhaps a single scene, a particular setting, a character introduction, a revelation, a unit of time—and that reason must conclude. Whatever held that chapter together must wrap around and bind the other end.
Second, the end of the chapter should entice the reader to keep reading to the next one. Yes, it’s 1:37 AM and the reader has to go to work tomorrow, but the way that chapter ends compels the reader to keep going.
How do you accomplish those goals? Any number of ways. This post by John Matthew Fox at Bookfox and this one by Sacha Black offer many fine ways to end chapters. If handled well, new conflicts, surprises, jokes, mysteries, cliffhangers, and questions can all serve as chapter endings that springboard to the next.
In particular, I like Fox’s advice: don’t overthink it. Chapter endings, while important, don’t deserve as much of your time as the first sentence, opening paragraphs, and final words of your novel. Your book spans many chapters, and you must write an ending for each one. Ending each one the same way would bore the reader, so vary your ending method.
I also like Fox’s suggestion to examine the chapter endings used by your favorite modern authors. Analyzing the techniques of successful writers could result in approaches that will work for you. As always, don’t plagiarize. Imitate a technique, don’t copy words.
I’ll offer this test you can use to see if your chapter endings work. As you write your first draft, and as you edit each subsequent draft, do you stop writing for the day at the end of a chapter? Or do you feel an irresistible urge to start the next one? If you stop writing or editing at the end of a chapter, it’s likely readers will stop reading there. They might even stop reading your entire book.
Just as all novel chapters must end, so too with all blogposts. Well, come to think of it, if anyone could find a way for a blogpost to go on forever, it would be—
Fresh out of story ideas? Try the 1G Nostalgia Formula. (My name for it. Trademark application pending.)
Here’s how the 1G Nostalgia Formula works. Take today’s date and subtract twenty-five to thirty years (about one human generation), and set your story in that time period.
As you do this, research as much as you can about that era—clothes, catch phrases, news, culture, sports, songs, movies, etc.
Why do readers find such stories appealing? For the young, it’s a chance to satisfy their curiosity about their parents’ time, and to feel a little smug about those “simpler times.” For older readers, such stories trigger memories, not of simpler times, but of their younger and simpler selves. “Yeah, I remember that.”
The TV industry glommed onto this formula decades ago. Consider “M*A*S*H,” “Happy Days,” “That ‘70s Show,” “Mad Men,” and others, all set in earlier eras.
You needn’t be precise about the one-generation part of the formula. Pick a time period within living memory of at least some of your target audience. One generation works well, since you’re maximizing the size of that audience.
The formula hinges on how well you immerse your readers in that time period, and how many contrasts you can draw between that time and the present.
In creating the feel of your time setting, it’s okay to exaggerate a little. Say you’ve picked the mid-1990s for your story’s time period. Feel free to make your story even more mid-90s than the real mid-90s were.
This requires simplifying the complicated, clarifying the vague, and concentrating the diffuse. Complexity characterizes every era. No time period separates itself by damming off the flow from earlier, or the flow to later, times. Currents and counter-currents form eddies and whirls in the river of time.
William Gibson said, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” That uneven distribution also applies to the past time period you choose for your story.
Depending on the needs and purposes of your tale, you may not wish to depict these complexities, at least not at first. Best to give your readers a unified, integral gestalt—an exaggerated mid-90’s, for example, free of any lingering 80’s remnants, and free of millennial foreshadowings. If the story might benefit from those slight anachronisms, introduce them later.
These can take the form of a grandparent character who can only relate to an even earlier time (2G). Or it can be a forward-looking character, perhaps a science fiction fan, who imagines a future much like our own present. These aspects can add delightful cross-currents to liven up a nostalgic story.
None of this advice takes the place of the writer’s prime directive: write a good story. Just because your tale follows the 1G Nostalgia Formula, that doesn’t guarantee sales. The subject matter might pique reader interest, but you only gain buyers and readers by writing well.
Ready to set your creative time machine to a date one generation in the past? All you have to do is hit the gas. Your destination switches have already been set by—
