Monthly Archives: March 2026
I’m All Aglow About my New Globes
Did you know you can order a custom globe—one with your own map printed on a spherical surface? You can. I did.
Your Own Little World
If you’ve ever enjoyed sketching your own planet with continents, islands, mountain ranges, oceans, seas, bays, and rivers, you can hire a service to convert your map into a globe.
Or if you’ve loved novels with world maps, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea, Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse series, or H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle series, you could have any of those made into globe form.
Perhaps you accomplished a trip around the world—by ship or plane. Or you relished the idea of tracing someone else’s circumnavigation—say, Magellan’s or Phileas Fogg’s—on a globe. Put away the Sharpie. Get a globe to order.
Seasteading World
For my book, The Seastead Chronicles, I drew a map of our world’s oceans, with all international waters carved up into countries. (I call those countries aquastates.) My stories span a future history of many decades from humble beginnings to a world full of aquastates. As the concept of seasteading spread, I assumed countries would form based on seabed resources (mineral nodules, petroleum deposits, etc.), and bottom features (hydrothermal vents, deep trenches, etc.).
In time, competition for resources would result in conflicts over borders—diplomacy, and even war. Each aquastate would take on specific characteristics based on who settled there, the country’s main economic income, and its type of government. Over a period of decades, perhaps, they’d reach a point of relative stability, and that’s what I depicted on my map.
Globe-building Experience
I wondered If somebody could construct a globe based on my map—a globe worthy of displaying at science fiction conventions and other book-selling events. I hoped the model of my seastead world would attract potential readers.
After searching for custom globe companies, I settled on SnapSpheres. They proved easy to work with and answered all my questions. They seemed just as enthused about my weird idea as I was.
For my map, I used a rare projection that looked like an orange cut into unequal slices and flattened. However, with mine, the slices cut through continents to emphasize the oceans. Cartographers call it an Interrupted Goode Homolosine Oceanic View projection. I sent that map to SnapSpheres and the rarity of it didn’t bother them at all.
Matt, at SnapSpheres, sent me pictorial depictions of what the finished globe would look like. I loved it. After I approved the design and paid the invoice, the product arrived in short order.
Resulting Globes
I received two globes, one three inches in diameter and one seven inches. The small one is all pentagons, and the larger one includes pentagons and hexagons. The pieces attach with magnets and snap into place. Assembly and disassembly are easy, and I can store all the pieces of both globes in small boxes for convenient transport.
When I put a puck light inside the larger globe, it shows through the translucent pieces in an attractive way. I bought a stand that rotates the larger globe for a more enticing display.
The larger globe shows off the aquastates better, but some book-selling events limit my table space. For those, I’ll put out the smaller globe.
They say writers live in their own little worlds. That’s true, now, for—
Poseidon’s Scribe
Could a TikTok Challenge Get America Reading Again?
Count me among the two thirds of American adults without a TikTok account. I’m slow, therefore, to pick up on TikTok trends and challenges. Having only just heard about the 75 Booked Challenge, I figured I’d offer my thoughts.
75 Booked Challenge
Unlike many TikTok challenges, this one doesn’t involve dancing, music, or posting videos, and it poses no physical danger to participants. Over the course of seventy-five days, you must:
- Complete two 45-minute reading sessions each day (one of them not in bed),
- Finish drinking a bottle of water during each reading session,
- Log all your reading in a physical journal, and
- Read books (paper, ebooks, or audiobooks) you already own, or that you bought secondhand, or borrowed from a library. Do not purchase new books for this challenge.
You can learn more about the challenge itself here, here, and here.
Benefits
Not long ago, I lamented, in a blogpost about the decline of reading in America. In that post, I cited a study showing reading for pleasure reduces stress, increases creativity, boosts empathy, improves your vocabulary, and aids sleep.
75 Days
The 75 Booked Challenge seems a fine way to re-start a stalled reading habit. The duration of seventy-five days spans enough time to challenge you, but not so long as to seem impossible.
Two 45-Minute Sessions
The two sessions per day allow enough time for focused reading while still permitting time for other daily tasks. However, for many people, those ninety minutes will force other important daily chores and activities to the sidelines during the challenge.
Physical Journal
I find the requirement to log the accomplishments in a physical journal interesting. The challenge doesn’t mandate full book reviews or anything specific. However, logging anything about the book you’ve just read may help you retain basic facts about it. The log serves as a record of your accomplishment. At the end of the challenge it will stand as proof of what you’ve done, and could spur you to continue reading, and logging, at some level.
Already-Owned Books
I support readers purchasing books, so this aspect of the challenge disappoints me. However, it helps clear out the TBR (to be read) list of books people bought and haven’t gotten to yet.
Water Bottle?
I puzzled over this aspect. Water and reading occupy non-overlapping circles in any Venn diagram. Still, drinking water won’t harm you.
Conclusion
All in all, this challenge could benefit most Americans. I hope it catches on. Personally, I do plenty of reading, but a writing challenge might be better bet for—
Poseidon’s Scribe
Authors Playing in the Leaves One Afternoon
On Sunday, March 8, I participated in a panel discussion with other authors at Leaves Bakery and Books. I’ve appeared there before and blogged about my visits here, here, and here. They haven’t had enough of me yet, I guess.
Ashlee G. Rosales
I hadn’t met Ashlee before this event. She’s written a romance book called Let Me Protect You: A Granite Falls Romance. In the novel, a woman hires a bodyguard, but that protector turns out to be her ex-boyfriend.
Susan Ayres
The lone poet on our panel, Susan was another new acquaintance for me. She’s titled her newest chapbook of poetry Red Cardinal, White Snow. One reviewer wrote, “These poems are a master class in the art of becoming human.”
Scott Finley
I’d met Scott at a previous visit to Leaves, so was familiar with his Voyages of the Queen series. Each novel involves a ship’s nurse aboard an ocean liner in 1929 who ends up solving murders.
Me
I babbled some answers to the questions put to us by Tina, our moderator. I also read from my short story, “Weathervane Wally,” which appears in Ain’t Our First Rodeo.
A small audience showed up for this event. (A larger audience wouldn’t have fit in the available space.) Perhaps out of courtesy, they didn’t fall asleep during the blathering of—
Poseidon’s Scribe
What Happened to Reading in America?
Across our country, reading for pleasure has declined by 40% over 20 years, according to the journal iScience. I consider that unfortunate. Why and how should we improve?
Beginning
For most of us, reading began with us sitting on the lap of a parent or guardian while they read a children’s book to us. Each page turn revealed new pictures, plus some funny black squiggles we didn’t understand. The adult’s voice took us to another world, where animals talked, or children went on adventures, or other crazy and fascinating things happened. We associated reading with fun. Once we learned the meaning of the squiggles, our world opened up and we read with abandon.
Decline and Ending
In middle school and high school, teachers assigned books to read, boring ones they said were good for us. Reading became a chore, drudgery, something to slog through so we could dash off the required report.
As an adult, no longer in school, a part of us recalled the fun of reading, especially fiction. We wanted to resume the habit. But life crowded in. Work, commuting, appointments, and obligations left no time for fiction. Reading to children didn’t count, since we did that for their enjoyment, not ours. We felt a nagging guilt about it, but where were we supposed to find the time?
Advantages
According to this article by Adithi Ramakrishnan, studies show reading for pleasure reduces stress, increases creativity, boosts empathy, improves your vocabulary, and aids sleep.
Fiction as Metaphor
We’re pre-wired for stories. As individuals with unlinked brains, we find ourselves in a confusing world, a world of problems. We seek coping strategies, solutions to the problems that will lead to favorable ends. Not coincidentally, fiction provides make-believe characters facing problems in a strange world, learning to cope and solve their problems. We get to read fiction with no risk to ourselves, and maybe learn something, or at least get entertained.
Beginning Again
What to do? You know how reading would help. You recall how fun it used to be. But you’re too busy now. I’ll list some strategies to re-form the reading habit, provided by Clare Mulroy in this article:
- Avoid long books, at least at first. Read short ones to attain a sense of accomplishment you can build on.
- Read a genre you enjoy before branching out. Again, this increases the chance you’ll finish a few books, helping to re-form the habit.
- Schedule a daily time to read. This informs your psyche about the importance of reading compared to the rest of your daily tasks, and ingrains the habit.
- Avoid distractions. Free your reading time from phone and computer notifications, the TV, and anything else that might cause your mind to wander.
- Experiment with different formats. Find out what works best for sustaining your reading habit—paper books, e-books, or audiobooks.
- Set a reading goal. Make it an easy goal at first to give yourself a positive sense of achievement. After meeting that goal, set a stretch goal. Consider telling a trusted partner about your goal, or joining a reading challenge. That adds social pressure to the task
- Stop reading a book you don’t like, and start another. If you DNF (did not finish), that’s okay. Very few books get better after the first twenty pages. Life’s too short to read bad books.
- Bring a book with you whenever you leave home. That way you can read during any idle times that pop up during the day.
- Join a reading community. Perhaps someone has started a book club in your neighborhood, or you could start one. Online book clubs exist as well.
Come on, America! Let’s turn this trend around and lead the world in reading for pleasure. Doing my best to supply the demand for entertaining fiction, I’m—
Poseidon’s Scribe
Heard this One? 7 Authors Walk into a Bar…
Opener to a joke? No. It really happened. Last Saturday, seven of us set up in the open-air seating area of the Oak Street Drafthouse and Cocktail Bar in Denton, Texas.
Selected as the fantasy portion of the Denton READiculous Book Palooza—they dared to call it the “first annual”—we sat at our tables selling books, conversing with readers, and reading excerpts of our writing.
I marred an otherwise eminent group, consisting of CCS Jones, Rhonda Eudaly, Rachel Oslin Bradford, Michelle Miles, Leslie C. Sewell, and Amena Jamali. From watching them at work and from viewing their table setups, I learned more about selling books to potential buyers.
You’re still wondering what happens when seven authors walk into a bar? They peddle books, and we did. It’s different when seven lexicologists walk into a bar. One drinks, one sips, one gulps, one quaffs, one imbibes, one swigs, and one guzzles.
Well, okay. That joke floored ‘em at the lexicology convention.
My thanks to Mindy and Jennifer and the whole staff who organized and put on the Denton READiculous Book Palooza.
If you’re going to put on a book palooza, it helps to have a bar close by. That serves to satisfy the thirsts of—
Poseidon’s Scribe