Category Archives: Readers

3 Tips for Compelling, Shareable Writing

Everyone who creates an online post, tweet, or meme hopes it goes viral. That occurs when others read it, like it, and share it. Viral posts often contain three key attributes. Do these same attributes apply to fiction in general?

Author, speaker, and producer Shane Snow blogged about these attributes and gave them an easy mnemonic to remember—FIN.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Fluency

The F in FIN stands for fluency. Snow means this in the sense of smooth, flowing prose, rather than familiarity with a language. He advocates plain, easy-to-understand writing.

Go for a low number in the readability index. Don’t force readers to wade through flowery phrases to grasp your meaning. Shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs make life easier for your readers. Read your writing aloud to check for awkward phrases or other stumbling points and edit as needed.  

Identity

Here, Snow refers to how well the reader identifies with the characters or topic. To engage readers, connect with universal themes and struggles.

Give readers something familiar to latch onto. Often, novels begin in a familiar setting to orient readers to an identifiable locale—home, office, neighborhood, etc. They give characters commonplace problems readers can relate to. Having grounded the reader in a familiar place, the novel can then launch into the unfamiliar.

Novelty

Speaking of the unfamiliar, Snow includes novelty as the final third of the acronym. We call them novels for a reason. Be bold and creative. Strike off in a new and different direction.

Take an old idea and give it a fresh twist. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, but ‘they’ haven’t read your book yet.

Putting FIN Together

Shane Snow focused on FIN as a technique for giving your social media posts and memes a better chance of going viral. Fiction stories can be sharable, too, in the sense that fans get a buzz going and that increases sales.

For a short story, novella, or novel, consider applying these attributes in reverse order–NIF. First, think of a new and fresh thing to write about. Then, begin your story by giving readers something to identify with. Last, as you edit, work to keep your prose clean and fluent.

Soon, you’ll FINish a wonderful, sharable tale, thanks in part to Shane Snow and—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 13, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Authorial Reticence—Why Writers Hold Back

You’re asking if you read that subject line correctly. Hold back? Aren’t writers supposed to explain things? Aren’t they supposed to…you know…write to be understood?

I’d never heard the term ‘authorial reticence’ until last weekend, when I listened to author Michael Scott Clifton talking about it at a conference.

He spoke on the subject of ‘magical realism’ and dropped ‘authorial reticence’ on his audience. Intrigued by his description, I decided to blog about it.

Definition

Most often associated with magical realism, authorial reticence refers to a writer refraining from explanations about a fantastical setting or event. The story proceeds as if the astounding, magical thing happened every day. This encourages the reader to accept it and keep reading.

Antonyms

If that seems confusing, it might help to understand the term by exploring its extreme opposites. Think of a story where the author used an As-You-Know, Bob or an infodump to give a detailed description. Or consider a story where the author wrote out the moral. In each case, the writer took you by the hand and told you what to think.

Authorial reticence is the opposite of that.

Example

Authorial reticence can apply to sub-genres beyond magical realism. A classic example from science fiction occurred in Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Beyond This Horizon with this three-word sentence: “The door dilated.” No further explanation or description. Heinlein expected readers to form the mental picture, accept it, and read on.

Pros

Done well, this technique fosters engagement on the part of the reader. The author says, in an implicit way, “I trust you. If you’ll go along with me, I’ll entertain you without moralizing or boring you. No spoon-feeding, though. You may have to stretch your mind beyond normal credibility limits.”

Benefits include a shorter, tighter story that highlights action and drama. Readers get a sense of being welcomed into your story’s world, as if they’ve lived there for some time. Also, readers who feel trusted might well buy your other books.

Cons

Like any good thing, you can stretch authorial reticence too far. Throwing too many bizarre or fantastic elements in at once can confuse a reader, who now will be less likely to finish the story, or buy another.

Also, if you fail to establish authorial reticence in your writing style at the story’s outset, introducing it later can prove jarring.

Reticence and Me

Given my engineering training, I suffer from a tendency to over-explain. I fear the reader might not form an accurate mental picture, or might reject my story element as too far-fetched. I’ll strive to resist this impulse. I’ll try to trust the reader’s imagination to fill in gaps.

From now on, if you’re looking for authorial reticence, you’re looking for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 22, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Write for 2 Audiences

If you write genre fiction, you write for two sectors of the reading public. Problem is, they want opposite things. What do you do?

For any genre—and I’ll use science fiction as my example—you’ll have two types of readers. Let’s call them Experts and Newbies. You’d like both of them to buy and enjoy your books.

Experts

The first type knows the genre well. Scifi experts can quote the Three Laws of Robotics, have a ball lecturing you about Dyson Spheres, reveal the universal question for which the answer is 42, and babble on about Babylon 5. They read often, and crave the most recently published stories, and prefer them crammed with all the technologies and the latest scientific discoveries.

Newbies

Don’t take that term the wrong way. We all start as newbies. The newbie takes a chance when buying your book. Despite harboring doubts about scifi, the newbie remains curious and willing to learn. The newbie may not know a warp drive from a hard drive, but likes a good story as long as it doesn’t confuse.

These two types differ in their approach to what I’ll call New Stuff and Tropes.

New Stuff

I mentioned experts seek technology and scientific discoveries. They want the latest, the cutting-edge, the most imaginative concepts. Give them the New Stuff. Not only that, they want the full explanation. What’s it look like? How is it powered? How fast does it go? What languages can it speak? You could write many pages of convincing technobabble without boring an expert.

Newbies don’t delight in New Stuff. It’s all new to them. They just want to know how the characters feel about the new stuff and how it affects the plot. Any paragraph that reads like a technical manual annoys them, maybe enough to stop reading.

Tropes

With tropes, the situation reverses. Here, I using the term to refer to technology or concepts well known to readers of the genre. Expert readers get your meaning as soon as you mention wormholes, the multiverse, generation ships, FTL, or cryosleep. If you go further to explain the trope, experts feel insulted.

Newbies, by contrast, get stumped by tropes. These strange words and phrases serve as an ejection seat to launch them out of the story. Just a brief definition would save newbies from frustration.

The Balance

As a writer, you’d like to please both types. When it comes to New Stuff, you should aim for just enough explanation to satisfy experts, but not so much that it bores newbies. With Tropes, seek the briefest definition to help out the newbies. Better yet, define the term in context so newbies can catch the meaning and experts don’t get exasperated.

At a critique group meeting recently, one member criticized my manuscript, saying I hadn’t defined an unfamiliar term, but that member managed to glean what it meant. Another group member knew the term, and said I shouldn’t bog down the prose with further explanations.

I’d achieved balance.

The Signal Technique

Say you’ve got some new stuff in your story. You want to explain it all for the benefit of experts without making newbies nod off. Perhaps the signal technique will work. At the beginning of a paragraph, provide a signal to the reader that a long description follows. If you make the signal clear enough, the expert reads on with eagerness and the newbie skims or even skips that part.

This method might work as well for tropes. Here the signal tells experts they may skip an upcoming explanation without missing anything, while the newbies should read the paragraph to understand the unfamiliar jargon.

Jules Verne mastered that technique. Known for including long lists, he provided unmistakable signals in advance. It’s as if a hypertext alert pops up from the page saying, “Uninterested readers may skip this next part.”

Summary

Needless to say, I’ve simplified things in this discussion of two audiences. Your readers span a spectrum from newbie to expert and all points in between. You can write for them all if you keep their preferences in mind. Maybe, for your next book, one member of your reading audience might be—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 18, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Love the Books, Not Their Author?

Have you ever enjoyed an author’s books, then found out something disturbing about that author? Did the revelation spoil your appreciation of the books?

I suspect we’ve all been let down by a hero. Perhaps a favorite actor, athlete, politician, or artist did something unsavory, and that detracted from your experience of their work. It stains their reputation, at least for you. You’re no longer able to separate performer from performance.

The works of Jules Verne, my favorite author, come across today as antisemitic, racist, and sexist. His anti-Jewish sentiment is evident in both Hector Servadac (also published as Off on a Comet) and The Carpathian Castle where he depicts Jewish characters in a bad light. He includes characters of color in many novels, but never as the hero and often in stereotyped ways—servants or cooks—subordinate to the white hero. At least he includes them, unlike those of the female gender, who rarely appear at all in his works.

I could excuse these ‘isms’ and rationalize my continued reading of his works, by observing that this 19th Century French author reflected the prevailing biases, prejudices, and privileges of his time. I could say it’s unfair to impose my modern standards on a man no longer around to defend himself.

But I believe that lets both of us—me and Verne—off the hook too easily.

Consider that reading represents a form of communication, and that it involves a sender (the writer) and a receiver (the reader—you). Your appreciation of the written work occurs at that interface where you interact with the text.

Therefore, you bear a share of responsibility here and you can’t shrug it off. Your love for or hatred of the book is an individual reaction you own, an experience you share only with the writer, whether that person is alive or dead.

All written material to which we have access was written by humans. All humans suffer from faults, frailties, and weaknesses of some kind. You lack the option of reading books written by angels. Sorry about that.

Knowing this, you face a choice. You might refuse to discover anything about the author. That spares you from any knowledge of skeletons lurking in their closets. But it sets you up for profound disappointment if you ever find out your favorite author slipped off the mental pedestal you erected and fell short of your moral standards in some way.

On the other hand, you can read with full understanding that you consume text produced by a flawed author—a human. You can research the author and discover some distasteful truths, and read the work anyway.

Here’s where I stand with Verne. I can’t claim ignorance of his backwards attitudes. If I choose to enjoy his novels, I must decide that the good outweighs the bad. Further, I must recognize this as an individual choice. Other readers make their own choices.

I like to read Verne’s novels, most of them. I don’t excuse his faults, don’t condone his biases. I wince at his stereotypes and cringe at the prejudiced opinions. I don’t idolize him. I’ve decided, for me, his strengths outweigh his weaknesses.

You face similar decisions whenever you read anything. Does the good exceed the bad? Do the delights of the book surpass the poor behavior or faulty value system of the writer?

When you read a work, only you can weigh good against bad. Nobody else can do it for you, not reviewers, critics, or even—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 3, 2023Permalink

Do You Log Your Reading?

Writers should read. I’m rather organized about it, maybe bordering on anal. This week marks twenty years since I started keeping a log of my reading.

My spreadsheet started in January 2003. Since then, I’ve read 637 books. Fiction comprised 67% of these. Over those two decades, I’ve averaged 12.6 days per book.

In my spreadsheet, I note the date I finished, the title, author, and whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. For text-type books (print or ebook) I enter the number of pages and compute pages read per day. For audiobooks, I note the number of hours and compute the hours listened per day.

For print and ebooks, I’ve read an average of 16.7 pages per day and averaged 31.6 days to finish a book. The average audiobook took me only 6.9 days to complete, listening for an average 1.5 hours a day.

In an average year, I read 31.9 books, but that varied a lot. One year I only read 8, and another year I read 58.

I’ve consumed books in various formats—178 print books, 21 ebooks, 301 audiobooks on CD, 85 audiobooks on cassette (not many of those lately), and 52 downloaded audiobooks. Therefore, I’ve listened to 69% of the books and read the text of the remaining 31%.

If it sounds like I’m bragging, believe me, I’m not. I’m disappointed I didn’t read much more. This is an admission of failure, not a proud boast.

What sort of books do I read? I don’t note the genres in my spreadsheet, but much of the fiction is scifi. In nonfiction, I’m eclectic—all over the map.

In addition to the log, for the past 9 of those 20 years, I’ve posted reviews on Goodreads and Amazon of the books I read. That totals about 244 reviews. I’m not always kind in my reviews, but I try to be fair, noting strengths and weaknesses of each book. If I support other writers by reviewing their work, perhaps some will return the favor. Any review, whether good or bad, can help sales.

I’ve noticed my reading habits changing over the years. I used to read during my commute to and from work, either reading on the subway or listening to audiobooks in the car. I also read on the plane when traveling for work. Since my retirement, I’ve begun reading before breakfast, and still listen to audiobooks when traveling by car and I read on the plane when I fly.

Do you keep a record of the books you read? If not, should you start? Up to you, of course, but let me caution you first. Human nature is such that you get more of what you measure and less of what you don’t. If you start logging your reading, you will read more, but only at the expense of something else you’ll be doing less.

How does my reading data stack up against the average person? According to Gallup, the average American reads 12.6 books per year, the lowest average in 30 years, down from a high of 18.5 in 1999. The Penn Book Center found CEOs read a great deal, with Bill Gates reading about 50 books a year—a good goal.

There’s an app called Basmo that will log your reading for you. I’ve never tried it, but it looks easy to use, and it does all the spreadsheet calculating stuff. Using that app might inspire you to read more.

Without much effort, and with the aid of a log or logging app, you should be able to read much more than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 29, 2023Permalink

The 3 Types of Readers

In a 1920 essay, author Herman Hesse postulated there are three types of readers. Perhaps they’re more like stages of reading styles, since a person develops them sequentially. Or perhaps they’re more like modes, since a person will often switch between them. Let’s examine each one.

Reader 1 

Hesse called this the naïve type. Here the reader follows the book, accepting every word without critical analysis. There is only the book and the reader, no author. The book stands above the reader in a hierarchy—the book leads, the reader follows. We all start out reading in this way, but often revert back to this method in later life.

Reader 2

A reader of this type is aware of the book’s author. This reader by turns loves or hates aspects of the book, and by extension, praises or blames its author. Hesse considered this reader both critic and interpreter, for this reader judges and creates meaning from the book’s text. This reader faces the book (and author) on the same level, in a hunter-prey relationship, with reader as hunter. Although you may call this a stage of reading, a level more advanced than Reader 1, it is also a mode, to which a reader can return at any time.

Reader 3

For this reader, a book serves only as a jumping-off point. Meanings, associations, connections, and fanciful interpretations arise in the mind, inspired by a paragraph, a sentence, a word, or the small arc capping the letter ‘r.’ A reader of this type thus transcends both book and author, leaving them beneath and behind. This reader needs no books at all, and finds them all equivalent. Of what use is a book when you can grasp eternal and infinite truths from the words on a gum wrapper?

Maria Popova provides a more in-depth description of these types in this post.

I’m indebted to Davood Gozli for his Youtube video where he expresses the three types in the vertical hierarchy I mentioned above.

Hannah Byrd Little, in this post, laments the decline of reading in our age of cellphones and social media. She believes young people today too often linger in the Type 3 Reader mode, with tweets and texts constituting the bulk of their reading matter, and serving only as springboards for connecting with online followers. The decline of reading deserves its own blogpost, and I’ll leave that for the future.

If we accept Hesse’s three-mode system, the question is, do you move from mode to mode, as he imagines most people do? If so, what percentage of time do you spend reading in each mode, and does that percentage vary by the subject matter you’re reading?

I’d estimate I spend about 20% of the time as Reader 1, absorbed by the book, oblivious to the world, willing to go where the book takes me. About 80% of the time I’m Reader 2, thinking critically about what I read. Maybe 2% of the time I enter Reader 3 mode, and then most often with poetry. I suspect the 4-to-1 ratio of time between Reader 2 and Reader 1 is consistent whether I’m reading fiction or non-fiction.

How about you? Do you accept Hesse’s classification of reading modes? Do you cycle between modes and, if so, what fraction of time do you spend in each mode?

I’m guessing you remained in Reader mode 2 while going through this post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 27, 2022Permalink

Don’t Read in Bed!

Many people read in bed at night. Researchers tell you it’s good for your sleep and overall health. I disagree. Let me explain.

First, I know all the reasons people urge you to read in bed. It helps you relax, stimulates your creativity, gives you more empathy, and makes you smarter. I’ve read blogs and articles by Maddie Thomas, Lilianna Hogan at WebMD, Jodi Helmer, and Dr. Michael Breus. Molly Cavanaugh even inflicts this practice on her children.

These people have it all wrong. Reading in bed is bad. No, I’m not talking about the blue light hazard. The danger I speak of is present whether you read ebooks or paper books.

No, I’m not talking about the supposed harm of reading horror stories or other unsettling books that might cause nightmares or insomnia. I’m talking about a peril lurking for you no matter what you read.

I’ll concede that science has shown reading in bed helps you sleep. True. I get that. But that’s not the point. Those researchers have it all backward.

My concern—my deep fear—isn’t about how reading affects sleep. I’m terrified about how sleep affects reading.  

There’s not much research on that subject. Oh, there’s a paper called “The relationship between self-reported sleep quality and reading comprehension skills,” where scientists found a surprising result, that longer sleep times led to lower verbal efficiency, and poor sleep quality led to better reading comprehension.

But I’m not even talking about that. It’s not the amount of sleep that bothers me.

Here’s my scary theory. Our brains seem wired for pattern recognition. That skill enables us to form habits and cement them into routines and rituals.

If you read every night before bedtime, if you’ve developed and ingrained that habit, your brain has formed a solid link between reading and sleep.

That’s right. Your brain knows the pattern—seeing words means going night-night. You’ve made it a pleasurable pattern, thus a self-reinforcing one.

How do I know this? Where’s my research? Well, okay, I don’t have any studies to cite. The world cries out for experimental data on this vital subject. For all I know, researchers have tried, but as soon as they read their own paper, they fell asleep.

Where, you ask, is the danger? Who cares if your brain links reading with sleep?

Go ahead and think that, but don’t come crying to me when, during a meeting at work, you drop into slumberland when your boss displays a text-filled PowerPoint slide.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re driving, see stop sign, and pause to read it, only to fall asleep at the wheel.

Worst of all, and I can hardly bear to mention this unspeakable horror, it’s possible that, someday, you will fall asleep while reading a book written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 23, 2022Permalink

How Readable is Your Story?

If you’d like your fiction to sell well, wouldn’t it be beneficial if readers found your stories easy to read?

Not all writers see it that way. Some authors of the world’s great classic literature made it tough on their readers, but their books still became bestsellers. Obviously, readability alone doesn’t determine great writing.

For the most part, the factors of great writing remain intangible, but you can measure readability. Many word processor software packages calculate the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease’ score, as well as the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level,’ both standard measures of readability. The higher the Reading Ease score and the lower the Grade Level, the more readable your story.

Journalist Shane Snow inspired me to think along these lines with this wonderful blogpost. He did a lot of research obtaining Flesch-Kincaid data on many great fiction authors, and graphed it all.

That made me wonder how I measured up. I obtained the data on my ten most recently published stories. Listed from least readable to most readable, here they are:

StoryFlesch-Kincaid Reading EaseFlesch-Kincaid Grade LevelGenreYear Written
“The Steam Elephant”69.06.8Alt Hist2006
“Target Practice”69.36.5Scifi1999
“The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall”69.86.5Alt Hist2011
“Reconnaissance Mission”71.46.2Alt Hist2019
“Ripper’s Ring”72.26.4Alt Hist2015
“Moonset”74.85.3Horror2018
“A Clouded Affair”75.95.5Scifi2014
“The Cats of Nerio-3”76.35.1Scifi2016
“After the Martians”78.35.1Scifi2015
“Instability”79.14.8Alt Hist2017

Not too many obvious patterns there. My alternate history stories tend toward less readability than my straight science fiction, but not always. To some degree, I’ve improved readability with the passing years, but there’s some scatter in that, too.

When I average the F-K Grade Level of these stories, I get 5.82. According to one of the charts in Shane Snow’s post, that puts me around the readability level of Hunter S. Thompson, and between early J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Not bad company.

If my stories don’t sell as well as theirs, it only proves that, as I mentioned above, readability alone doesn’t make for great writing.

What if it did? Could you write in a way that maximizes your Flesch-Kincaid readability score? The Wikipedia entry gives the formula. It’s very simple. Just take your average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word, and the rest is math.

To make readers struggle, use long words and long sentences. To make your writing more readable, do the opposite.

To make your stories irresistible and widely sold…ah, that’s the magic formula I’d really like to know. That equation—whatever it is—might contain readability as one factor, but also many others. Ernest Hemingway earned a F-K Grade Level of just over 4, and Michael Crichton earned one a little under 9.

Shane Snow makes the point that a lower F-K Grade Level allows you to reach a larger potential audience for your stories. However, he cites two other factors that help determine whether your writing will gain traction and catch on. I’ll discuss my take on those in a future blogpost.

Although readability alone won’t determine whether your stories sell in the marketplace, consider this: if all other factors rated the same between two stories, wouldn’t you prefer the more readable one? I suspect you would, and so would—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 10, 2021Permalink

Editing in Perspective

While editing your manuscript, you might wish to look at it from three different viewpoints, or perspectives, to give your story a complete assessment.

A nice post by Jennie Nash inspired this blogpost, but I’ve taken her ideas in a different direction. I concur with her that it’s helpful to get out of your own head and try to see your story through other eyes. That will help you decide what to cut, what to keep, and what to rephrase.

Here are the three perspectives I suggest:

Your Characters. Take each of the major characters in your tale, get inside their heads, and think about the story from their point of view. Are there parts that don’t work? If your character is telling you, “I would never do (or say) that,” listen to that voice. It means that person is unrealistic—literally uncharacteristic. Either change the dialogue or action, or revise the character to make the voice and action plausible.

Your Readers. The audience for your story doesn’t see the story as you do. A reader has limited time, and a lot of other stories to read. The beginning of your tale really has to hook the reader, grab attention and not let go. In the middle of your story, you can’t afford many boring parts, or any parts that are both boring and lengthy. Shorten or get rid of them before your reader throws your book away. There may well be passages you love, but are unnecessary when viewed from a reader’s point of view. Delete them.

Your Editors. Don’t forget those nice folks with the eyeshades and blue pencils, the ones who decide whether to risk the publisher’s money and reputation on your story. They really don’t see your story as you do. They see every grammar and spelling mistake, every plot hole, every cliché and stereotyped character, every ambiguous phrase, every confusing description, and every character that acts out-of-character. It’s best if you see these things first and not give the editor an excuse to reject your story.

There. When you’re done, you will have viewed your story from three perspectives, much as a blueprint depicts an object using front, top, and side views so a manufacturer can understand it from multiple dimensions.

Of course, there’s a sort of fourth dimension involved here, and that’s—

You. You had the idea for the story in the first place and you wrote every word of it. What’s more, it was really you pretending to be characters, readers, and editors throughout the editing process above. It’s been all you every step of the way. When the story is published, it will have your name on it. Are you proud of it? If not, perhaps you ought to let that story sit and percolate awhile before picking it up again for further editing.

I’ll conclude with one interesting trick of perspective, one little-known fact about a peculiar optical illusion. When viewed from any angle, I’m still—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 27, 2021Permalink

Clean Fiction? What, Did it Wash its Hands?

You’ve been hearing the term ‘Clean Fiction’ and wondering what it means. That questioning mind of yours shall soon be satisfied. Or, perhaps, left even more confused.

Apparently, ‘Clean Fiction’ doesn’t require you to physically wash a book in soapy water. My bad.

The clearest definition of the term is: fiction both young adults and mature adults can enjoy.  

In these pandemic times, with parents spending more time at home with children, sometimes home-schooling them, there’s a hunger for such stories. For that reason, the Story Quest Academy has been championing the cause of clean fiction.

From a writer’s point of view, how do you write a clean story? How does such a story differ from an unclean one?

I recall reading where Robert Heinlein said writing for young adults (called ‘juveniles’ in his day) was the same as writing for adults, you just take out the sex and swearing. The dozen ‘juvenile’ novels he wrote, though dated, remain readable and exciting today.

He warned writers against talking down to teenagers. If you think they aren’t ready for deep themes, long words, mild violence, or literary symbolism, you’re underestimating them.

These days, you could even leave in some mild swear words. Today’s YA audience has heard them.

Author Allison Tebo makes some interesting points about clean fiction in this post. Writing clean fiction, she says, forces you to be a better writer. You can’t fall back on sex or swearing to hold the reader’s interest. The action, dialogue, and word choices in your story must step up to do that.

Moreover, Tebo states that clean fiction is more likely to become classic fiction than typical adult-only fiction is. By appealing to nearly all age groups, a clean story become more universal and welcoming. If it is good enough, it may well become a classic, enjoyed for generations, even centuries.

Like Tebo, I grew up reading and loving clean fiction. Nearly all the science fiction I read was clean. In fact, teenagers were perhaps the main intended audience for that genre.

My own fiction tends toward the clean side. Exceptions include my horror story, published as “Blood in the River” and later, with alterations, as “Moonset.” Ripper’s Ring contains violence teens might find upsetting, though it’s not graphic.

If you go looking for my stories, many appear in anthologies along with tales written by other authors. In general, those stories, too, are clean, with the exception of those in the horror anthology Dead Bait.

I guess you could say I’ve been writing clean fiction before it was a thing. Creating stories so clean you could wash your hands with them, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 4, 2021Permalink