Category Archives: Short Stories

The Truth About “A Tale More True”

Gypsy Shadow Publishing just launched my newest story, “A Tale More True” and I’m excited about it. Here’s the blurb:

History’s greatest liar, a colossal clockwork spring, a fantastic trip to the Moon…in 1769. Read it, but don’t expect truth.

What made me write a clockpunk alternate history story about an 18th Century trip to the moon? As both of my many fans know, I’m a great admirer of Jules Verne, who wrote a classic tale called From the Earth to the Moon.

One day I was searching the web about fictional trips to the moon and discovered Verne was a bit of a latecomer to that topic. Here are some of his predecessors, and the methods they used to get their characters to the moon, according to this website:

ws-images-reading-09-jan-im01-lucian-true-story-tm• Lucian of Samosata, True History, 2nd Century A.D. Carried to the moon by a waterspout/whirlwind, and Icaromenippus, 2nd Century A.D. Flew to the moon in an aerial carriage.
• Johannes Kepler, The Dream, 1634. Transported to the moon by aerial demons.
• Bishop Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone, 1638. Pulled to the moon godwin001by trained geese.
• Cyrano de Bergerac, Comic History of Estates and Empires of the Moon, 1650. Launched to the moon by firecrackers.
• Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator, 1705. Rode an ‘engine’ called The Consolidator.
• Vasily Kevshin, Newest Voyage, 1784. Flew to moon in a self-constructed flying apparatus.
• Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Land of Acephals, 1824. Flew in a balloon.
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, 1835. Flew in a balloon equipped with an air compressor.

I was struck by the fact that no one had written about going to the moon using spring power. During the 1600s and 1700s, they knew about the energy-storage properties of springs, the driving force in most clocks, so I thought someone should write that story.

During the research I also happened upon the interesting historical figure, Baron Hieronymus Carl Friedrich von Münchhausen, well known for his fanciful fibs, including tall tales about making two trips to the moon. In one trip he climbed a tall beanstalk, and in the second a hurricane lifted his ship up to the moon. I wondered if a rival of the Baron might be upset by these lies and might set about to prove Münchhausen wrong.

That’s how “A Tale More True” was born.

Subsequently I happened upon this website, and learned that David Russen had written A Voyage to the Moon in 1703, in which a giant spring is used to reach the moon. Oh, well, I wasn’t the first after all!

For you engineers and realists out there, yes, I know a human would not survive the acceleration of being ‘sprung’ to Earth’s escape velocity. However, it might be possible to construct a huge spring within a cylinder, have the spring drawn down in compression, draw a near vacuum in the cylinder, and launch a solid, unmanned projectile to escape velocity. Why you’d want to do that, I have no idea, but it might be possible.

Still, it’s fun to imagine someone building a giant spring in 1769 and travelling to the moon two centuries early. And as long as I was changing history anyway, I figured I’d also change the moon. In most of those early space-travel stories, (except Verne’s), the moon was inhabited. So why not populate the moon in my story?

And, though it’s outside my normal line, why not make the story humorous?

Anyway, enough said. The book has been sprung upon an unsuspecting world, and is available at Gypsy Shadow Publishing, Amazon, Smashwords, and other outlets as well. You’ll enjoy it, thinks—

                                                           Poseidon’s Scribe

June 9, 2013Permalink

A Path Not Taken

Want to be a published author?  Curious about the best path to take?  In this post, I’m going to suggest you not do what I did, and instead I’ll offer a short cut.

which-way-29941281444641fqVCFirst let me retrace my steps for you.  In the mid-1980s, I had a great idea for a story.  Way too big for a short story, this had to be a novel.  I’d never thought of being a writer, and the notion scared me a bit, but the idea wouldn’t let go.  I studied writing—read books about writing, joined a writer’s group, went to writer’s conferences, joined a critique group.  And began writing.

I stayed enthusiastic about my novel, but only about the writing of it, the first, second and third drafts.  The more I wrote and rewrote, the more scared I got of the next phase, finding an agent and sending my novel out.

In 1999, I took a brief break and wrote a short story called “Target Practice” which I submitted, and it got accepted in the anthology Lower than the Angels by Lite Circle Books.  That should have been a clue I was on the wrong path, but I went back to working on the novel.

Around 2004 or 2005, I abandoned that first great idea novel (yes, after 20 years of work!), and started a different novel.

In 2006, with the second novel about one quarter finished, I resumed writing short stories.  This time I got serious about actually submitting them.  After many rejections, I started getting published.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see where I went wrong.  I should have started with short stories and worked my way up to novels.  It’s distressing to think of the time I wasted, and how much earlier I might have gotten stories in print.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the two decades of work on a now-abandoned novel was time well spent.  One could claim those years contained my 10,000 hours, the time required to develop genius-level capability.  It’s also true that my first novel might have actually gotten published had I bothered to submit it, and might have done well.

Certainly there are cases of authors getting their first novel published and seeing it become a best-seller.  But these are rare enough that I believe a better strategy for most writers is to start with short stories.  Crawling should precede walking for most people.  That method allows you to become familiar, more quickly, with the whole writing-submitting-publishing-marketing process end to end.

There you have it.  Advice, as I say at the top of my web page, straight from Mount Olympus.  Please don’t do what I did; don’t waste twenty years on a low-percentage strategy.  Don’t follow that first path trod by—

                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe

March 17, 2013Permalink

Two New Stories!

I’m pretty excited!  Gypsy Shadow Publishing has just put out two of my steampunk stories at the same time.

Let’s start with “A Steampunk Carol.”  That stuffy Victorian inventor, Stanton Wardgrave, is back again, eight years after inventing holograms and meeting the American Josephine Boulton…Within Victorian Mists.  Married now, with a son and daughter, he’s dealing with rather too much balderdash and poppycock this Christmas Eve.  Conversing with his dead father?  Expecting three visitors?  It all seems so very Dickensian.  But he knows he’s not at all like that Ebenezer Scrooge fellow…is he?  What, this story asks, would Christmas be without a bit of steampunk in it?  This story (published in time for the holidays…hint!) is available here.

The other story is “The Six Hundred Dollar Man.”  Wait, is that a smokestack over his right shoulder?  What’s with his left hand?  Sonny Houston, cowpoke.  A man barely alive.  “I can rebuild him, make him the first steam-powered man.  A darn sight better than before. Better, faster, and a heap stronger, too. I’ve got the know-how.”  A century before any bionic man, a doctor in the Wyoming Territory attached steam powered legs and an arm to a man trampled in a stampede.  Get ready, Pardner, for a rip-roarin’ steampunk adventure!  This story is available here.

I’m proud of these two stories and pleased to bring them to you, thanks to the great folks at Gypsy Shadow.  Today’s indeed a great day for—

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

November 22, 2012Permalink

Romancing the Short Story

Bet you didn’t expect me to write a blog entry on writing romance short stories, did you?  Well, for one thing, if you desire to become an author, you should learn to write about anything, even topics or genres you know little about or have little interest in.  You never know what you’ll end up being good at.

Second, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the romance genre has a vast and insatiable readership.  Perhaps not so much in the short story length as in the novel length, but again, what if you’ve got a potentially great romance writer inside you, but you never try the genre to find out?

And, it turns out I have written a couple of short story romances.  “Within Victorian Mists” is a steampunk romance, and “Against All Gods” is a romance story set in Ancient Greece.  So I am nominally qualified to discuss the topic.

To figure out what’s special or different about romance short stories, let’s start with basics.  Any fictional story must have certain elements, including character, plot, conflict, setting, style, and perhaps theme.  We’ll dispense with the last three by saying that romance stories can take place in just about any setting, be written in any style, and can explore just about any theme.

Romance stories are character-driven.  The characters must be intriguing and complex.  The point-of-view character should have aspects with which readers can identify and empathize.

The plot is the emerging love between the characters.  Choose your events such that they enable the characters’ love to either develop, or be tested, or both.

The conflict is the protagonist’s struggle to attain love itself, not the sexual act or the fleeting emotions of love, but the deep and shared realization that the two major characters cannot live without each other.

In a short story, you’re going to have to be choosy.  It’s very difficult, in just 1000 to 10,000 words, to encompass the typical progression of a love story in its entirety, from the first meeting, through the burgeoning attraction, through the testing or challenge, to the final realization of love.  There’s a natural pace to the process of falling in love, and the short story length doesn’t fit that pace as well as the novel length does.

Consider selecting one vignette, one emotion-charged event of a larger love story, and leave the earlier parts as backstory, and just hint at the later events.  To explain what I mean, let’s consider what Christie Craig and Faye Hughes describe as the plot points of a romance story, the events that sum up to the plot arc:

  • Introduction/meeting
  • First acknowledgement of attraction
  • First acknowledgement of emotional commitment
  • Dark moment (what I’d call a test of love’s strength)
  • Resolution

Your short story could consist of just one of those events, and hint at the rest.  Charge your story with emotion, and ensure the protagonist experiences an internal change in the direction of love, and that could be sufficient.  It might be all you can manage within a short story format.

Have you written a romance short story?  Submitted it for publication?  Leave a comment and let me know what happened.  When you began writing did you ever think you’d write a romance? No?  Neither did—

                                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

 

November 11, 2012Permalink