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

Hurry, the Smashwords Sale is Ending

We both knew what would happen. At the beginning of July, I told you about the ½ price sale of my books over at Smashwords. These are the ones in my What Man Hath Wrought series, published by Gypsy Shadow Publishing.

You thought about buying one or two books.

Then you put it off until later.

Guess what? It’s later. The sale ends tomorrow, yes tomorrow, the 31st of July.

Ridiculous, when you think about it. $2 for a book? $1.50 for some of them.

In August, on Wednesday, they go back up to full price and you’ll hate yourself for missing an opportunity.

Why are you still reading this blog post? Click this link now and grab, for ½ price, some books by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 30, 2018Permalink

Author Interview — Julie Frost

You surfed to this site just in time. I’m about to interview author Julie Frost, who recently had a story published in The Gallery of Curiosities magazine, issue #3.

Julie Frost is the award-winning author of over forty short stories in all the speculative genres and combinations thereof. They have appeared in various venues, including Monster Hunter Files, StoryHack, the Planetary Fiction series, Tales of Ruma, and Writers of the Future. Her novel series, Pack Dynamics, is published by WordFire Press. She lives in Utah with her family—a herd of guinea pigs, three humans, a tripod calico cat, and a “kitten” who thinks she’s a warrior princess—and whines about writing, a lot, at her website.

Now for the interview:

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

Julie Frost: I wanted to be a writer in high school (SE Hinton was one of my early inspirations), but found that I never actually knew how to finish anything. So I took a 30-year hiatus (I don’t recommend this), and then started writing again when I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Spike grabbed hold of my imagination. I wrote a ton of fanfic in the Buffy, Angel, and Firefly universes, along with a few others here and there. And then I saw a call for subs from a publication that wanted humor. So I scraped the serial numbers off one of my Firefly fics by condensing the crew, swapping some sexes, and adding aliens—and that was my first “original” story. That one never sold, and you can read it for free on my LiveJournal (it’s called “Illegal Beagles”), but I wrote four other stories in that ‘verse, and all of them found homes. One, “Affairs of Dragons,” was my first sale, and another, “Give Up the Ghost,” won 2nd place in the DragonComet Awards. I plan to write more.

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

J.F.: The first science fiction novel I remember picking up on my own was The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein because the cover was just fantastic. I’d read mostly dog and horse novels before that, but this book opened up a whole world of possibilities, and in short order I was devouring Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Gordon R. Dickson, and all the others everyone grew up reading back in the 70’s and 80’s. Nowadays, I lean heavily toward urban fantasy, and Jim Butcher is my favorite of favorites. But Carrie Vaughn’s “Kitty” series, Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International (anything by Larry, really), and Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros series are also among my favorites, along with Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock and Elliott James’s Pax Arcana and David B. Coe’s Case Files of Justis Fearsson. I can’t pick a “few favorite books” because I tend toward series. That being said, Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf was and is a huge influence on me.

P.S.: In The Gallery of Curiosities, Summer 2018 edition, your story is “Doc Borden’s Hard-Luck Hoss.” Can you tell us about this story and how you came to write it?

J.F.: It’s a weird western about a post-Civil War doctor who gets bitten by a rattlesnake in the desert, and is then saved by a unicorn. It came about as a title prompt from a contest in the Codex Writer’s group. I realized I hadn’t written very many stories with unicorns (one, actually), so I decided to rectify that. The title screamed “weird west,” and the story basically wrote itself.

P.S.: What are the easiest, and the most difficult, aspects of writing for you?

J.F.: Easiest, by far, is editing once I have a draft. Getting that draft, and the shape of the story, is actually pretty difficult for me, even with an outline. But once I know what the story wants to be, I can do the wordsmithing to make it spark off the page, and dig deeper into character and theme. I also have trouble with emotions and getting them across properly—and frequently need to be told to add emotional punch to my stories. Once someone tells me it’s missing, I slap my forehead and put it in.

P.S.: From your author photo, your degree in biology, your variety of pets and bird-related interests, it’s apparent you love animals. How does that come through in your fiction? Do you typically portray animals as good, evil, or neutral?

J.F.: I would say that probably 90% of my stories have some kind of animal in them. They’re generally either the good guys (my werewolf fiction tends to fall into this category, mostly), or the source of a series of humorous accidents—but not always. I’ve got one with demon civets, and one with a plush bunny run murderously amok, and another with zombie rabbits, and another with killer robot bunnies (you might be sensing a theme here, but I actually like bunnies. Really!). My mad scientist creates a flying weasel for a dying little girl, and wackiness ensues. I wrote one story where a guy is bitten by a werewolf overnight and comes home to find his beloved Irish setter is terrified of him. In another, a group of adventurers need to leave a talking cat in a dragon’s den. I’ve got a time-traveling wizard with a weasel familiar, looking for a unicorn in the wilds of Memphis, Tennessee. My spaceship captain doesn’t like transporting live cargo, but he gets roped into all kinds of ridiculous adventures with beagles and bears and dragons and meerkats.

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

J.F.: I personally think I am exceptionally good at chasing my characters up a tree and throwing rocks at them, and getting them to the point of throwing boulders back. I want to be Jim Butcher when I grow up, so I strive for that level of OH HOLY CRAP WHAT DID YOU JUST DO, along with the emotional engagement. Whether I actually hit it or not, I will leave up to my readers.

P.S.: Werewolves and vampires figure prominently in your stories. What is it about them that intrigues you?

J.F.: With the vampires, it’s the power dynamic and what they do with it—but they don’t figure as prominently in my stories as you’d expect, since in most urban fantasy they kind of go together with the werewolves. I think I’ve used vampires all of three times in my fiction, out of over sixty shorts and two novels.

The werewolves, though… I call myself “That Werewolf Writer” because those guys grabbed me by the imagination and just won’t let go. I think it gets back to my love of animals and wondering what it would be like to be one part-time. And there’s also the fact that you can do nearly anything with them, from the wolf-man form all the way to the full-wolf form, from someone who is still them as the animal to someone who completely freaking loses it over the full moon, and all the shades and gradients between. And then there’s the family relationships to explore, and the pack structure, and how the wolf integrates with the human and makes him more (or less) than the sum of his parts.

P.S.: A large percentage of your stories feature male protagonists. What challenges have you faced with writing in a convincing way about a male lead?

J.F.: Honestly, it comes naturally—I have a harder time writing female protagonists than male ones, which is a source of considerable bemusement to people who don’t actually know me. I think it goes back to my childhood reading preferences; I loved the Hardy Boys, but Nancy Drew left me cold. Most of what I read as a kid had male leads—there are a lot of “boy and his dog” stories, but not many with girls, and I gravitated toward westerns with the horse stories, which had lots of cowboys but a dearth of cowgirls. Ditto the science fiction and fantasy I read—and it still holds true today; I prefer male protags in my recreational fiction. So when I start thinking about a story, I default to a male protag because it got wired into me from a young age.

P.S.: From your LiveJournal entries, it appears you’re working on the cover to Pack Dynamics: Phases. Is this a sequel to your 2015 novel Pack Dynamics? Please tell us about the protagonist of Phases, and when the book might be available.

J.F.: Phases is actually a pair of novellas. One (Piles of Cash and Killer Benefits) is a direct sequel to Pack Dynamics, and picks up my mad scientist Alex Jarrett and his werewolf personal assistant Megan Graham—who has been hiding her condition from him for six years—on a trip to Athens which goes disastrously badly. It swaps POVs back and forth between Alex and Megan. Funnily enough, I actually wrote this story a couple of years before Pack Dynamics, and the novel came about because I was casting around for a way to not write fanfic anymore (a long story involving a mashup of “Iron Man” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”—don’t ask, but if you haven’t seen “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” hie thee to whatever service has it streaming and watch it now), and I decided to drop those characters into that plot.

The other (In the Multitude of Mercy) is a prequel of sorts. There’s a new werewolf character in Pack Dynamics: A Price to Pay (coming soon from WordFire Press!) named Noah Emerson, who is fixated on his vengeance-obsessed alpha in a not-necessarily-healthy way, and I decided he needed his own story to explain what shaped him and why he’s sticking it out with this guy when it’s gone completely to Hades in a handbasket.

I’m waiting on a proof copy from CreateSpace as of this writing; if I’m happy with it, then I’ll pull the trigger, and it will be available in a dead tree version very soon (say, around the beginning of August), and an ebook soon after that.

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

J.F.: My other fiction weakness is angels and demons, but I have rather specific standards for what I can suspend my actual beliefs for. In my current WiP, I have taken the shoulder-angel/shoulder-demon trope and run it headfirst into the Wall of Wrong. My shoulder angel protagonist is Nachi, a Guardian Angel to serial killers, which means he gets to attempt to be the conscience of a killer—and he’s never had a single success in turning them from that path, in thousands of years. It’s… beginning to wear on him. And his current Charge is his most difficult yet, because this guy finds a grimoire with a Free!Demon!Inside!, who helps him turn simple acts of murder into works of art in exchange for help getting free from the book. Nachi is outnumbered and out-gunned, and plagued by his own self-doubts, but he has to stop this guy before he unleashes a literal Hell on Earth. Fortunately, his opposite number on the left shoulder doesn’t much care for the grimoire demon (surprise!—there are factions in Hell), but its an uneasy alliance at best.

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

Julie Frost: First advice: grow rhino skin. This business—and it is a business—can be absolutely brutal, and it seems there’s a new kerfuffle on a daily basis. Don’t be a doormat, but don’t be a whiner either. Bad reviews come with the territory; let them roll off your back and resist the urge to answer them (except in locked spaces because venting is normal). That being said, learn to take criticism with humility. If you ask for someone to give you their honest opinion, and they tell you that your baby is ugly, well… they might be right, especially in the drafting stage of a story. Listen, internalize it, and fix the issues before you send your baby out into the world—because readers and editors won’t be nearly so gentle as your betas. That being said, if you honestly disagree with the advice you’re being given, or if someone wants you to write a completely different story than what you’ve got, then you can ignore it. It’s your story. Finding the balance is the challenge, and it’s an ongoing learning curve.

Second advice: Never give up; never surrender. I won Writers of the Future in my 50’s, on my 29th entry, with a werewolf story—and Dave Farland, the coordinating judge of WotF, famously hates werewolf stories. Find that Thing that you love, and write it with all your soul. If you love what you write, then your target audience will too. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too young, too old, or too anything to be an author. The only barriers anymore are the ones you put up yourself. Set your mind and your keyboard free, and go forth and write your passion—no matter what it is.

 

Thank you, Julie. My readers can find out more about Julie and her stories at her website/blog, on Facebook, Twitter, or at her Amazon author page.

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 27, 2018Permalink

Author Interview — Donald J. Bingle

Today I launch a series of interviews with authors whose stories appear in The Gallery of Curiosities magazine, issue #3. With me today is Donald J. Bingle.

Donald J. Bingle

Donald J. Bingle is the author of Frame Shop, a mystery thriller set in a suburban writers’ group, Net Impact and Wet Work, spy thrillers which incorporate real-world conspiracy theories, GREENSWORD, a dark comedy about global warming, and Forced Conversion, a military science fiction novel set in the near future. Co-author of The Love-Haight Case Files, a paranormal legal thriller about lawyers protecting the rights of supernatural creatures in a magic-filled San Francisco. Edited the ghost anthology, Familiar Spirits. Also author of a variety of short fiction in the science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror, mystery, steampunk, romance, and comedy genres, including stories in the Dragonlance and Transformers universes and in a variety of DAW themed anthologies.

Now, here’s the interview:

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

Donald J. Bingle: I was a tournament roleplaying gamer (the world’s top-ranked classic tournament player from 1985 to 2000) and started writing tournament scenarios for others, then adventures and source materials for RPG publishers. Many of those editors also edited short fiction, so from there I branched out into short stories, including tie-in fiction for Dragonlance, BattleTech, and Transformers. Screenplays and novels were the next steps.

P.S.: Your website’s bio states you’ve written science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror, mystery, steampunk, romance, comedy, and memoirs. Out of all those, which is your favorite genre?

D.J.B.: On the novel side, almost everything I’ve written is a thriller of one stripe or another. Forced Conversion (near future military scifi thriller); Net Impact and Wet Work (spy thrillers); GREENSWORD (darkly comedic eco-thriller); Frame Shop (murder mystery thriller); The Love-Haight Case Files (urban fantasy legal thriller); ghostwritten novel I can’t talk about (political-medical thriller). So I guess that says something. On the short side, I tend more toward scifi and horror than fantasy these days—maybe because much of my stuff is rather dark.

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

D.J.B.: Replay by Ken Grimwood (my favorite time travel book); Dream Park by Niven, Barnes, and Pournelle (scifi, mystery, gaming; fantasy, and history all in one package); Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer (thoughtful scifi); The Dragonlance Chronicles by Weis and Hickman (epic fantasy done right).

P.S.: Your website identifies you as a “Writer on Demand.” Please explain what you mean by that.

D.J.B.: Because some editors from my days writing game products and stories knew that I could write fairly quickly to specifications (topic, tone, wordcount), I kind of ended up being the fallback guy for Techno Books, which packaged a lot of the themed anthologies for DAW. I wasn’t famous enough to get invited to most of those anthologies, but when the editor would come up short because someone missed a deadline or everyone wrote to the short end of the assigned range, I would get calls/emails asking me to write a story in a few days to help fill the anthology. The genre depended entirely on what the anthology was about, so I ended up doing fantasy, scifi, horror, steampunk, even comedic romance. And, of course, I ended up writing all sorts of stories I never would have written without that impetus.

The Gallery of Curiosities, Issue #3

P.S.: Your story “Gentlemanly Horrors of Mine Alone” appears in The Gallery of Curiosities issue #3. Please tell us about the story and what inspired you to write the tale.

D.J.B.: I came to write the tale because Mike Stackpole had a chain story project on his website. Each story was a fellow at an Old English Style Men’s Club regaling fellow members with his latest adventure. Having lived in the foothills of Colorado for a while and being familiar with various monsters from games like Chill, putting together a tale about a monster in Colorado was a natural fit. Of course, in order for my story to be different from all the others, I gave it a twist by making the adventure a disaster rather than a triumph and the protagonist less than a hero in his own eyes.

P.S.: What are the easiest, and the most difficult, aspects of writing for you?

D.J.B.: Selling what I write is the hardest part, which includes finding a publisher for books and stories, and getting people to read what I have published. When I was writing stories on short notice for DAW, I didn’t worry much about rejection (if the story was good, it would get published) and the anthology would be distributed to every Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Waldenbooks in the country. But, now, having had books sit at publishers for periods well in excess of a year before getting any response and having to find anthologies with the right topic, tone, and wordcount requirements for my various spec stories is tedious. I spend far more time trying to place a story, than it takes to write it in the first place.

The easiest part is coming up with ideas—I have plenty of book and story ideas I will never get around to penning. Of course, most writers do, which is why people who suggest “letting” the writer write up their nifty idea and split the proceeds 50/50 are such an aggravation.

P.S.: Many of your stories seem to be reactions against tales of extraordinary heroes. Your protagonists tend to be ordinary, average people. Is that intentional? Why do you prefer such characters?

D.J.B.: There’s nothing particularly interesting to me about superpowered, extraordinary people doing great things, but for a regular guy to do what needs to be done despite the fact he may not have the skill or ability to accomplish his goal (and is therefore risking all) is heroic, or at least brave. I hesitate at the word “heroic” because some of my protagonists are simply not good guys, which I think is a nice change of pace and more realistic.

P.S.: As the author of five books and more than fifty shorter tales, are there two or three that you’d recommend to new readers who want to get to know your style?

D.J.B.: I think my spy novel series, Net Impact and Wet Work, gives a good overview of my writing. There’s action, marital strife, bizarre conspiracies, and odd bits of information all rolled into one tale. If readers want an overview of my short stories, I’ve taken many of them and re-released them in Kindle collections of 3 to 5 stories, grouped by genre. So I’ve got Tales of Gamers and Gaming; Tales of Humorous Horror; Tales Out of Time; Grim, Fair e-Tales; Tales of an Altered Past Powered by Romance, Horror, and Steam; Not-So-Heroic Fantasy; and Shadow Realities. See my website for more detail.

P.S.: In your latest novel, Wet Work, you return to a character featured in an earlier novel, the spy Dick Thornby. Please paint a word picture of this character for us.

D.J.B.: Dick is a middle-aged, stocky, ex-Army, ex-cop with a wife and a kid and a mortgage. Everyone thinks he works as a waste-water treatment consultant, but he’s actually a spy. He does what needs to be done, but he doesn’t necessarily enjoy many aspects of his job. He’s practical, rather than idealistic, but understands it is people like him who stand between happiness and despair for an unknowing populace.

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

D.J.B.: Another ghostwriting project is probably my next novel, so can’t really talk about that. On the story side, I’ve got a notion about a quantum entanglement tale that is gestating.

P.S.: I have to ask. What’s this about being the Keeper of the World’s Largest Kazoo?

D.J.B.: In high school a friend and I started a kazoo band, The Greater Naperville Area All Kazoo Klan Band, as a lark and it grew to about thirty strong. We performed at freshman orientation, marched in local parades, and elected a Kazoo Queen. When I went to orientation at college (The University of Chicago), there was a sign up at the Student Activities Office seeking (mostly jokingly, I think) a Keeper for the World’s Largest Kazoo. You see, when the U of C was still in the Big Ten (Michigan State came in when we left), it had Big Bertha, the World’s Largest Drum, now owned by the University of Texas. When football returned to the U of C, a group of students drove to Texas and stole Big Bertha, driving out onto the field at an early game (not at half-time, just when they happened to arrive being pursued by the Chicago cops). This group, part of the Students for Violent Non-Action (yes, I got that right) decided that if Chicago was going to have football, they needed to have the World’s Largest something, so they built the world’s largest kazoo. They also had fezes made up for those parading it about at games. All that was a few years before me, so they were all gone and the Student Activities Office was pretty surprised when I applied to be the new Keeper and listed GNAMMAKB as relevant work experience. The Fez Faction appeared at sparsely attended football games, carried Big Ed about, and  played Ode to Joy whenever the team got a first down (which was not often; my sophomore year the team scored 14 points—seven in the first game and seven in the last), but we did get news coverage from The Chicago Tribune and Sports Illustrated.

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

Donald J. Bingle: Join a writers’ group. Your best friend, spouse, or mother is not going to give you honest, useful criticism. They likely don’t have the writerly experience or knowledge to be helpful in any case. Also, start your writing with short stories—you can learn a lot and try out a lot of different techniques, perspectives, and styles. Submit what you write to anthologies and magazines—it will give you exposure to the real world of writing, editing, rejection, and lousy pay. Don’t write for free (except for charity); that way lies madness.

 

Thank you, Donald. My readers can check out Donald J. Bingle’s writing at his website, on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Amazon.

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 23, 2018Permalink

Your Own Steam Elephant

The Gallery of Curiosities, issue #3, Summer 2018

I’m delighted The Gallery of Curiosities has chosen to reprint my story, “The Steam Elephant” in their Summer 2018 Issue (#3). It gave me a chance to re-read the story, and recall the fun I had writing it.

Verne’s steam elephant on its way through India

“The Steam Elephant” is my sequel to Jules Verne’s novel The Steam House. In Verne’s tale,  a British inventor constructed a steam-powered mechanical elephant (and two wheeled carriages towed behind it) on commission from an Indian rajah. This rajah died before taking possession, so ownership remained with the inventor. He took a group of British friends, a Frenchman, and several servants, on a series of adventures in the wilds of India.

My steampunk sequel picks up eleven years later. Although the original steam elephant met its end in Verne’s novel, the engineer constructed a second one in my tale. He modeled this new elephant after the African species. The group of friends gathered again, this time to go lion hunting in Africa, but found themselves drawn into the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.

Verne’s story predated automobiles and appeared long before Recreational Vehicle motorhomes, when people only knew about steam locomotives on rails. I’m sure it fascinated his readers to imagine taking their home with them while travelling. Today, millions of people do just that…but they’re restricted to travelling on roads. Verne’s elephant walked anywhere, even through shallow rivers.

Star Wars’ All Terrain Armored Transport (AT-AT)

As an engineer, I loved the idea of a quadrapod, animatronic, bio-inspired walking vehicle powered by steam. This lay well beyond the technology of the Nineteenth Century, and we’re only at the early stages of such mechanisms today. That’s why the AT-AT ground assault combat vehicles of Star Wars seem so cool. By the way, the AT-AT designers also drew inspiration from a pachyderm.

Verne described the elephant as being a ‘traction engine,’ a steam engine that pulls loads on roads or smooth ground. This term doesn’t find much use today, since internal combustion gasoline engines supplanted steam for tractors and other off-road vehicles.

Still, imagine owning such an elephant. Within its iron flanks, there’d be the water reservoir, fuel storage, firebox, boiler, and cylinders common to locomotives. Also, you’d find the massive gears and linkages necessary to move the four giant legs in a stable pattern.

Seated in your well insulated howdah on top, you’d rotate the trunk down to pump in water from a river. Then you’d swivel the trunk up, start the engine, sound a blast from its trumpeting whistle, and watch steam and smoke belch from the trunk. When you pushed a lever, your elephant would plod forward on its ponderous legs over any type of flat ground or shallow water. Roads? Where we’re clomping, we don’t need roads.

Perhaps after ten minutes of sweating through that, you’d retreat to one of the towed carriages and let someone else drive the elephant while you sipped wine and played whist.

I’ll take two of those, please. In a way, I did. I wrote about one in another story, “Rallying Cry.”

Too bad you can’t buy your own steam-powered, mechanical elephant vehicle. You could try to build one for several thousand dollars. Or, the next best thing, you could lay down just $3.00 and get a copy of The Gallery of Curiosities magazine, issue #3, and read “The Steam Elephant” by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 22, 2018Permalink

Write Like Mozart Composed

No way, you’re thinking. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a genius, a child prodigy, a composer whose fame will endure forever. There’s no way you could write fiction one eighth as well as he composed music.

Mozart

Maybe not, but I’m suggesting you could aim for that end, strive to emulate his method. To the extent you can do that, you might well end up writing fiction beyond your current abilities.

How did Mozart compose music? He said, “I write music as a sow piddles,” which speaks to how naturally it was for him, but gives no hint of method. There is evidence he used sketches and did his main composing at a keyboard, but it’s also clear he had an amazing memory.

A scene from the 1984 movie Amadeus provides a hint of how he might have composed. I know it’s fiction, a movie, but it’s based on reality. I’ve long admired the scene; you can see it on YouTube, though you should watch the whole film.

In that scene, Mozart is gravely ill, bedridden, too weak to write. With the assistance of rival composer Antonio Salieri, he’s trying to compose the Confutatis movement of the Requiem in D minor. While Mozart describes, and sings, the various parts, Salieri scribbles as fast as he can. Repeatedly, Mozart asks, “Have you got it?” and Salieri keeps saying, “You’re going too fast.” In the background, the audience hears an orchestra and choir performing the fast-developing piece.

Mozart seems to be conveying a piece already fully formed in his mind. His task seems not to create or invent, but to capture and document. Speed is of the essence to him, not because he will forget any part of the piece, but because his health is failing and he’s running out of time.

One could surmise his entire composing career might have gone at a breakneck pace, even during his healthy times. He only lived to age thirty five, and it seems as if he were born with a century of music in his mind, but permitted only a third of that time to document it for others.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine if that were also true for you. What would it be like to have short stories, novels, and novellas already finished in your mind, every word clear and instantly retrievable? You don’t face a quality problem, for all those tales are perfect in structure, irresistible to readers. Nor do you have to struggle to invent characters, plots, or settings, let alone agonize over word choices or sentence formations. That’s all done.

Your only difficulty is writing them all down. You only need one draft—no editing—but there are too many stories. You have three lifetime’s worth of tales to scribble, but your hands and fingers will only last a single lifetime.

That was an enjoyable daydream, wasn’t it? However, you’re no Mozart, and neither am I. We toil away on draft after draft. The stories in our minds are but half-glimpsed, ghostly figments of perfect tales, and our attempts to recreate them in text are pitifully botched versions of those images. Our lifetimes of writing are spent slowly learning and honing the aspects Mozart found trivial.

At least we can envision what it might be like to be Mozart. If we can envision that, we can strive toward it, work to approach closer to it. It seems to me there are three aspects of Mozart’s abilities to work on: (1) attaining complete works in your mind, (2) ensuring those visions are in final form, and (3) conveying the vision to text rapidly.

Here are some exercises to develop each aspect:

  • 1A. Do as much story planning as you can—setting details, character traits and appearances, major plot points—before writing anything down.
  • 1B. Get the next sentence fully formed in your minds, and memorize it, before writing it down.
  • 2A. Practice editing a sentence at a time in your mind, trying various word substitutions, word orders, and structures, before writing the sentence down.
  • 2B. Work on limiting the number of drafts you go through before declaring a story done.
  • 3A. Participate in NANOWRIMO, and write a novel of at least 50,000 words during only the month of November.
  • 3B. Try writing software such as Write or Die or Flowstate, word processors that penalize you for getting distracted while writing.

I’m not guaranteeing these exercises will enable you to produce stories on par with Mozart’s music. Still, what if they made you half as good? Even a quarter as good? Writing stories one eighth as good as Mozart’s musical pieces is a lofty goal for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 15, 2018Permalink

About All That Money…

You’ve decided to become a best-selling author, and you’re wondering when the millions of dollars will start flowing into your account. Will it be all at once, before you’ve written Chapter One, or a few million at a time over the weeks that follow? It’s important because you’re itching to buy that limo and mansion right now.

The author in his vault

If I were you, I’d hold off on purchasing the car and house, at least until you’re done reading this blog post. Let’s discuss the methods by which publishers pay authors.

Flat Fee

As Chuck Sambuchino discusses, this is when the publisher pays a fee to the author up front. It’s more common with short stories than with novels. The author gets that amount regardless of how well or poorly the book sells. It’s the simplest payment method, but it entails some risk for the publisher. If an anthology publisher pays a flat fee for each story and the book doesn’t sell enough copies to cover those fees, the publisher loses money.

Royalties

These are the opposite of the flat fee method; the publisher pays royalties based on how well the book sells. The contract will specify a royalty in terms of a percentage of each book’s price. These payments arrive periodically, often quarterly or semiannually.

You might be wondering about that term ‘royalties.’ According to Jean Murray, it dates from the Middle Ages when the King owned all land in his realm. If you wanted to mine for gold or silver, you had to pay the King for the right to dig these precious metals from his royal ground. They started calling that payment a ‘royalty’—a payment made to the gold’s true owner for the right to mine it. In essence, it’s the same thing today. You’re the king; the story is your gold; and the publisher is paying you a royalty for the right to ‘mine’ it.

Amazon Kindle Royalties

In 2015, Amazon introduced an interesting royalty calculation method for their Kindle Unlimited subscription service. Rather than making royalty payments on a percentage of book sales, they base payments on how many pages the purchasers read. Although controversial at first, there’s been some run time on this now and I think authors are getting used to it. It incentivizes authors to write books readers will read to the end.

Advance

This is short for ‘advance against royalties.’ The publisher ‘advances’ you a fixed amount up front, before the book starts selling. According to Morris Rosenthal, the purpose of the advance is to support you (the author) financially until your books starts selling. It’s not a flat fee, though; it comes out of royalties you haven’t earned yet.

Let’s say your contract specifies royalties of 15% on a book selling for $10. That means you’ll get $1.50 for each book sold. If the publisher gives you a $1500 advance, then for the first 1000 copies sold, you’ll get no royalties since the publisher advanced you that money already. Starting with the 1001st copy, you’ll start earning royalties.

As discussed by Valerie Peterson in this post, when the publisher sells that 1000th copy of the book (in my example), it is said to have “earned out.” That’s a happy time for both you and the publisher. Up until then, the publisher took a risk of having paid you an excessive advance. After that point, you’ll start earning royalties on every book sold.

A post by Tom Chmielewski mentions how some publishers have started paying the advance in installments. They might pay one-third when you sign the contract, one-third when they accept the book, and one-third when they publish the book. Or they might pay half at signing and half at acceptance.

 

I congratulate you on your decision to become a best-selling author, but I still suggest you put off those stretch limo and island mansion plans, at least until the first payment lands in your account. Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor; I’m just—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 8, 2018Permalink

What? My Books are Half Price?

The folks at Smashwords are nice, but they’ve gone too far now. They’ve priced my entire What Man Hath Wrought series at half price for the entire month of July.

I’ve checked, and it’s true. You can get After the Martians, Ripper’s Ring, Time’s Deformèd Hand, The Cometeers, To Be First and Wheels of Heaven, Rallying Cry and Last Vessel of Atlantis, A Tale More True, Against All Gods, Leonardo’s Lion, and Alexander’s Odyssey for a measly $2 each.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, there’s more. You can grab The Six Hundred Dollar Man, A Steampunk Carol, Within Victorian Mists, and The Wind-Sphere Ship for just $1.50 each.

 

 

 

 

Wait a minute [grabs calculator], that means you can get the entire collection (all 14 books—that’s 16 stories) for $26. I guess my financial misfortune is your summer reading opportunity.

This time, there’s no need for coupon numbers or passwords or promo codes. None of that. Just go to Smashwords and you’ll see the slashed-in-half prices are already marked. Simply click on my books and load ‘em in your shopping cart.

The What Man Hath Wrought series features relatable characters grappling with new technology in a historical setting. These alternate history stories explore what might have been. They’ll make you think about how you struggle with new gadgets today.

The Smashwords ½-price sale runs through July 31, but you know what a procrastinator you are. You’d better buy the books now before you’re caught up in summer’s many distractions.

What an inexpensive way to immerse yourself in the remarkable and adventurous world of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 1, 2018Permalink