books - Steven R. Southard (Poseidon's Scribe)

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Evolution of Your Book

As you write it, your book will evolve. Think of this process as a scientist thinks of an organic species.

The scientific theory of evolution holds that genetic variations within individual members of a species produce an organism slightly different from its parent or parents. The differences allow it to fit into its environment better, or worse, or with no change, in comparison with its ancestors. Those organisms less able to fit do not survive. Those that fit better, do.

Further complicating the process, the environment changes too. Usually this occurs at a much slower rate than the generational, genetic changes within a species, but sometimes the environment alters in sudden and catastrophic ways.

How is this like the book you’re writing? Your book begins as an idea, amoeba-like, single-celled, floating in the nourishing sea of your mind. That sea not only feeds the new-born amoeba-book, it adds cells, adds complexity in a benevolent, parental way.

Soon that environment changes. Your fledgling book idea doesn’t swim alone in your mind-sea. Other book ideas compete for food there. Any given book idea jostles against others while you probe and examine each one, scrutinizing them all for weaknesses.

Your book then grows more complex and becomes a fish with internal structures. Physically, a few pages of notes. It’s survived the rough-and-tumble of competition with other book ideas to adopt this new form.

As you create early drafts, your book becomes an amphibian. A manuscript, though rough in form. Time for it to emerge into a new and harsher environment. You push your book up to the light, to crawl onto the beach of criticism where it will encounter a critique group or a beta reader.

A cruel life awaits your book as it creeps about in this unfamiliar world. Editor-predators lurk there, ready to detect weak spots and pounce. If genetic variations (revisions) prove favorable, your book adapts, becomes more reptilian, fits in with the environment by surviving encounters with predators.

Your book continues to evolve during a long period of revision. It becomes strong, lean, and complex, with few remaining weaknesses. A mighty and fearsome creature, it rules its world.

A meteor strikes.

You got the book published. The environment explodes into a chaotic new form. No longer a gigantic dinosaur, striding unchallenged, your book is a tiny mammal, a mouse scurrying about, competing for readers against innumerable other creatures.

These readers provide the sustenance your book needs—sales. But some readers become critics. A few of those critics treat your book well. Many other critics claw, slash, and gnaw at it.

Many books cannot adapt to this treatment and die out. Others manage to survive, despite the adverse criticism. Published in text form, your book may evolve in new ways. It can take the form of an audiobook. It can be adapted into a play, a movie, a TV show, a graphic novel, a comic book, a video game, etc.

Adapted and evolved to survive in various environments, your book stands erect, spreads throughout the world, and endures.

I wish you luck as you help your book along its evolutionary path. May it survive many epochs. I’m hoping the same success awaits books by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 17, 2022Poseidon's ScribePermalink

National Read a Book Day

Tomorrow, September 6^th, is National Read a Book Day. Sort of snuck up on you, didn’t it? It coincides with Labor Day this year. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know how to celebrate it.

If you’re curious about the origins of National Read a Book Day, join the club. Nobody seems to know who created it, or when. If you know those details, don’t tell me. I prefer they remain a mystery.

In honor of this fine holiday, I’ve put together an official history of books. Well, let’s call it an abridged, official history of books. In the interest of space, I could only include the most important milestones. Here it is:

What’s the best way to celebrate National Read a Book Day? After thinking about it for a while, I’ve got a suggestion—read a book. In fact, you might glean some ideas about which books to read from my History of Books above.

I believe you’ll enjoy National Read a Book Day. Why do I believe that? Because the Number One fan of that holiday is—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 5, 2021Poseidon's ScribePermalink

That Bookshelf Behind You

On TV these days, we’re seeing the insides of a lot of people’s homes. Particularly bookshelves. If you’re an expert being interviewed by the media, it’s important to have an impressive bookshelf as backdrop behind you.

Ah, but what is an ‘impressive’ bookshelf? Let’s explore that today, so you can prepare for your next Skype call from a TV network.

A portion of Poseidon’s Scribe’s bookshelf

I’m not that impressed by bookshelves arranged for show. If it looks like the books sit there for years without being read, that indicates a shelf intended to dazzle others, not to serve the owner.

A useful home bookshelf should have a sense of chaos, of disorder, with some books leaning, and perhaps others left horizontal. That indicates a reverence for books as things to be read, not as props to be displayed.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne gives Captain Nemo a library aboard the Nautilus intended both to impress Professor Aronnax (and thus, the reader) and to convey a sense of frequent use by an eclectic mind.

“Tall pieces of furniture, made of black rosewood inlaid with copper, contained in their deep shelves a vast number of books uniformly bound…works of science, ethics, literature, in many languages, were in abundance…And, strange to say, these books were not grouped according to the languages they were written in, and the resultant mixture suggested that the captain could read fluently whatever books came to hand, regardless of language.”

(Well, I do have one quibble, Captain Nemo. If the Nautilus takes an angle or encounters rough seas on the surface, most of your books will fall to the floor. Bookshelves aboard the submarines I’ve seen always include moveable restraining bars to keep books in place.)

Cover image for *20,000 Leagues Remembered*

This seems a good moment to mention that both I and Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing are co-editing an upcoming anthology titled 20,000 Leagues Remembered, a collection of short stories intended as a sesquicentennial tribute to Jules Verne’s novel. Submit your own story here.

Returning to the topic of bookshelves, remember—they’re meant to be used, not just seen. If a TV network calls you for a video interview, you’d like to be known as a person who reads, not just owns, books.

If you work for a news station and want to interview an expert on the use of bookshelves as background, or just desire to interview an interesting author, call me and ask for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 19, 2020Poseidon's ScribePermalink

8 Reasons to Comment on Books

Did you just finish reading a book? Congratulations! But your work’s not done. Consider leaving a comment about that book. Let’s discuss why.

We’re in the Age of the Internet now and everything’s interactive. That includes reading books. These days, businesses thrive or fail based on comments left by customers. The writing biz is no different.

Still, I understand why you don’t often comment on books. You’re busy and have many other things to do. There is some effort involved in leaving a comment and it just doesn’t seem worthwhile. I get that.

Consider, though, that you made time in your schedule to read the book. It affected you in some way, good or bad. What if I could give you a good reason to take 2-5 minutes to leave a comment about that book you read?

I’ll do better than that. I’ll give you eight reasons:

It’s easy. Just go to the site where you bought the book, or to Goodreads.com, and leave a comment. It can be brief, but it’s best to be specific about what you liked or didn’t like.
You can. For the first time in history, you can easily leave impactful comments. Before the Internet, you might write a book review for school, an analytical essay in a professional journal, or tell your friends. Most of these actions didn’t matter much to the book’s sales.
Your comment matters. It affects whether other people buy the book. Readers sometimes base purchasing decisions on others’ comments.
You already rate other businesses. These days, companies are always asking to be rated. Authors can’t really do that directly, since they don’t know who’s buying their books; they can’t reach their individual customers.
Your comment influences the book’s promotion. The number of comments and the average number of stars go into website algorithms that cause the book to appear on lists like “You might also be interested in…”
You might connect with the author (if living). Many authors welcome personal contact with fans and exchange correspondence with them. Even some deceased authors have active fan clubs you can join.
Even negative comments help. The author (if still active) will learn what doesn’t work and will strive to correct weaknesses in subsequent books.
Things improve through feedback loops. With tight and near-instant feedback loops, businesses (including writers) can hone their business to better please customers (including readers).

I do have some caveats to think about before leaving a comment. If you’re a friend of the author, consider how and whether your comment might affect that friendship. Also, if you are an author, don’t comment on your own books, and don’t get into flame wars with those who leave negative comments. No good can come from that.

To sum up, consider commenting on the books you read. Make it a new habit: read a book, leave a comment. Every comment helps. That’s useful feedback from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 1, 2019Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Books Aren’t Clutter

Is your place crammed with boxes and bins, your closet overflowing with junk, your bookshelf sagging under too many books, your table piled with stuff? It’s time you de-cluttered using the KonMari method of Marie Kondo. Your living space will be pristine and sparking joy in less time than—

Hold on, there, Captain Shipshape. Did you say bookshelf? Loaded with too many books? There ain’t no such thing as ‘too many books.’ The universe sheds a tear whenever those three words appear in that order.

An uncluttered entryway, courtesy of Pixabay.com

While you’re busy disposing of joyless junk and about to trash that book in your hand, let me tell you something about books. Books magically transport you to a different place and time. Books mysteriously relocate you into someone else’s mind. Those marvelous vehicles of paper, ink, cardboard and glue convey you in comfort to distant lands. They leave you inspired, horrified, downhearted, fuming, or ecstatic.

And you were about to take that mystical, wonderful book and dispose of it? Listen up, O Knight of Neatness, there’s an escape clause in the Rules of Organizing, an allowed exception to KonMari, and it’s this: books aren’t clutter.

I mean no disrespect toward Ms. Kondo. I like a tidy place. But books get a waiver, a pass, and a permanent exemption from all Decrees of Decluttering. By definition, books spark joy. They are cheap, compact, life-long joy-sparking machines.

Inspired by this article in Independent, I’m here to tell you there ought to be books in every room of your place. No matter where they are, they’re never out of place.

You finally got your son to clean up his room? Well, almost. Some of his books didn’t make it to the shelf? That’s okay. His room now counts as clean.

Company is coming over, so you dusted and scrubbed until everything’s perfect? Oops. You left an opened book on that coffee table, and a couple more on the arm of your couch. Who cares? That room is now ready for visitors.

This isn’t about impressing others. It’s not some contest about personal library size or literary sophistication. Who cares what others think? It’s about the joy your books spark in you.

So, by all means, toss the trash, eject the joyless, rid your place of rubbish. Transform your pad into a shining Shinto-inspired shrine of order. But leave the books alone, especially—oh, most especially—those written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 25, 2019Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Secrets of the Past

Is it possible that some amazing things happened in historical times, but never made it in the history books? Today I’ll discuss the subgenre of fiction known as secret histories.

Wikipedia’s entry provides a good definition: “A secret history (or shadow history) is a revisionist interpretation of either fictional or real (or known) history which is claimed to have been deliberately suppressed, forgotten, or ignored by established scholars. Secret history is also used to describe a type or genre of fiction which portrays a substantially different motivation or backstory from established historical events.”

With secret histories the author can deviate from actual history as far as she’d like, but she must return things to status quo or else explain why historical accounts don’t align with her story.

For this reason, secret histories are not to be classified as alternate histories (as I mistakenly did here. There is no permanent altering of history. Rather the world returns to the one we know. The thrill for the reader is seeing how close the world came to actually changing in some dramatic way.

Secret histories work well as thriller stories with assassins or spies, since they work in secret anyway. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle are two examples.

I’ve written secret histories myself, but my stories involve technology, not spies or assassins. In each one I leave it to the reader to speculate how much further ahead we’d be if some inventions had occurred earlier.

In “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” an inventor creates a submarine in China in 200 B.C. There are obscure references asserting that something of that sort actually happened, and those references inspired my story. The tale ends in a way that explains why more submarines weren’t made as a result of this invention.

My story “The Steam Elephant” (which appeared in Steampunk Tales magazine) is a secret history in which a traveling group of Britons and one Frenchman are enjoying a safari from the vantage of a steam-powered elephant invited by one of the Brits. They get caught up in the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. This is intended as a sequel to the two books of Jules Verne’s Steam House series.

In “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” Heron of Alexandria takes his simple steam-powered toy and uses it to power a ship. If there had been a steamship in the 1st Century A.D., it boggles the mind to think we could have had the Industrial Revolution seventeen hundred years early and skipped the Dark Ages.

Another secret history is “Leonardo’s Lion” which answers what happened to the mechanical clockwork lion built by Leonardo da Vinci in 1515. In the story, humanity comes very close to seeing all of da Vinci’s designs made real, which would have advanced science and engineering by centuries.

I’d categorize “The Six Hundred Dollar Man” as secret history too, when a man fits steam-powered limbs on another man who’d been injured in a stampede. The story takes place in 1870 in Wyoming and it’s pretty clear by the story’s end why that technology didn’t catch on.

“Rallying Cry” is a tale about a young man who learns there have been secret high-technology regiments and brigades in wars going back at least to World War I. Members of these teams cannot reveal their group’s existence, so it fits the secret history genre.

In “Wheels of Heaven” I take what is factually known about the Antikythera Mechanism, and weave a fictional tale to explain it.

As you can see, I like writing in this sub-genre. Imagine something interesting and imaginative happened in history, write about it, then tie up all the loose ends so that our modern historical accounts remain unchanged. Leave the reader wondering if the story could have really happened. History that might have been, courtesy of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 7, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink

What a Disaster!

Today I’m exploring the world of disaster fiction. There are many, many stories dealing with disasters, from local misadventures to world-wide calamities. I’ll discuss frequently occurring themes in disaster fiction, as well as the reasons people read it. That might help you decide if you want to write such a tale.

First, no disaster story is truly about the disaster. If you want to write about disasters, try non-fiction. As I’ve said before, fiction is about the human condition, so your disaster story is really about the characters, their attempts to cope with the disaster, and how they grow or change as a result.

I’ll make a distinction between disaster stories and post-apocalyptic stories. In the latter, the disaster has already occurred and people are trying to handle the aftermath. In the former, the disaster occurs during the story. I’ll discuss post-apocalyptic fiction in a future blog post.

Types

Though disaster stories are about people, we can still classify them by the type of disaster that occurs, and there are plenty to choose from. You might think all the best disasters have been taken already and the reading public won’t go for one more disaster novel. You’d be wrong; since the stories are about people, there are always infinitely more stories to write.

Disasters can be natural, as with floods or tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, other significant storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme climate change, asteroid or comet collisions, etc.

The disaster could be an accident, such as a shipwreck, airplane crash, train wreck, industrial accident, etc. A car crash probably wouldn’t count, since the disaster really should involve a large number of people.

There are other disasters that aren’t natural, and aren’t really accidents either. Let’s call them calamities, and separate them into plausible and less-plausible scenarios. The plausible ones include pandemics, terrorist attacks, major wars, economic collapse, and loss of electricity.

The less-plausible calamities (my own risk assessment; yours might differ) include: alien invasion, uncontrolled release of technology (such as nanotechnology, robot uprising, creation of a black hole, creation of a super-disease or super-creature, etc.), zombie apocalypse, “return” of vampires or werewolves, and attacks by menacing (usually gigantic) animals.

Themes

You’ll find some common themes in disaster stories. Here’s a partial list.

• Despite how far humans have progressed, we need reminding we are small and weak creatures in a big, dangerous universe.
• As disaster looms, people will react differently, going through the Kübler-Ross ‘Five Stages of Grief’ at different rates.
• A large-scale disaster will collapse the normal societal structure, and other structures will form.
• A disaster brings together strangers who must form a team with a common purpose, such as survival.
• A main character must overcome a personal fear or other psychological flaw and rise to the situation.
• A former leader cannot cope with the disaster; a new and unlikely leader must take charge.
• Often the protagonist’s main goal is either survival (of a group) or rescue of others.
• There are good and bad human reactions to disasters, and the characters who react badly often (though not always) meet a bad end. For example, preparation is better than assuming an unchanging future; clear thinking is better than panic, teamwork is better than uncaring self-centeredness; natural leadership is better than using a chaotic situation to claim power; focusing on the goal is more productive than blaming or finding fault.

Purpose

Why do people read disaster stories? These are among the reasons:

• It’s a chance to “experience” the disaster in a safe way, without having to endure it for real.
• The stories can be taken as metaphors for how we can deal with the smaller-scale mishaps of daily life.
• The tales can be metaphors for some perceived societal defect, as in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
• The stories offer lessons in preparation as old as the ant & grasshopper fable.

Conclusion

I would classify only one of my stories as a true disaster tale. “The Finality” appeared in the anthology 2012 AD by Severed Press. In it, a scientist discovers that time itself is coming to an end, not just on Earth but throughout the universe, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But just maybe the Mayans were trying to tell us something about that.

May all your disasters be the written kind; that’s the hope of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 30, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The Trick Is…

Remember the TV show ‘Cosmos?’ No, not the new one starring Neil deGrasse Tyson (though I enjoyed that too). I mean the original Cosmos, starring Carl Sagan. There’s a brief part of one episode that’s stuck in my mind for all the decades since that show first aired.

You can see the episode here and the part I recalled is from time 41:45 to 42:30.

In the clip, Carl Sagan is standing in a library. He says, if you read one book a week, over a normal human lifespan you can read only a few thousand books. (50 books per year times 70 years would be 3500 books.) He then paces off a distance across some library shelves to indicate that many books.

After remarking on how that’s only a tenth of a percent of the content of a library, he then says, “The trick is to know which books to read.”

That’s it. No follow-up. He goes on to discuss other things.

Thanks, Dr. Sagan, for clearing up that mystery of the universe.

How about telling us which books? Is there a list somewhere? Don’t just leave us with “the trick is…” without solving it for us!

Okay, okay. I do really like Carl Sagan, and loved the show. And I get what he was saying. His main message is that our lives are too short to permit soaking up all of human knowledge. As you choose books to read, go in with the understanding that you ain’t gonna read ‘em all.

Moreover, there can’t be one right answer to the question of which books to read. There are billions and billions of answers. (Yes, I had to say that.)

But allow me to take up Dr. Sagan’s challenge, and to set up some criteria for selecting books to read, given that you can’t read ‘em all. Here’s my answer to “which books to read:”

Read books you think you’ll enjoy. This is the most important criteria, since if you don’t like reading, you’ll stop. You’ll never come close to reading a book a week for life.

Read some classics, on occasion. They represent the greatest wisdom of the ages, and they have persisted because their value and relevance is timeless.

Read way outside your interest area, on occasion. This helps broaden your knowledge, and you never know when one such book might spark a new passion for you. Try to eventually cover the whole Dewey Decimal System, and all fiction genres.

Read both fiction and non-fiction. You can choose the percentage of each according to your preferences, but I think there’s value in both.

Read books by authors you enjoy, and also give different authors a chance. There’s a strong temptation to keep reading books by the same author. After all, you liked the previous one; chances are you’ll like the next one. That’s fine, but it’s okay to read books by authors who are new to you, every once in a while.

Give each book you select a chance, but don’t be afraid to abandon it. Read past page one; often the value of a book won’t become apparent until later. However, if you’re well into the book and getting nothing out of it, stop and get another. Your lifespan is too limited and there are too many better books for you to slog through reading a bad one.

That’s it, my attempt to respond to Dr. Sagan’s challenge to all of us, to figure out which books to read. They may not be the best criteria in the cosmos, but they’re good enough for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 9, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink

That’s Classic!

Today’s lesson is: how to write a book that becomes known as a classic. Good news—we can identify some attributes of classic literature. Bad news—no book becomes a classic in the author’s lifetime, so you won’t find out if your book made the list until after you’ve been dead awhile.

I’ve blogged before about the attributes of good, quality short stories, but today’s question is about the few books that attain true classic status. These must pass a more stringent test.

Easy, but Unsatisfying Definition

Many people say that a classic is that which endures, stands the test of time, and which people still read long, long after the author is dead. In his book Antifragile, Hassim Taleb states that you can make a rough prediction about how long a book will remain in print. The average time a book will remain in print from this point on is equal to the time it has been in print so far.

To me, this definition of a classic, though true, doesn’t really settle anything. It begs the question, why do readers today still want to read this book? Let’s accept that a classic must endure, but I want to explore why this is so.

Other Folks’ Definitions

I’m not the first to knock on the door to this party; in fact I’m way past fashionably late. Many people before me have come up with great definitions of what makes a classic.

Italo Calvino says you can’t feel indifferent to a classic. That definition makes it a personal connection between book and reader. However, that’s not so useful to an author trying to write a classic.
Blogger Chris Cox builds on Mark Twain’s definition. There are two kinds of classics, those we’re embarrassed not to have read yet, and those we nag others to read. Funny, but again it concentrates on the reader-to-book connection.
The French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve said the author of a classic “….has enriched the human mind…caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered…who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.” This is closer to what I’m looking for—let’s hold those thoughts.
Goethe said it’s not a classic because it’s old, but because it’s forever new. I like that one.
Some blog commenters have said a classic had some impact or effect on the age in which it’s written. That may be true for most classics, but not all such books endure.
Others say a classic is that which is new or innovative in its time. But, again, it’s not clear to me why such books would necessarily stand the test of time.
Jonathan Jones, a writer for The Guardian, says a classic must be elastic. That is, it endures despite plagiarism, satire, criticism, etc. Hassim Taleb would hasten to add that such pummeling of a classic makes it stronger, more enduring, and to use his word, antifragile. I like this attribute too, but it’s more about the reaction to a book rather than the writing of it.

My Definition

Borrowing the attributes I like and rejecting the rest, here are my rules. A classic for the ages must:

capture its time
be well written
say something profound and permanent about the human condition

There you have it. Write your book that way, and it might become a classic someday. Something for your great-grandchildren to enjoy. Currently at work on a classic, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 2, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Writing for the Very Young

As someone who’s read books to his children and (more recently) his grandchildren, I’ll offer my thoughts about books for the very young. Here I’m considering books for children who haven’t begun to speak yet.

I believe the writer and reader of such books share a profound duty, one they shouldn’t take lightly. They work together to create an experience, from a first and indelible impression to a repeated pattern that becomes an ingrained habit. Their shared purpose has several facets:

To entertain. This is not as important for this reading audience as it will be when they get older. Perhaps I could have phrased it as “To avoid boredom.”

To teach vocal communication. The child needs to understand the one-way vocal transmission of thoughts and ideas. Sure, you don’t need a book for that, but the book provides something to look at while the speaking/listening communication takes place.

To transmit the joy of human story-telling. It’s a primal human trait; we tell stories. We convey life lessons through the use of characters, which make the lessons clearer. We pass down the stories through generations, and that strengthens an understanding of ancestors and the past.

To imbue a love of books and reading. At some point the child will realize the book always opens the same way; the pages are always moved one at a time in the same order; the book doesn’t change from one reading to the next; and there must be some connection between the funny little marks and the sounds the reader is making. The child should come to see reading a book as a quiet, comforting experience.

The reader has a huge part to play in accomplishing these purposes. I think it’s important to introduce books in brief doses. Don’t even read the whole book at first. Gradually lengthen the time spent reading. In every case, you should finish before the child is ready for you to finish. In other words, don’t associate reading with boredom. Needless to say, vary your voice pitch as you read, and read with dramatic emphasis.

Enough about reading. For the writer, you have only pictures, words, and book layout to work with.

Pictures. At first, the child will know your book only through the pictures. Make them bold, colorful, and immediately obvious.

Words. The child won’t understand the written words, but will experience them by listening to them. Use short, simple words. Make use of rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. Use words that sound good together.

Book Layout. Consider cloth or plastic pages for early books, or a thick grade of paper. Don’t put too many words on a page; make the reader keep turning pages frequently.

Another thought on book layout—as the shift to e-books continues for adults, e-books will soon appear for adults to read to small children. From what I can tell, the ones available now still have real pages to turn, and the book narrates its own story without needing an adult. I think there would be value in a sturdy e-reader able to display pictures and text, but requiring an adult to read it.

Whether you write books for little tots or read books to them, please take the task seriously. If you do it right, you’ll spark a love of reading. If you do it wrong, the child will forever consider reading boring. Thank goodness Mom and Dad did it right for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 12, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink