Dr. Seuss - Steven R. Southard (Poseidon's Scribe)

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Oh, the Things You’ll Write!

It’s hard to think of a hobby, pastime, or activity more versatile, more location-independent, than writing. You can write almost anywhere. I’ve come up with a poem about that. Sincere apologies, Dr. Seuss:

You can write stuff on a train. You can write stuff on a plane.

You can write stuff in your house. Write beside your dozing spouse.

Write by soft electric light. Write quite late into the night.

You can write until the dawn. You can write out on the lawn.

You can write while in a park. You can write on old tree bark.

You can write both here and there. You can write most anywhere.

You can write while at a desk, from sublime to the grotesque.

Write first hither and then yon, and while sitting on the john

Write in your own living room, in a meeting while on Zoom.

Write while sitting in a chair wearing only underwear.

Write while riding in a car. Write when you get to the bar.

You can write both there and here. Write between big gulps of beer.

You can write while still in school, then while tanning at the pool.

You can write within your dorm. Write through a torrential storm.

You can write your prose so clear, hanging from a chandelier.

Have you written ‘till you cried, halfway up a mountainside?

You can write on any trip, even on a fine cruise ship.

You can write beneath the moon. Write aloft in a balloon.

You could write, or so I’ve heard, high up in a whirlybird.

You can by world unseen, while aboard a submarine.

You can write on your commute. Or hanging from a parachute.

You can write your very best while atop Mount Everest.

Write in far-off Kathmandu, or even while in Timbuktu.

You can write in every place. Even while in outer space.

Write while in a time machine. (Done before you start, I mean.)

You can write in any spot. That’s convenient, is it not?

You can write, (this ain’t no gibe), better than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 18, 2022Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Depicting Monarchies in Fiction

Do you love stories involving queens and kings, thrones and castles, nobles and knights? Would you like to live under such a government?

Really?

An interesting Twitter thread inspired this blogpost. Author Ada Palmer responded to a tweet by Author Nnedi Okorafor. Okorafor stated how much she detested monarchies, and Palmer commented that fiction authors should be circumspect in their descriptions of monarchic governments, and show their disadvantages, not just their grandeur.

Often, in both fantasy fiction and science fiction, the story takes place against a backdrop of a monarchy presented as a fine and just government. Worse, some stories glorify the nobles, painting them as truly superior to their ignorant peasant subjects.

Palmer gives an example of a children’s tale where the simple commoners are confused and frustrated by some problem until the queen arrives to resolve the dilemma. Just as bad are the stories where a princess falls in love with a rogue, but alas, such a union is impossible until it’s discovered the rogue has noble blood, and only then can a wedding and happy ending ensue.

To a certain extent, I get it. As children, we grow up reading monarchy stories. It’s an easy concept, well suited to kids. Obey the king and queen (stand-ins for Dad and Mom). Pretty basic government. Much easier for young minds to grasp than senates and parliaments.

The kingdom motif lingers on in our psyche even as we mature, well after we recognize no human family is more fit to rule than any other. Americans fought our founding war to overthrow a monarch, yet free U.S. citizens today fawn over the British royal family and stand in huge crowds to watch guards change shifts at a castle.

Someday, perhaps, young children won’t be raised on a literary diet of medieval feudalism. Only when they’re old enough will they study human history and laugh at the idiocy of past monarchic governments, shaking their heads at the primitive stupidity of their distant ancestors.

Helping hasten that day, Dr. Seuss expressed proper disdain for autocratic rulers in books such as Yertle the Turtle and Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Future children need more Bartholomews and fewer royals. Come on, writers of children’s books—give kids tales of wise peasants toppling corrupt kingdoms!

One respondent in the Twitter feed countered that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government. True, on rare occasions in history, kingdoms thrived under the leadership of wise sovereigns. Then the monarchs died, and their average or below-average heirs messed things up. Not a sustainable form of good government.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not cheerleading for democracies either. All forms of human government suffer from one fault or another. Winston Churchill stated, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”

Democracies don’t choose leaders by familial line of succession, but rather through popularity contests—no sure-fire method of obtaining a wise head of state. History provides few examples of democracies, but the ones that existed often devolved into autocratic systems.

I agree with Palmer and Okorafor, but I’ll venture further. As observers and chroniclers of the human condition, writers shouldn’t glorify any brand of government. Fiction that does so comes across to readers like a morality play, a sermon.

Governments are systems for consolidating and legitimizing the use of power and force. As Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Therefore, governments—all governments—tend toward corruption.

But what do I know? I’m neither king, nor prince, nor duke or earl. I’m just—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 1, 2021Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Writing Inside the Box

The problem with life is there are too many constraints. There are too many limits, too little money, too few resources, and never enough time. And that’s the good news.

Good news? Lest you think me crazy, I’ll explain.

A wonderful blog post by James Clear inspired this post, and I encourage you to read Clear’s article, too.

If Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) could constrain himself to write a children’s book using only fifty different words and come up with Green Eggs and Ham, then constraints may help you as well.

As discussed in Clear’s post, constraints (whether self-imposed or not) force you to think creatively, to find unusual ways to get things done within the limits.

As a fiction writer, you’re always imposing constraints on your characters, particularly the hero of your stories. Your protagonist is always racing against the clock, striving to get out of some trap, fighting to get free of a bad relationship, or otherwise burdened by severe limitations. With the usual options denied, your hero must become inventive in coming up with ways to resolve problems.

What about you? While writing your story, do you face constraints? Yes. I’m sure you have a word limit, even if only a vague one.

Other constraints include the tone of the narrative (once you’ve chosen that, you shouldn’t deviate), genre norms, a desire to stay away from stereotypical characters, character speaking style, the story’s Point of View, etc. Other constraints you might choose for yourself include vocabulary limits like Dr. Seuss’ story, an upper limit on readability index, a dislike of certain words or phrases, and thousands of other possibilities.

Perhaps the most constraining limit of all for any writer is time. You never know how much time you really have and you can’t buy more of it. You can’t take an infinite number of years to finish your story.

As one extreme example, consider the way Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451. With two small children at home, he sought a quiet place to write. At the library, he could rent a typewriter, but had to feed it a dime every half-hour. That would be a dollar every half-hour today. They say ‘time is money’ but imagine feeding money into your laptop all the time. No wonder Fahrenheit 451 is a rather short novel.

Constraints, whether imposed by the universe or by you, force you to optimize, maximize, and prioritize. They force you to choose some things and forego others. They force you to think beyond the normal, to consider bizarre alternatives, and to invent new methods.

Perhaps there’s no use complaining about constraints, then. We all face them. Just maybe, they’re bringing out your most creative impulses. Instead of complaining, accept them. Face them. Figure out ways to deal with them.

I’ve accepted the box I’m writing in, but it’s uncomfortable and my joints stiffened up. Now I’m stuck. I hope someone can reach in and help—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 27, 2019Poseidon's ScribePermalink

On Beyond Slash

In his 1955 book On Beyond Zebra! Dr. Seuss had child readers imagining several new alphabetical letters occurring after our last one—Z. Today, I’m advocating the addition of some new punctuation and fonts. Since the last punctuation mark on my keyboard is the slash (/), we’ll venture beyond slash. Way beyond.

Let’s face it.There are times when currently available punctuation just won’t do. Moreover, the number of keys on a keyboard no longer limits us. This is the age of multi-use buttons. Software programmers could easily show one or more pop-up keyboards that replace QWERTY with alternate punctuation marks and fonts. If we can have innumerable emojis and emoticons, we can certainly add some fresh punctuation marks.

Many others have proposed new punctuation marks that haven’t caught on yet, but should. You’ll enjoy other blog posts on this topic by Adrienne Crezo, Randy Krum, Keith Houston, and Zachery Brasier. I’ll start my list with marks advocated by others, and finish with two of my own invention.

ElRey Mark

The ElRey Mark is a variant of the exclamation point invented by photographer Ellen Susan. The original intent of the exclamation mark was to denote very strong feelings or loud shouts, like “Stop!” or “Watch out!” However, people now use it even for mild emphasis, as in “Thanks!” Named for ‘The King’ in Spanish, the ElRey Mark’s intent is to express a moderate amount of excitement or optimism. However, given the two dots in the ElRey Mark, I’d propose swapping it with the Exclamation Mark, so that ElRey would denote the stronger emphasis.

We really need the Exclamation Comma and especially the Question Comma. They would permit exclamations and questions within a sentence, rather than having to reword them to occur at the sentence’s end. Invented and patented by Americans Leonard Storch, Haagen Ernst Van and Sigmund Silber in 1992, the symbols didn’t catch on and their patent has lapsed.

Interrobang

An advertising executive named Martin K. Speckter came up with the Interrobang in 1952. It combines the exclamation and question marks for those times when it’s tough to choose between the two, but your editor will only permit one, as in: “What? Now you tell me you don’t know how to land the plane?”

I love the Love Point, invented in 1966 by author Jean-Pierre Marie Herve-Bazin. Yes, authors should be able to express the emotion of love through words alone, but the Love Point would add a charming emphasis to it. Couldn’t the world use a little more love?

Quotation marks are supposed to be for actual quotations, so there’s a need for a way to denote“air quotes” indicating what someone should have said or seems to be saying. Mockquotation Marks would serve that need in a visually obvious way. As near as I can determine, we can thank Mike Trapp of collegehumor.com for these marks.

Doubt Point

I’ve added the Doubt Point to my list, not because I think it’s particularly useful to express doubt through punctuation, but because it looks so Seussian. It was another creation by Jean-Pierre Marie Herve-Bazin.

Here’s another punctuation mark I’d love to see for its appearance alone. Originally called the Hedera when used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the French renamed it the Fleuron, the name I prefer. Although they used it to separate paragraphs, I don’t care what we’d use it for; I just like the way it looks.

Now we come to my own inventions. Others have proposed reverse italics for other purposes, but I’d used them to add emphasis to a word or two within an already italicized section. It’s common to do that by putting that word in normal font, but that just doesn’t do it for me. Reverse italics would be a way of nesting emphasized words.

We’ve saddled the apostrophe with double duty for too long, and it’s often misused and confused. The apostrophe’s original use was to substitute for letters we’re not showing. We call those contractions, like don’t for do not. However, we use the same mark for possession. Allow me to introduce the Possesstrophe. It even looks like two arms reaching out to possess the word or phrase beyond the ‘s.’ The Possesstrophe would resolve the need to remember the rule for it’s as a contraction and its as a possessive.

What do you say? Let’s get some of these new marks accepted in standard usage. Go on beyond slash with—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 16, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Author Interview—N.O.A. Rawle

The fun continues today as I interview another author with a story appearing in the anthology Hides the Dark Tower. To obtain this interview, I had to travel all the way to Greece…well, virtually.

N.A.O. Rawle is a British writer, teacher and translator living and working in mythical Thessalian Plain in Greece. She graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in Creative Writing and Philosophy. After many years of procrastinating, she took the plunge and has started publishing short sci-fi/horror/fantasy stories. She’s had over a dozen short stories and poems published. She’s been published in the anthology Once Bitten, and The Girl at the End of the World, Book II and the anthology Denizens of Steam.

Here’s the interview:

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

N.A.O. Rawle: First, thank you for having me on your blog, it’s great to talk to you. I grew up with books as my dad was a librarian. He had a study stuffed floor to ceiling with books, mostly about fly fishing and theology, but that’s where I got the bug. The actual writing started with fan fiction when I was in Secondary school and progressed into photocopied comic books in my late teens. Published work came a lot later.

P.S.: What other authors influenced your writing? What are a few of your favorite books?

N.R.: Harder to answer than I imagined. I can’t say who has influenced my writing style as I don’t think I’ve really found my own. (At the moment I’m going through a phase of stories in rhyming prose and that comes straight from Dr Seuss and ‘The Night Before Christmas’!) Once I had finished James Herbert’s The Magic Cottage, I remember thinking “I should like to do that.” I love Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Iain M. Banks, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Bret Easton Ellis, Harlan Ellison and Bruce Sterling…

P.S.: In your blog, you’ve mentioned having thirty writing projects going at once, in various stages. Have you accepted that as a normal state of affairs for you, or would you prefer to be more focused?

N.R.: That’s normal. I live by flitting from one thing to the other and half finished projects everywhere, and I don’t mean just writing. I can focus and do occasionally, to the point of obsessive! That’s when work gets done fast.

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

N.R.: Being asked to do edits is the hardest. Not because I’m too proud and don’t want to change what I’ve written but because I find incorporating another’s perspective bewildering. Will it look right to the reader? Have I clarified and tidied up the waffle? The easiest is writing. I can sit and type for hours and hours.

P.S.: Your bio mentions your British nationality, your current work location in Greece, your teaching and translation work, and your education in creative writing and philosophy. In ‘Core Craving’ and ‘Those Who Can, Do,’ you touch on two of those aspects. In what other ways do your varied background and education inspire your stories?

N.R.: I’ve done (counts on fingers and gives up) many jobs since the age of fifteen so there’s always a bit of those experiences in my writing but it’s not necessarily what I know about them. In ‘Those Who Can, Do’ I was more interested in the fact that so many teachers appear to have forgotten the purpose of their jobs and get into some sort of power place ‘us’ and ‘them’. I also had some hideous teachers at school who really didn’t understand that the colour of my shirt was not a factor in the learning process. Greece crops up in my work frequently, I’ve spent almost half my life here now and it would be weird for it not to feature. A character might come from someone I’ve met or the atmosphere of a place might inspire a scene, I’m always trying to paint a picture so that my reader can see what I do.

P.S.: It appears you’re participating in NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month) for the first time this year. How is that going?

N.R.: It’s going…I did it in the hope that I could complete one of those projects I’ve been composting for about a decade as there is outside interest in it after a short story grew from some of the remnants that I had cut from the original work. (‘Synchronysi’ due to be published in the New Year). If I can get the plot down then I know I’ll get it sorted.

P.S.: Lately, you’ve been writing some steampunk stories. Why does that genre appeal to you?

N.R.: It’s what Goths do when they discover brown, or so a friend of mine tells me. No, I like that I can mix up fancy frocks with feminism and mechanical monsters! Oh and rhyming prose, ‘A Walk in the Park’ is the first story I’ve self-published that is Steampunk in Denizens of Steam, an anthology that I helped ‘curate’ to promote the Scribbler’s Den writing forum on the Steampunk Empire.

P.S.: You’ve guest-blogged for Rie Sheridan Rose about your story ‘Core Craving’ in Hides the Dark Tower and mentioned the research you did on the castle. Had that story idea been kicking around in your mind before the anthology’s call for submissions, or did it all click together afterward?

N.R.: The story was fully formed but had not found a home. Vonnie and Kelly [editors Vonnie Winslow Crist and Kelly A. Harmon] made it welcome in Hides the Dark Tower, an anthology, which is a real treat to read and an honour to be included in! ‘Core Craving’ is such a small story but one that took a long time to build and the first one published which is set in my home town (I have several others) so I’m pleased it’s found its niche amongst so many respected authors.

P.S.: Among your many current Works in Progress (or, as you have quipped, Works in Procrastination), would you mind telling us a little about one of them?

N.R.: I have a story called ‘Touched’ which has been simmering for a long time (read years). It’s a fantasy/horror mishmash involving fae folk who live in the beautiful Greek mountain forests. (I am told, in all seriousness, that fairies do reside there.) I have so much written but on an ancient word processor whose disks I have been unable to print up anywhere since the WP died on me. I’ve been trying to remember the story but there are big gaps in the plot and I am so sad. I’m patching it up but it’s beginning to resemble Frankenstein’s monster not the glorious creation I envisaged. In my heart I know I can make it good but I need determination.

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

N.O.A. Rawle: Jim Morrison wrote “Words dissemble, words be quick, words resemble walking sticks, plant them and they will grow…”

Sow the seeds of stories and see what becomes of them. Some will become roses and others prickly thistles that you’ll need to weed out. Like plants, some tales are therapeutic and others poisonous. Some will charm you with their beauty and there will be down-right ugly ones; they will all teach you something about writing but only if you keep tending them.

Thanks, Naomi! I know readers of my blog will want to find out more about you, and, luckily, I have that information handy. You have a blog and you’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. You also appear on Google+, Pinterest, and Amazon as N.O.A. Rawle, and on Steampunk Empire as Lady Naomi.

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 15, 2015Poseidon's ScribePermalink