Ever heard of CSS Hunley? A hand-cranked submarine from the U.S. Civil War, it accomplished the first successful submarine attack in history.
I’ve written a fictional story set aboard that sub. One of my few ghost stories, Rebel Spirit follows the experiences of a man nicknamed Scowler, a member of the sub’s first crew.
In 1864, Northern warships blockaded Charleston harbor, permitting no waterborne trade. In desperation, the South tried an unprecedented attack from underwater, by submarine. Earlier inventors had attempted submarine warfare without success. Many in Charleston hoped the Hunley, named for its inventor, Horace Lawson Hunley, would prevail.
Think of Rebel Spirit as historical horror. Well, mild horror. For the most part, I’ve adhered to historical accounts while telling Scowler’s story. My tale makes no reference to the politics of the war and does not glorify the South’s cause. As a former submariner with an interest in history, I’m awed by the bravery of the men who served aboard such a dangerous, cramped, man-powered craft.
In real life, researchers have salvaged the Hunley and it resides in a museum in Charleston. I hope to visit that museum one day.
I invite you to read Rebel Spirit. For $3.99, you can buy it at Amazon. It’s a ghostly story of the sea brought to you by—
Poseidon’s Scribe
P.S. I’m planning to speak at Penguicon, a scifi conference in Southfield, Michigan, on Saturday, April 22. I’ll provide more details in the next blogpost by—
Three days after the party and I’m still recovering. No, not really. It was a Facebook party to celebrate the launch of the anthology 20,000 Leagues Remembered. No music, no dancing, relatively few drinks.
We held it last Thursday night, the first Facebook party I ever attended, and I was one of the two hosts. We had 32 attendees, including both co-editors (Kelly A. Harmon and me), and 7 of our 16 authors.
Much credit goes to those authors, who kept things interesting by posting fun facts about themselves and their stories. I heard feedback from one attendee who said the author bios were the best part of the party.
We gave away prizes, some randomly based on numbers of comments and shares, and some based on correctly answering trivia questions. Prize winners got to choose from among Pole to Pole Publishing’s collection of anthologies.
Prior to the party, I’d been thinking about the wide variety of settings for the anthology’s stories, and made a map of all of them. I posted the map during the party and people seemed to like it. One party-goer said all anthologies should make similar maps!
One of my daughters is particularly talented with 3D printing and has printed models from my various stories before, pictured here, here, here, here, and here. Recently, she made a near-replica of the submarine pictured on our anthology’s cover. I’m to blame for the poor paint job, but still. Kinda cool.
If you missed the party, you can still enjoy the retrospective here.
Grand Prize Still Up for Grabs!
Also, a grand prize is still available! Here’s how you can earn it, simply by posting book reviews during the month of August 2020. Post your reviews of 20,000 Leagues Remembered and any other anthology from the Pole to Pole Publishing archives on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, your blog, and any other online public forum. Email Pole to Pole Publishing at submissions(‘at’ symbol)poletopolepublishing.com with the URLs of your reviews. Each posted review at each public site earns you 1 point, but reviews of 20,000 Leagues Remembered earn 2 points each. (The co-editors of that anthology reserve the right to judge what constitutes a legitimate review.)
If you post the most reviews during the month of August, you’ll win…wait for it…3 (yes, three) books of your choice from Pole to Pole Publishing, in either ebook or paperback format.
I’d like to win that prize myself, but, <heavy sigh> one of the few people in the world who isn’t eligible for it is—
Ever wonder what it must have been like to serve on a submarine in World War I? You can’t visit or tour one, since there are no U.S. subs from that war on display. You may have seen and walked through a WW II sub in a museum, or seen one in a movie, but the earlier WW I subs are a mystery to most of us.
Recently, one of my wife’s relatives loaned me the journal of her grandfather, a submariner in WW I. I eagerly read it, and now offer you the following description.
Submarine L-10 (SS-50)
Chief Machinist’s Mate Frank Laugel served aboard the submarine USS L-10 (SS-50). (Back then, they didn’t give submarines names, only alphanumeric designations.) His journal covers the period from Monday, December 3, 1917 to Saturday, February 1, 1919.
The book itself is a U.S. Navy ledger book with lined pages; the cover is brown with purple trim. The binding is covered and protected with gray duct tape. Laugel began writing on page 1 and ended on 106 of 200. His cursive writing is quite legible, and I rarely had to pause to decipher a word. There are oil or grease stains on some pages.
The journal begins by chronicling the sub’s departure from Newport, Rhode Island on December 4, 1917 in the company of other submarines and the submarine tender USS Bushnell (AS-2), the crossing of the Atlantic and arrival at Port Delgado on Sao Miguel Island in the Azores on December 19.
They left Sao Miguel on December 30 to continue the crossing. The crew lost a man overboard, a gunner’s mate, on January 24, 1918. They arrived in Bantry Bay, Ireland on January 26, 1918.
The L-10 and its crew spent the war operating in and around Bantry Bay, going out for short excursions and returning to tie up alongside USS Bushnell. They saw little war action. They rarely sighted an enemy and never sunk anything.
The submarine left Ireland on Friday, January 3, 1919 and arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on Saturday, February 1, the date of the final journal entry.
When the sub is at sea, Laugel’s entries carefully record the weather, the time of day the ship dives and surfaces, the depths they reach, and the number of engines running at any time. He identifies the other ships they sighted.
Laugel’s in-port journal entries state when other ships, both U.S. and allied, arrive and leave. He details the equipment that breaks aboard the sub and it seems he spends most of his days in port fixing things or cleaning the boat.
L-10 moored with her sister boats in British waters in 1918. The “A” (for “American”) was added to avoid confusion with British L-class submarines.
Journals are personal logs, begun for various personal reasons. A journal writer never intends for others to read his words, and therefore excludes things with which he’s intimately aware and feels no need to describe.
That’s true with Laugel’s journal. His entries are extremely impersonal. Except for a few brief mentions of the captain, he never mentions the names of any fellow crewmen, including the one lost overboard. Absent is any description of the submarine itself, or what life aboard was like.
Perhaps some of that is due to security restrictions, but then why did he feel free to note the submarine’s depth and the sightings of other vessels? Moreover, there would be nothing classified about his liberty time ashore, yet these entries contain equally sparse descriptions of this time, with brief mentions that he “went out to dinner…went to a dance…went to a movie…”
The closest Laugel gets to anything personal is in noting the receipt of every letter from Frieda, his girlfriend. He also mentions the occasional chances he gets to talk to Walter, presumably a relative or friend assigned to a different ship.
If Laugel feared death due to enemy action or submarine malfunction, he didn’t feel a need to write about it. There is one brief mention about the risks of war, and his attitude about that is philosophical.
L-10 moored with sister boats at the Philadelphia Navy Yard soon after her 1 February 1919 return to the U.S.
A journal-writer is often so close to events that he cannot know what will be important to others. Laugel describes the initial crossing of the Atlantic as mostly routine, free of drama. Yet, according to the Wikipedia entry on USS L-10, the submarine’s captain, Lieutenant Commander James C. Van de Carr, received the Navy Cross for his distinguished service.
In part, that citation reads, “While en route from Newport to the Azores, the submarine which he commanded was separated from the escort and the other submarines of the squadron, leaving him without a rendezvous. He thereupon proceeded to destination successfully, assuming the great responsibility of starting a 1,700-mile Atlantic Ocean run in winter weather and in a submarine of a class that had never been considered reliable under such conditions.”
From the journal, I can infer some things about Laugel, but these are just suppositions. Assuming he took the same care with the sub’s engines that he did in penning his journal, he was in large part responsible for the sub’s successful ocean crossing. A strong sense of humility must have prevented him from taking credit for any significant repairs; he only mentions team efforts, that “we” did this or that. I also sense he was a practical and methodical man, reserving his strong emotions for Frieda alone.
I’m grateful for the chance to read Frank Laugel’s journal, and I shouldn’t criticize him for writing in such a dry style. He was a machinist’s mate scribbling in a journal for his own reasons. He wasn’t writing a novel or a movie script.
Frank Laugel, along with all U.S. submariners, has earned the unending admiration of—
What a great weekend! I was at Chessiecon, a science fiction/fantasy conference near Baltimore. In case you missed it, here’s the recap:
I moderated a panel on “Gadgets in Fiction.” We discussed how it’s easy to get too passionate about your faster-than-light drive or the workings of your hand-held ray gun, but your audience doesn’t want a textbook. How do you share your geeky idea without straying into too much? When does over-reliance on gadgetry start to take away from the plot and characterization?
The talented and knowledgeable panel members were Martin Wilsey, Nicole “Nickie” Jamison, and Steve Kozeniewski. They had some great ideas about how to discuss and describe gadgets in your fiction without boring readers.
Martin Wilsey, Steve Southard, Nicole “Nickie” Jamison, and Steve Kozeniewski
Later, I moderated another panel called “Care and Feeding of Critique Groups.” The blurb for that panel was—participating in a critique group can be a great way to improve your writing. Not all such groups work out well, though. The panel will discuss ways to keep a critique group helpful, vibrant, and long-lived.
My willing and able panel members were Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Jay Smith, Margaret Carter, and J.L. Gribble. It became obvious to me that critique groups come in all sizes, shapes, rules, forms, etc. The keys to success appear to be setting expectations, actively participating, being fair in providing critiques, and being thick-skinned in receiving them.
Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Jay Smith, Margaret Carter, J.L. Gribble, Steven R. Southard
All that was Friday. On Saturday, I moderated yet another panel, this one called “Dive! Dive! Submarines in Science Fiction.” The idea of this one is that not all SF takes place in outer space. Panelists will discuss their favorite undersea fiction and undersea vehicles.
I called myself the Captain of this panel, and my crew was D.H. Aire, Leslie Roy Carter, Kelly A. Harmon, and Martin Wilsey. Sorry, no picture of this one. We had a great time discussing favorite science fiction submarines, and what sets submarines apart from other story settings.
At my book reading, I read the entirety of “The Cats of Nerio-3,” my story from the recently published anthology In a Cat’s Eye. I hope the audience enjoyed the story at least half as much as I loved reading it.
I had a fine time at the book signing later Saturday night. For one of the copies of In a Cat’s Eye, the woman asked me to sign it to her two cats. First time I’ve done that! I hope her cats enjoy the story. I sold another copy to a young girl who just loves cats. I forgot to tell her and her mother that the stories in that anthology are a bit on the dark side. Oh, well…
All in all, a delightful weekend! It’s fun to gather with fellow authors who write, and with readers who love, science fiction. It just warms the heart of—
Should an aspiring fiction writer start with novels or short stories? Don’t look to this blog entry for a concrete recommendation for your situation. I can only tell you the path I took and my reasons for choosing it. For you, success could well lie on a different path.
When phrased as an either/or choice – novels or short stories – the question itself is too limiting. There are a variety of other avenues for the creative writer of prose, including flash fiction, novellas, podcasting, television and movie scriptwriting, and playwriting. I’m sure I’ve left out some options and many more possibilities remain to be discovered, or forgotten ones rediscovered. Some writer will have to be the pioneer who leads these expeditions. Why not you?
While serving aboard a submarine many years ago, I thought of an idea for a story. So grand was this story idea, I was certain it would make me both famous and rich. To truly capture this story, only the novel format would do. I was sure my tale would seize the attention of the country and even the world. I could already see myself resigning my commission in the Navy, doing the talk show circuit, and traveling to book signings.
Though chock full of enthusiasm and energy, I was less well supplied with writing experience. I’d heard all the arguments for starting with short stories, of course. But such well-meaning advice could be safely ignored. It simply didn’t apply to my case, I was sure. Undeterred by these considerations, I set to work.
Actually writing the novel proved harder than I’d counted on, which surprised me at the time for some reason. There was a lot to think about, with plots and subplots, characters, settings, even a theme. How to keep it all straight? Confident that my future fans would patiently await the great opus, I struggled on.
The struggle filled some time, like two decades or more. At the end of that period I found I’d created a manuscript of which even my desk drawer was—and still is–ashamed. To this day, the desk’s immune system occasionally rejects it and I have to gather up the pages, force them back in, and nail the drawer shut again.
In truth I had more to show from all the work than just an unpublishable manuscript. Without knowing it, I’d been honing my skills in a harmless way, practicing the craft and making all my early mistakes.
Abandoning that first novel, I started another. But doubts had set in about whether I was cut out for this. A novel is a daunting task and a significant investment of time with very uncertain payoff, particularly for the beginning fiction writer. It’s easy for discouragement to build up and eventually overwhelm enthusiasm.
I then read The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown, published by Carroll and Graf in 2005. It’s a marvelous collection of short stories inspired by Jules Verne, all written by modern authors. As a Jules Verne fan, the book inspired me. I wrote my own short story, a work that would have fit well in that collection, or would if they decided to put out a second anthology in a similar vein. That story, “The Steam Elephant,” appeared in Steampunk Tales issue #5.
That started me off writing more. There are several reasons why I’ve enjoyed my switch to short stories. I can churn out many more of them per year. They keep my ever-fickle muse interested and focused. It’s easier to test out different genres. Short stories represent a good method for further growth as a writer while getting the positive feedback of more frequent acceptances.
At some point I’ll return to the novel length story. The average non-writer doesn’t regard an author as serious until she or he has published a novel. Certainly the pay for a published novel is greater as well. Who knows, one of these days I may dust off the two novels I started, rewrite them, and send them out for consideration. If you’re engaged in writing a novel equally as good, perhaps I’ll join you on the talk show circuit! Until then, I’ll remain a short story writer, and—
At my book reading, I read the entirety of “The Cats of Nerio-3,” my story from the recently published anthology 
I had a fine time at the book signing later Saturday night. For one of the copies of