Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 3

Who Doesn’t Love a Story with a Map?

Isn’t it fun when a fiction book includes a map? If you’re like me, you linger over the map longer than you do any other page of the story. A map draws you in and makes you feel like you’re there, like you could use it to navigate from any spot to any other. As you read the story, you keep referring to the map to pinpoint the current action.

Maps of Others’ Stories

Sarah Laskow wrote a marvelous post about maps associated with fiction. Her article includes maps from The Swiss Family Robins...

Will Oceanism Become Your New Religion?

Sometimes science fiction authors create religions for their stories. According to Wikipedia, they do this to satirize, to propose better belief systems, to criticize real religions, to speculate on alien religions, to serve as stand-ins for real religions, or other reasons.

Examples

I could cite many cases of this, but I’m most familiar with the following:

Church of Science – Foundation (1951) by Isaac AsimovChurch of All Worlds – Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Hei...

Does Your Fiction Book Need a Glossary? Does Mine?

Ever read a work of fiction and wish it included a glossary of the book’s unusual terms and names? Or do you think of glossaries as useless wastes?

In General

More common in nonfiction, glossaries sometimes appear in science fiction and fantasy books, to help readers orient to the unfamiliar world of a novel bristling with strange words and numerous proper nouns.  

Daniel J. Tortora posted a nice discussion of glossaries giving you everything you need to know.

Your Context-Free Slang...

Want to Explore Leonardo’s Subterranean Secrets?

Who could have guessed Leonardo da Vinci left secrets underground?

Me, that’s who. First, here’s what really happened.

Reality Sforza Castle, photographed by Jakub Halun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the 1490s, the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, hired Leonardo to decorate Sforza Castle with artwork, and he complied. Since then, and down through the centuries, rumors persisted of hidden underground passages, secret corridors running beneath the castle.

Leonardo documented...

Cycling Through the World of Short Stories

What do you call a book-length collection of short stories? An anthology, a fix-up novel, or a short story cycle? Let’s explore the terms and see which applies to my recent book.

Definitions

For an anthology, a compiler or editor groups stories, poems, plays, or songs together. Often, they share a common theme, but the pieces need not have been written by the same author.

In a fix-up novel, individual short stories by the same author appear in the same novel. The author may have written...

You Need to Know More About Seasteads

You might find my new book, The Seastead Chronicles, of interest. Several book distributors offer it in paperback and ebook format. Before you buy, though, you should understand the meaning of the word “seastead.”

Definition

Combining the words “sea” and “homesteads,” seasteads are permanent abodes at sea. The Wikipedia article restricts the definition to structures in international waters, but I see no reason for that. People could construct them close to shore. Some imagine seasteads ...

Launch of The Seastead Chronicles

My newest science fiction book, The Seastead Chronicles, launched today. You can purchase the ebook version on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords and soon at Apple Books.

The Seastead Chronicles takes you through the 21st century struggle to colonize the seas, to carve oceans into nations, and to build cities on and under the water.

Spanning decades of time and several generations, these fifteen tales include the early efforts to construct sustainable seasteads, the hostile re...

Cover Reveal – The Seastead Chronicles

Soon, my next book will launch. It’s The Seastead Chronicles, the first book in a series by the same name.

Throughout history, humanity confined itself to a small fraction of the Earth—the land. In the future, we take to the sea.   

Fifteen short stories chronicle humanity’s 21st century struggle to colonize the seas. They include pioneering attempts to own and defend sectors of the ocean, scrambles over vast mineral resources, and quests by oppressed populations to live free. You’ll fo...

NaNoWriMo — Gone in Body, Not Spirit

NaNoWriMo is dead, long live NaNoWriMo. The ending of the organization behind National Novel Writing Month shocked the writing world. After over twenty years of operation, the group folded in March.

Organization

The interim executive director of NaNoWriMo, Kilby Blades, explained in a video why the organization folded. It terminated for financial reasons, she said, with income falling short of expenses.

All organizations face monetary challenges at some point, with infinite wants co...

Afternoon with Authors

I participated in an Afternoon with Authors event today at the Leaves Bakery & Books store in Fort Worth, Texas.

From left to right in the photo are Megan Dawn, Fabiana Elisa Martínez, Amanda Russell, and me. I learned a lot from listening to them discuss the writing process. Each of us, of course, does things in a different way.

We discussed our individual writing rituals, the reason we started writing, our writing influences, our preference for outlining or free discovery, the re...