Steven R. Southard's Blog, page 76

Turkey City Lexicon

In any specific human endeavor involving more than one person, the people involved soon find themselves repeating the same phrases over and over. It’s inevitable they should seek some shorthand way to avoid that. So they develop jargon, specialized terminology suited to their activity.

Some time ago, in science fiction writing workshops, the participants worked out a vocabulary of writing terms called the Turkey City Lexicon (TCL). There is no authoritative source for the TCL, nor is it copyri...

Blog Hop – The Next Big Thing

Many thanks to Charlotte Holley who tagged me to participate in The Next Big Thing blog hop. I didn’t know what a blog hop was but it seems like fun. In this one, authors answer questions about their Work in Progress (WIP) and people can follow the links along and see what various writers are working on. That way readers can anticipate and check back later to buy the books they’re interested in. It’s possible that one or more authors in this chain may really be working on The Next Big Thing!

W...

To Do, Or Be Done To?

That is the question. Today I’ll cover one of my pet peeves—passive sentence construction, as contrasted with the active version.

Defining these types is easy. In active sentence construction (also called ‘active voice’) the subject of the sentence performs the action described by the verb. In passive construction, the subject is the recipient of the action.

For example, here are two sentences from a recent story of mine:

Doctor Rudolph Wellburn looked up from his workbench as Red dragged the tr...

Rules Writers Break

In the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” several pirate characters throughout the movie mention the Pirate Code in reverent tones. Late in the film, Captain Barbossa reveals, “the Code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

Today I’ll discuss writing rules your grade school teachers taught you, and whether following them is something you must do, or should do. When teaching young children, it is often best to give them black-and-white rule sets....

Captain Nemo sighted at Darkovercon

Those who attended Darkovercon this year on November 24th and 25th got a chance to see me, dressed as Captain Nemo.

I’m the one on the right, by the way. Why, yes, that is an electric pistol I’m holding; very observant of you to notice. Not visible in this photo is the Captain Nemo motto “Mobilis in Mobile” on my chest. My Nemo costume is based on the original illustrations, unlike the movie versions where Nemo appears either as a Navy Captain or an Indian Prince. Jules Verne’s Nemo had abando...

Author Interview — Anne H. Petzer

Today Poseidon’s Scribe introduces a new occasional feature to this blog. I had the opportunity to interview author Anne H. Petzer. She’s a South African, now living in Prague.

Anne is the author of several stories in a series about an operative with Feline Intelligence – Czech Republic. Oh, yeah, the operative is a cat named Zvonek. Anne has also written Snow Cat based on Czech legend.

Here’s the interview:

Poseidon’s Scribe: When and why did you begin writing?

Anne H. Petzer: I started writi...

Sorry, New Rule. You Can’t Do That!

In the original Star Trek TV series, there’s an episode where Captain Kirk invents a card game called Fizzbin in which he makes up the rules as he goes along. The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes featured a game called Calvinball which may never be played by the same rules twice.

If you’re a writer of fiction, you might consider yourself to be playing such a game, too. According to W. Somerset Maugham, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” With...

Two New Stories!

I’m pretty excited! Gypsy Shadow Publishing has just put out two of my steampunk stories at the same time.

Let’s start with “A Steampunk Carol.” That stuffy Victorian inventor, Stanton Wardgrave, is back again, eight years after inventing holograms and meeting the American Josephine Boulton…Within Victorian Mists. Married now, with a son and daughter, he’s dealing with rather too much balderdash and poppycock this Christmas Eve. Conversing with his dead father? Expecting three visitors? It all...

Conveying a Sense of Wonder

One of the things that drew me into fiction as a child was the sense of wonder I experienced when reading certain fiction, notably that of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and later science fiction writers. The question is, how does a writer evoke that in readers?

First, let’s try to define it. The book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it this way: “a feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation w...

Romancing the Short Story

Bet you didn’t expect me to write a blog entry on writing romance short stories, did you? Well, for one thing, if you desire to become an author, you should learn to write about anything, even topics or genres you know little about or have little interest in. You never know what you’ll end up being good at.

Second, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the romance genre has a vast and insatiable readership. Perhaps not so much in the short story length as in the novel length, but again, what if yo...