The moral of the story

When Aesop told fables in the sixth century B.C.E., he always had a moral to the story. “Slow and steady wins the race.” “The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.” “It is wise to turn circumstances to good account.” The stories were all meant to teach something. We are told that Aesop was a slave, but also that he was honored in ancient Greece and there are statues of him dating back to the same period. His stories, usually just a couple of paragraphs, still survive. Moral: “Low estate does not prevent honor.”

Well, I made that up. What I was really trying to get to was how storytelling has evolved. We would be hard-put to publish stories that were only a paragraph or two. Our reading public wants a story that will absorb them and get them involved. Aesop is a classroom technique, not a storytelling technique. Yet satisfaction in reading a story is still often derived from the moral, or in contemporary language, the punchline.

We want to see Harry Potter triumph because good needs to conquer evil, and there is no power like love. We look for the hero’s journey in everything we read, and are disappointed if the last line is not perfect. I have personal experience with this based on my first book, For Blood or Money. Six words can make a huge difference.

By this time, in fact, we’re probably all aware of Smith Magazine’s Six Word Memoirs. It’s not a bad technique to use when planning your book or story. Summarize the point in six words. For Steven George & The Dragon, I can summarize the entire point in six words: “All roads lead to the dragon.” Within the book, each of the 19 original and recast folktales also has a moral, even though we don’t have to be hit over the head with it at the end of the story. “Sometimes fools are the best teachers.” “People care for people who care.” “Bridges are meant to be crossed.”

Whether you are working on a book, a story, a poem, or a term paper, “Know the point before you write.”

Killing the Sacred Cow (metaphorically speaking)

I finished the layout for Steven George & The Dragon yesterday and sent it off to the printer for a proof. That should give me just enough time to get copies in hand by the March 25 release date. Whew! There are some interesting things about doing your own layout. I’ve been on both ends of this. I’m a layout artist and a real stickler about letter spacing, line lengths, widows and orphans, and ligatures. I use good professional grade tools to handle the typography. But when laying out my own work, I have another tool that I learned back in my days of publishing magazines: Write to fit.

If I’m laying out someone else’s work, I have to make it look good based solely on the typography. But when I lay out a page of my own work and there is a “-ing.” sitting by itself on the first line of the next page, I don’t have to go back eight pages to pick up an extra line of type and crowd the letters in the offending paragraph to suck the suffix into the previous line. I can also look at the whole paragraph and say “I really don’t need ‘that’ in this sentence.” Voila! cut the word and close up the space needed. I was surprised at how often I edited a little something in the text in the layout application to gain a line or improve the layout.

But those were all pretty meaningless edits. The copy was just as good or sometimes better after the edit than before. It was in the last pre-layout edit of the book that I killed the sacred cow. From the time I started writing this book back in 2007, I had the idea that there was a confusion between Steven George and Saint George based on similar abbreviations in old manuscripts: Stⁿ vs. St^e. It was a clever conceit that allowed me to treat Steven as though he were the one the stories of St. George & The Dragon were all about. I was proud of this cleverness and explained it in the first paragraph of the book.

In the last edit, I killed it. I even changed the name of the book from Stⁿ George & The Dragon to Steven George & The Dragon. The truth is that people don’t need to have that little cleverness explained. No one can miss the connection between the two and the cow had to be sacrificed.

Sometimes I wonder how many other sacred cows I carry around in my life. There could be steak for dinner.

The Independent Confederacy--a novel idea

Reading about the “celebrations” in Alabama this week of the anniversary of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States of America got me thinking, and that’s always a dangerous thing. Rather than present my ideas as a political statement, however, I’m going to suggest an idea for a novel. Since I’m not much on writing historical fiction, feel free to grab it and run with it. I might even read the book when it comes out!

Suppose Lincoln had let the South secede. No Civil War. Now, I’m not saying there would have been no war, because the North would have remained a haven for run-away slaves and there would have been a war over it and continuing tensions along the Mason Dixon line. There would also have been a war over California, but I’m not going to change history too much. There would be a continuing line of connection from the North all the way across to California, while the South would not have been able to push enough people westward to colonize California. As for Texas, of course, it would be a nation independent of either of its parents, comprising Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, and it would still be at war with Mexico.

Wait. Is that part fiction or history?

Well, knowing what we know now of the ultimate demise of slave states, we could assume that sometime (probably within the last 50 years) there would have been a revolution in the South and ultimately it would have become a black fundamentalist state. I don’t know if it would have been fundamentalist Christian or Islamic, and I don’t think it makes much difference. You pick.

Of course, the United States would likely not have been quite such a world power or influencer during the World Wars, and it is likely that under Kaiser Wilhelm, a united Europe would have fended off the advance of communism.

So, what we would have today would be a world very much different than the one we currently live in, or not so much, depending on your perspective—all because preserving the Union was not a priority for Lincoln.

Take this novel idea and run with it.

How to help promote a new novel

People have asked what they can do to help promote Steven George & The Dragon. I'm happy to let you all know. It's really simple. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

1. Visit StnGeorge.com and read about the book. If you have a Facebook account, click the like button at the bottom. Share the link with your friends. (And of course, you can reserve your copy of the book.)
2. Visit the Facebook fanpage and “Like” it at http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Steven-George-The-Dragon/190084564346235. (Or search for "Steven George & The Dragon" from Facebook.) Also, “Share” the page with your friends. Feel free to leave comments.
3. If you have a Twitter account, Tweet the web address http://stngeorge.com.
4. Reserve Friday 3/25 in the early evening (open house from 5:30-8:00 p.m.) to come to Jitters Coffee in Redmond for the release party and readings.

Of course, the more people you tell, the better it will be. When we talk about "word of mouth" campaigns, we're talking about your mouth!

Thanks to all the friends who have helped so far!

Steven George & The Dragon

We can finally announce the date! March 25th will see the publication of the young adult fantasy novel Steven George & The Dragon. The presale site is now open at http://stngeorge.com. Half of gross profits from presales will be donated to Room to Read for the building of libraries in developing countries. Before you buy, you can read the first chapter online.

The book will be available in both a print edition and on a CD-ROM eBook that includes both the deluxe color PDF and a non-copy-protected ePUB that will play on most eReaders and computer eBook readers. The reserved copies will all be signed by the author and the order form includes a space for your instructions on how to personalize your copy.

Stⁿ George was originally blogged during NaNoWriMo 2007 when it was enthusiastically received. Comments from readers were influential in determining the final version of the story as it now appears.

Raised from birth as a dragonslayer, Steven discovers that he is poorly equipped to deal with the overwhelming world outside his small remote village. That might be because none of the village elders actually knew what a dragon looked like, exactly where it would be found, or how to kill it. Armed only with his naivety and his ability to tell stories, Steven exchanges "once-upon-a-times" with every willing stranger he meets. Each improbable tale leads him closer to the true meaning of his quest. Ultimately he discovers that if all that looks like a dragon is not a dragon, then it follows that all that is a dragon may not look like a dragon.

Join in the fun by ordering your copy of Steven George and The Dragon at http://stngeorge.com!