How do you like your Steam Punk fiction?

[The Inventor]

So I mainly hang out on the area for building stuff, but a lot ( most ) of my free time
involves writing in some form, style or genera.

I've been writing largely for myself or for the people I game with for many years at a level
where teachers and everyone else said " Oh you need to publish."

But I have tastes and styles which are largely outside the interests of society, I'm a tech
guy I love to know how things work, why even the annoying details of machin'y bits and such.
In my writing I am very detail Oriented person, I like to describe the many intricate details of a
scene or object.

I guess question one is;
   Do you fine folks feel the same way?

It has been said by a few ( in my daily life ) that I am over oriented in the details of a situation an
seem to loose sight of the event(s) and people. Which was regarded as a problem by the people doing
the reading.

Second question issue;
    writing female character(s) who are main characters. This is a hell of a problem for me I can write
guys, animals, nations and all that. But writing the love interest's point of view first person and how they
think feel and talk. These things kill me to write,

Is there a; Method, plan... I've no idea what word I'm looking for here. Is there some sort of "trick?" to doing that well and not sounding like a 40's pulp writer when penning the girls in my stories?

Part three is romance / romantic scenes in stories without being annoying, but I'll save that for later.
( totally lost in that part of the story )

Oh and of course I've been ink bottle and quilling my stories!

Thoughts ideas, suggestions, Mockery?

[Commander Fulbourne]

Hello!
I can't say that I share your interest in the tech side so much but I definitely understand your focus on detail. My great passion (aside from steampunk obviously) is politics. If I were to try and write a steampunk book I would probably devote 100 page appendix to a psephological study of the Whig election victory of 1999 (or some such thing). I think this springs from a certain joy that we feel when two of our interests combine, for example I was thrilled to hear of Manchester University's steampunk Gilbert and Sullivan. I suppose the extent to which this matters depends on how you want to publish your book and in what quantity you wish to sell it.

Good luck with your writing, the world needs more steampunk books!

[Kaljaia]

When I read anything, it's logic that will decide my opinion on the book.
If you can write a female character who follows a logical set of actions, even if they're based on some random backstory illogic, I'll read it. If your government and details and random inventions all have a point in the plot, a point to the characters, and are the product of logical decisions, I'll take that too.
What turns me off a book quick is not establishing why characters are doing what they are doing, or are the way they are. Just because you know your character's purpose doesn't mean we know it too, and just because it looks cool on paper doesn't mean it reads like logic to us.
That's all I have to offer, from being in the same spot with my fantasy writing. (Yeah, got the whole friends/parents telling me to finish and publish too, but their opinions aren't exactly an unbiased sample)

And please, don't let your main male character solve your main female character's problems for her. 

[EchoesIE]

My opinion:

If there is someone in a professional environment that tells you might be worthy of publishing, I'd go with it. It's completely worth the ink, paper and manilla envelope to send it off and see just how good it is. There are few things more rewarding than seeing your own words in a magazine or anthology book of some sort.

Now for your questions:
1) If the details surround something that is important to the story, then by all means, use a paragraph to describe how it works and some of the kinks of it, however, you don't need to describe grass or a fence to us in any more than a couple of words. Most readers have a decent enough imagination to figure out what a brass fence or green grass looks like.

2) Your female delima -- if you have a significant other who is female, or a close female friend I'd ask her about the said questions and then get an accurate reading from her, especially if this female is the same age as the one in your story. If you don't have anyone like that, then pick up some short stories that have the females as the main character. Pick up some traits and feelings that are expressed and use them to your advantages (as a base, not the cream...you thief).

[The Inventor]

Thanks Commander Fulbourne.

When I read anything, it's logic that will decide my opinion on the book.
If you can write a female character who follows a logical set of actions, even if they're based on some random backstory illogic, I'll read it. If your government and details and random inventions all have a point in the plot, a point to the characters, and are the product of logical decisions, I'll take that too.
What turns me off a book quick is not establishing why characters are doing what they are doing, or are the way they are. Just because you know your character's purpose doesn't mean we know it too, and just because it looks cool on paper doesn't mean it reads like logic to us.
That's all I have to offer, from being in the same spot with my fantasy writing. (Yeah, got the whole friends/parents telling me to finish and publish too, but their opinions aren't exactly an unbiased sample)

And please, don't let your main male character solve your main female character's problems for her. 

This is very much what I needed to know, as the story will no doubt be largely confusing in it's setting and history ( a necessary at the start ); keeping the character's motives clear to the reader will be both hard and still I think enjoyable. Keeping things logical, need to post it note that to my monitor somewhere.
   Keeping the male character from solving the female character's problems for her I can avoid; as the story demands that he can't for the first part and she's going to peel off into her own ordeals before the end and he'll be somewhere else entirely. But I will keep it in mind for the many other characters each of them will interact with.

Thanks both of you have assisted me greatly.

[The Inventor]

My opinion:

If there is someone in a professional environment that tells you might be worthy of publishing, I'd go with it. It's completely worth the ink, paper and manilla envelope to send it off and see just how good it is. There are few things more rewarding than seeing your own words in a magazine or anthology book of some sort.

Now for your questions:
1) If the details surround something that is important to the story, then by all means, use a paragraph to describe how it works and some of the kinks of it, however, you don't need to describe grass or a fence to us in any more than a couple of words. Most readers have a decent enough imagination to figure out what a brass fence or green grass looks like.

2) Your female delima -- if you have a significant other who is female, or a close female friend I'd ask her about the said questions and then get an accurate reading from her, especially if this female is the same age as the one in your story. If you don't have anyone like that, then pick up some short stories that have the females as the main character. Pick up some traits and feelings that are expressed and use them to your advantages (as a base, not the cream...you thief).

I suppose this is the part where I echo millions of other people who've carved a story out of a mass of thoughts and ideas. And in my mind I can see it as the finished product; from the size of the book to the type set and the cover art. The Index(s) the chapter art, this would be an insanely expensive book to produce I'm sure as the art in the story would / will take on important parts and without the art it's
"just a novel". And since I wrote it about 5 years ago, and poke at it when I'm not working on every other thing that pops up I've always been letting it hang instead of pushing myself to "finish it".

I can understand the bulk of readers not wanting to know how many teeth were on the gears or how many there were. Though now that you mention it, I want to put a brass fence in my front yard.

This last part is my issue, there is at present no girl friend to speak of and as a result when I've shipped
it off to young women of my age / the character's age I usually get the "Oh wow that was amazing."
and little else about the story or the female character(s) I needed feed back on.

Should I take that to mean so far I've written a character which is doing just fine and I can leave her alone without making any big changes?

When I get the guys to read it, since I and most of my friends in RL are male; we set a whole different set of values interests in the story. Mostly I got " What does she look like, you don't describe her appearance very often after the beginning"

Or questions about the who, where, why, for back story.

Short of sending a document which I know be yet unfinished I am quite hesitant to ship it off to anyone who could be considering it in a professional capacity.

[whistlelock]

The writing life is not an easy one.  It's filled with more rejection that most people can tolerate.  If you're prepared to accept more rejection than you've ever been through before, strap your goggles on and put it all out there.

If you want feedback, find writing circles in your area or on-line.  There are many.  Most people won't be able to give you the feedback you're looking for.  Not because they are unwilling, but it's because they can't see the working bits of the story under the paint job.  Writing circles help.

When it comes to the details-well, that's part of your Voice.  Learn to control your Voice, and use it to your benefit.

Writing women?  Well, that could be your weakness.  Hemingway couldn't write women either, and he did okay.   

Romance?  That's actually very hard to write convincingly.  You're not alone here.  Most people are surprised about how hard it is to write "I love you" 15 different ways without sounding juvenile, cliche, trite, or simplistic.  My only advice here is to watch a lot of Romantic Comedies with a notebook in front of you.  Take notes on the story- when and how the characters meet and fall in love. 

There is a formula to it, I assure you. 

But, in the end, writing is a skill.  With practice, like anything else, you will improve.  You just need to be prepared to accept failure and rejection.

Before I graduated a professor gave me a ratio: An unpublished novel has a shelf life if three years.  Every year there are 100,000 novels written and sent out.  Of that number, only 10,000 are truly readable.  Of that 10,000 only 1000 will be of interest to an agent.  Of that 1000, only 100 will be of interest to a publisher.  Of that 100, only 1 will be published.

Are you that 1? 

IF you have no doubt.  No shred of hesitation about that 1, then do it.  Master your craft.  Perfect your skills.  Sacrifice for it.  Work hard. 

But.

If the thought of being told no hundreds of times makes you hesitate.  If the thought of being ignored causes you to swallow on reflex, then don't do it.  Keep your golden secret.  Tuck it away where it will be safe and warm.  It will always be the fantasy of what might have been.  Build your brass fences.  Create wonderful ray guns, and re-purpose old keyboards. And on those nights that are so cold  you are wearing your socks to bed and reading yourself to sleep with your favorite book, you can think to yourself, "I could have written a story like this," and believe it.  It will keep you warm at night.


As a personal example- my Bachelor's is in English with a focus in fiction writing.  I published 2 short stories right out of college.  I saw a bright and luminous career as a writer ahead of me.  Surely I was the one.

And then there was this drought where nothing got published.  I wrote and submitted three novels to various publishers and agencies.  All rejected with a form letter from the small agencies.  The big ones didn't bother to respond.  Most of my short stories failed to garner even a form rejection letter.  Being ignored is a terrible thing.  It's worse than being told no.  Believe me.

Mark Twain said, "Write for 5 years, if by then no one is willing to pay you, quit and go back to chopping wood." 

After 3 years of rejection- that's right 3 years- I started to look at axes.  I wondered if I should get one with a rubberized grip or go old school with a wooden handle.  They both had their benefits.  Rubber grips offer a better hold, but the all-wooden handle absorbed a lot of the shock of impact.  And, I would need the right kind of boots.  Don't want to lose any toes.   

Then I picked up a part-time gig writing video game reviews for a website. Shortly after that I sold a short story in December.  So, I have that.  The dream isn't dead yet.  The pilot light is still burning. 

Maybe this year I'll be the 1. 

[Thalesia Turnblood]

And the fun doesn't end once you get that contract, but we'll leave that worry for later.

Let's boil this down.

1. Detail oriented.

2. Trouble writing women and romance.

First. And I'm going to paint with a WIDE gender brush. There are men and women on both sides of this and in the middle. I get that, but I'm going to call 'simple majority' on this generalization.

Detail oriented works for a primarily male audience. I mean, look at Tom Clancy. The man bores my hair off, but he's wildly popular precisely *because* of his realistic and detailed writing. My husband flew with one of his researchers when he was writing about F-15s for a non-fiction book he wrote and apparently the guy was meticulous. After he finished puking.

Me? I can skip pages and pages of his books and as long as I'm reading the dialogue, I can still follow the story. I do not need to know how to build a nuclear submarine in my basement. I don't care. My husband eats that stuff up.

Aside from mechanical details, I'll skip too-minute worldbuilding because, honestly, if your world has an eight-party political system and your novel deals with the biggest two or three, then giving me the minutiae of all eight is going to do a few things.
1) It's going to bore me.
2) It's going to make me angry that I bought a novel that is wasting my time with stuff that has no bearing on the plot.
3) I can spot padding for word-count a mile away and that makes me angry, too.
4) Couldn't you think of something to DO with that information other than bother me with it?

I'll take those out of order.

#2 is, in terms of writing as opposed to reading, the big one. If it's not advancing your plot or going to character development, slash it. I only care how your gears and cogs fit together if it's moving the story along.

As to #4, the reader doesn't need to know everything you know. Just because you found a bunch of cool factoids, doesn't mean you have to include them in your novel.

For example, for my last story, I read translation after translation of 12th century lays on werewolf stories. Heck, I worked out a few translations myself. I read essays and treatises from classicists to feminists. I pulled from the Mabinogion, from TH White, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Tennyson and built my own bridges between them all to design one character. You know how much of that made it into the manuscript? A few paragraphs. Because my readers don't want a history lesson. They want a story.

To sum up, in regards to being detail oriented -- Story Trumps All.

I've got to get my day rolling, so I'll come back to address your character stuff later today.

[costumemercenary]

1) Short of actually reading an chapter or so of your writing, I'm not sure I could say if it's too detailed or not. On one hand, we can be our own harshest critics (I have a habit of tinkering and tinkering the same sentence) and on the other hand, y'know, you probably know your writing best and are probably right. If you think it's too detailed, it's probably too detailed... yes, I know just contradicted myself.

2) You can write a story without female characters. Or with very few female characters, that you used the term "love interest" seems telling. If the character's sole purpose than to be so-and-so's love interest, they're likely to sound rubbish. (I'll add here that most of the female geeks I know and myself have just gotten used to this ongoing irritation in fiction of all forms.)

Female characters are just characters, like male characters, and whilst there are differences between men and women, there are more similarities than differences. There was a study on the way men and women write, for example, that concluded that there is no inherent "female-ness" or "male-ness" to the way either gender writes that would betray their gender when writing. People just couldn't tell.

If you're serious about writing female characters, you could try making your story could pass the rather basic Bechdel Test. I'm not asking you to crowbar it in, but it's one of those sore points of mine: Do you have two named female characters talking to each other (more or less alone) about something other than a man? It's the basic benchmark of whether or not the female characters are just there to reveal things about the men, to make give them something to fight for or motivate them?

That said, lots of people writing today can't write female characters. As whistlelock says, it doesn't need to be a great impediment (though I suppose in an ideal world, it perhaps should be more of one). Alan Moore can't write female characters. Christopher Paolini, for example, ragingly successful and unrepentently crap. Even J K Rowling's cast is biased rather overwhelmingly towards the male gender.

Having no or few female characters is probably better than having exceptionally annoying ones.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: treat them like your male characters.

3) Romance? If you can't write it, then don't. Or don't push it into the foreground too often. It's really that simple. Writing is not one skill but many, many interlocking ones. Show off the things you're good at (intricate machine detail) and keep the romance to a minimum.

On the sidenote, I really, really don't think Romantic Comedies are a good place to learn from. You might want to try for something understated and less over-the-top. Arguably easier to pull off. The character doesn't need to say "I love you". That could just be because I find repression easier to write than full-blown passion.

[Thalesia Turnblood]

All right. Kids off to school and fresh coffee at hand. Let's dive into writing opposite gender characters and romance.

FYI, I'm a romance writer. I enjoy romance, I love Happily Ever Afters, and if a romantic subplot is introduced, I will be giddy with joy and follow it closely.

First, it's not strictly necessary to have a romantic interest in your story. As I mentioned in the previous post, does having that character and conflict advance either your plot or your main character's development?

I say 'main character' because most stories really do feature one primary mover, as opposed to romance, which often gives both hero and heroine more or less equal time.

If your female character's only purpose is to be a romantic interest and she doesn't feature in the plot -- don't.
If your female character's only purpose is to help him reload his gun during a firefight, and hang beautifully from his arm while he's drinking martinis -- don't.
If your female character's only purpose is to complicate his life in a way that distracts from your plot -- don't. Not that she can't feature in a subplot, but it all has to come together. The subplot enhances, informs, conflicts with and furthers your story.
If your female character's only purpose is to show how well you describe her abundant bosoms, flowing hair and skill with a raygun (Look! It's Steampunk Barbie!) -- don't. Please. I beg you.

Having passed all those tests and your female character is of vital importance to both plot and character development, it's really NOT necessary to go into a lot of detail regarding her abundant bosoms and flowing hair. Some, yes, but there's no more need to wax rhapsodic on her than there is on your main character.

The thing about giving detail (this also goes to writing characters) is that you write what impacts your character. Does it matter that she's 5'2", that her measurements are 38-24-36, that when she was in 5th grade she fell off the monkeybars and broke her leg?

No. According to your hero, she's a luscious little armful with a slight limp that adds an entirely distracting wiggle to her walk. And as he's about to approach her with a salacious comment, he overhears her talking to a freighter captain in perfect Cantonese about a smuggled shipment -- one that your character needs to get his hands on.

Now, you see, she's part of the main conflict and his reaction to her is going to change. When she's vital, you can't just gloss over writing her.

Know your character, especially if she's going to be an important part of the MCs story. We're not aliens. We're not from Venus any more than you're from Mars. We think, we grow, we're conflicted. Some of us want to settle down and have lots of babies, some of us would rather wrestle rabid badgers than hold an infant.

Now, you mention in your original post: writing the love interest's point of view first person and how they think feel and talk.

If you're writing in the 1st person POV of your main character, you're never going to get that deeply into the love interest's head. You can't. You can only write what your character sees, feels and hears. Unless you're writing multiple 1st person, which could get confusing.

However, if you're writing solely in 1 character, then you still need to know her as well as you know him. What she does and says informs his reactions, and it's only through his thoughts and reactions that we get to know her.

I write multiple deep 3rd. I like being in my character's heads. Both of them. I know both of them, or at least they reveal themselves to me as I write. Do a character interview with her, if you think it'll help -- several forms and questionnaires are available online. Anyway, when I write male characters, I know what formed them, so I can make a legitimate stab at figuring out how they're going to act in a given situation.

It's the same process for writing female characters. There's no trick to it, really.

I will say that it's easy to fall into writing an idealized version of an opposite gender character. For instance, it's a pet peeve when I read a romance novel and this tough guy starts spouting poetry out of nowhere because the heroine has touched his heart and made him a better man, yadda yadda yadda.

Pleez. He's an individual who is going to express his love in a variety of ways, but flowery words are probably not it. We call that "a chick in a man suit" and it's a cop-out. It's the mark of an author who hasn't really put any effort into creating a hero that we can believe in. The author has no idea who this guy really is, and as a result, the reader can't invest in that character.

The flipside of that is what you talked about. Writing the 40s pulp/noir bimbo -- an idealized but shallow version of 'what men want' rather than a character who is a vital part of the story.

I've rambled a bit, and probably repeated myself a lot, so I apologize. I suppose the sum of this, as a corollary to Story Trumps All, is Write Real People. Male or female, doesn't matter. Just make me care.

[The Inventor]

Holy Crap That's more posts than I think I've ever gotten on any thing I've ever posted.
All of it important to hear, even the parts about about the perils of publishing.

I think you all have given me the things I need to reevaluate how each of the characters are written and what the supporting character's roles will be / how they will be represented.

Would people be interested in the who's / why / how ? Or would I be turning into one of those annoying
"soon to be author(s)" I keep meeting at the CON's?

Sadly for me; both my lap top ( an original Windows 95 Thinkpad ) and Dad's Laptop ( his was "The family computer ) have suffered a CPU battery failure, and Dad's has had it's monitor ripped loose by careless hands.

So the digital copies of my 524 page story are locked in boxes I can't presently get into; and short of making a PDF I've no idea how to redigitize it ( oh this computer is having an ID crisis too, so I have some more issues to fix before I can fix it's Windows issues ).

Anyways, at some point I will finally be able to put it into computer form again and post evaluations.

[Miss Emilly Ladybird]

I think Turnbloods comments are fantastic!
absolutely spot on!
I like a bit of detail in my literature but I also, have been know to skip pages and pages of dreary/exciting detail without it reflecting even slightly on my appreciation of the plot.

The plot is the thing we read stories for. We want to know what happens.
The characters are why we care about the plot. We want to know what happens to them
Everything else is just style,setting and showing off...

I personally loathe long fantasy novels with too many characters with funny names in, in a world which has so many weird objects and cultures in i have a huge problem getting a handle on whats going on. However I adore Neal Stephenson and William Gibson because their characters grip me, in the same way Dickens and Austens characters grip me.

re female characters - yes we're not that different from guys really, no really! Why not make the female character your leads best friend rather than the obvious "love interest" - that is a far more "lovable2 relationship than a disstant "object of worship"

to be fair many adventure authors don't write very believable women characters - Philip Pullmans Lyra is unlike any little girls I have ever met - it's my belief he wrote the character as a boy and changed the name at the last minute - however it has not done anything to stem his sales - and indeed many people thought lyra the most exciting "heroine" for years... so don't worry about it.

As suggested before - join a writing group or two or three - go to a creative writing nightclass and chat to the tutor - take the criticism on board  - write a sample first chapter and post up on some of the creative writing group sites - see what the reaction is - that way you'll know if you're going in the right direction before spending a year writing the whole novel.

An editor friend of mine says she can tell within the first paragraph if it's worth bothering to read any more!

[costumemercenary]

Philip Pullmans Lyra is unlike any little girls I have ever met - it's my belief he wrote the character as a boy and changed the name at the last minute - however it has not done anything to stem his sales - and indeed many people thought lyra the most exciting "heroine" for years... so don't worry about it.

I thought Lyra was an utterly awesome little girl. Cultural differences aside, myself and quite a few of my friends really identify with her. But such is the way of fiction and ways of reading.

Holy Crap That's more posts than I think I've ever gotten on any thing I've ever posted.
All of it important to hear, even the parts about about the perils of publishing.

You asked writers to write about writing. It's one of their favourite subjects.

[The Inventor]

I think Turnbloods comments are fantastic!
absolutely spot on!
I like a bit of detail in my literature but I also, have been know to skip pages and pages of dreary/exciting detail without it reflecting even slightly on my appreciation of the plot.

The plot is the thing we read stories for. We want to know what happens.
The characters are why we care about the plot. We want to know what happens to them
Everything else is just style,setting and showing off...

I personally loathe long fantasy novels with too many characters with funny names in, in a world which has so many weird objects and cultures in i have a huge problem getting a handle on whats going on. However I adore Neal Stephenson and William Gibson because their characters grip me, in the same way Dickens and Austens characters grip me.

re female characters - yes we're not that different from guys really, no really! Why not make the female character your leads best friend rather than the obvious "love interest" - that is a far more "lovable2 relationship than a disstant "object of worship"

to be fair many adventure authors don't write very believable women characters - Philip Pullmans Lyra is unlike any little girls I have ever met - it's my belief he wrote the character as a boy and changed the name at the last minute - however it has not done anything to stem his sales - and indeed many people thought lyra the most exciting "heroine" for years... so don't worry about it.

As suggested before - join a writing group or two or three - go to a creative writing nightclass and chat to the tutor - take the criticism on board  - write a sample first chapter and post up on some of the creative writing group sites - see what the reaction is - that way you'll know if you're going in the right direction before spending a year writing the whole novel.

An editor friend of mine says she can tell within the first paragraph if it's worth bothering to read any more!

Well I can't change the relationship between the primary male character and the female without destroying the plot, he has to fall for her; she's after someone else ( Class structure society ), and neither of them end up " happily ever after"; though the secondary characters are going to more happily set up to follow.

Writing classes I've always been leary of; aside from being crazy broke I've heard mixed reviews from friends and family who did that.

Writing circle(s) sound generally more promising however and I'll have to look at that in the future.

The Novel was written ( atleast half of it; ) in 2005 when I was just out of school and working as a camp cook. I'm well past worrying about "if" the investment in time, at 560 pages and no art or appendix(s) yet the question in my mind is only " How do I make this the best book I can" regards to marketable or not don't even begin to factor into it; when I think it's ready for the public I don't think there'll be a publisher who'd touch it ( it will be a very picture/ art intensive story ). But I'm going for the Old European styles of illumination around the pages and hand made art to show off the cultures involved.

[dnbsdizzy]

To me in every type of story charactors are number one, if I love a charactor I will read genra's I would not typically consider, or subjects I don't care about. I hate stories that have too much minituia, who cares about reading how some device works for five pages, when you could tell me what the charactors are doing with the device! How does it benefeit them? how does it move the story? with steampunk or sci fi I want to know just enough to make the science credible but if things get too technical I glaze over or skip paragraphs.
as far as writing believable women. base them on women you admire, freinds, so's family, any woman that seems kind, strong, funny, loveable, look at why you admire these people and then add those traits to a female charactor. Always make them PEOPLE first and women second. this is the mistake alot of writers make and why we have so many stories with sterotyped female charactors, eather ball busting and *itchy, or shrinking fainting violets. when charactors or inspired by life they have more of a chance of being believable, good luck

So I mainly hang out on the area for building stuff, but a lot ( most ) of my free time
involves writing in some form, style or genera.

I've been writing largely for myself or for the people I game with for many years at a level
where teachers and everyone else said " Oh you need to publish."

But I have tastes and styles which are largely outside the interests of society, I'm a tech
guy I love to know how things work, why even the annoying details of machin'y bits and such.
In my writing I am very detail Oriented person, I like to describe the many intricate details of a
scene or object.

I guess question one is;
   Do you fine folks feel the same way?

It has been said by a few ( in my daily life ) that I am over oriented in the details of a situation an
seem to loose sight of the event(s) and people. Which was regarded as a problem by the people doing
the reading.

Second question issue;
    writing female character(s) who are main characters. This is a hell of a problem for me I can write
guys, animals, nations and all that. But writing the love interest's point of view first person and how they
think feel and talk. These things kill me to write,

Is there a; Method, plan... I've no idea what word I'm looking for here. Is there some sort of "trick?" to doing that well and not sounding like a 40's pulp writer when penning the girls in my stories?

Part three is romance / romantic scenes in stories without being annoying, but I'll save that for later.
( totally lost in that part of the story )

Oh and of course I've been ink bottle and quilling my stories!

Thoughts ideas, suggestions, Mockery?

[The Inventor]

Thanks Miss Dizzy,
that's quite helpful.

[pakled]

good stuff here. I'll have to use some of this for nefarious purposes (the advice, that is)
I tend to use dialog to set a scene, make explanations, etc. It's easy to read, and doesn't pad things too much.
I think one of the hallmarks of good literature is making you actually care about the characters...

[darkshines]

I personally will not read something advertised as steampunk fiction. I can read fantasy with steampunk elements, such as the Discwrld series, but much prefer science ficion and fact written during the Victorian era. I feel irritated and patronised when every other word is "raygun", "airship" or "goggles". This is exactly the same as my music taste as well. I would rather listen to something I feel fits with ME rather than something desperately trying to cash in on my lifestyle.