The New Worlds Patreon will have to come back to the topic of slavery later, because there’s still more to say. But the last post for this month looks at a rather central question: just what were all of those enslaved people made to do? Comment over there.
As the New Worlds Patreon continues its grim survey of slavery, we come to the question of what rights, if any, slaves might have in a given society. Comment over there.
So there’s the idea of four stages of competence, right? Unconscious incompetence (you’re bad at something and don’t even know it), conscious incompetence (you’re bad at it, but you know that), conscious competence (you’re good and you know it), and unconscious competence (you’re so good you don’t even have to think about it anymore).
The other day, while meditating, I realized a form of this applies to mindfulness:
Unconscious lack of focus — I am distracted from what I’m supposed to pay attention to — usually my breath — and I haven’t even realized that fact.
Conscious lack of focus — I am distracted from what I’m supposed to pay attention to, but I have noticed that fact. (Which means I am succeeding at the basics of mindfulness, yay!)
Conscious focus — I am paying attention to the correct target, but dammit, my awareness of the fact that I am focused keeps on breaking that focus. (I am again succeeding, but I’m annoyed at my own observer effect.)
Unconscious focus — I am paying attention to the correct target and don’t even realize that fact. (I am succeeding, buuuuut I’m lucky if this stage lasts for two seconds at a stretch.)
. . . and if you’re thinking, “But if you realized this while meditating, that probably means you were somewhere in the ‘lack of focus’ half of that list,” you are quite correct. 😛
In addition to the ongoing SFWA auction (where you’ve got three days left to bid on the Rook and Rose book + tea sample package and the first, second, third, and fourth kaffeeklatsch seats), there is now also the Sunflower Auction for Ukrainian charity! There are tons of things on offer there, browsable via the tags, but my own contribution is a bespoke short story based on the folkloric source of the winner’s choosing. Bidding for that one runs almost to the end of May!
In discussing the reprehensible institution of slavery, the New Worlds Patreon looks next at the questions of who was enslaved and on what grounds, and who owned those slaves. Comment over there.
If you prefer your worldbuilding essays in tangible form, you can now get New Worlds, Year Five in print from Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, Bookshop.org, IndieBound, and Amazon in the US or in the UK — note that the US link gives me a small commission, but I mention that for disclosure, not as a push for you to buy from Amazon.
Also also! At JordanCon last month they published their (I think) annual) anthology, this time titled Neither Beginnings Nor Endings. It contains my long story “And Ask No Leave of Thee,” which the familiar among you will have recognized as a line from the ballad “Tam Lin;” yes, after several decades, my brain finally produced a Tam Lin retelling! You can get the anthology only from Amazon, in ebook or in print (both of those commission links again).
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is running a silent auction, and I’m in it! Prizes on offer are a package deal of a signed copy of The Mask of Mirrors and five Rook and Rose-themed tea samples, and a virtual kaffeeklatsch for which the seats are being auctioned separately: one, two, three, four. Bid on one of those + the first package, and you could potentially sip delicious book-themed tea while we chat! Or if those aren’t your cuppa (sorry not sorry), there are oodles of other great things on offer at the auction site. But you only have a few days, so bid fast!
If you’re wondering what the money will be used for, SFWA does a great deal to assist people in the field, from the Emergency Medical Fund to the Legal Fund to scholarships for marginalized creators to attend events like the Nebulas Conference. Over the course of my career, SFWA has managed to reinvent itself as a much stronger advocate within SF/F publishing — the closest thing we have to a union, and very much needed, as things like #DisneyMustPay continue to show.
Sooner or later, any discussion of human culture and history has to address the topic of slavery, and the Topic Builders of the New Worlds Patreon have decided that time has come. We begin our journey down this very ugly road with more of an overview perspective than usual — comment over there.
A while back I wrote an essay on how translation gets represented in fiction for Dan Koboldt’s blog. Well, that essay is now available as part of an excellent book called Putting the Fact in Fantasy, which is stuffed full of practical advice on a variety of topics relevant to writers. You can get an overview for some of its contents in Dan’s post, and you can order the book from a variety of retailers — including as an audiobook! Some of you might also be interested in its predecessor, Putting the Science in Science Fiction.
For me, these kinds of books aren’t only about learning details that let me correct my mistakes (though that happens, too). Just reading through such articles often gives me ideas for new stories, as some concrete specific suggests a whole plot problem or scene. May they do the same for you!
Man — I got through an average of one book for every two days in April. That’s kind of astonishing to realize.
For the fifth Friday this month, the New Worlds Patreon begins a journey (that will stretch across the theory essays for Year Six) through the question of how to create a magic system. We begin with the origins of systematized magic in genre fantasy, and with the countervailing notion of magic as a thing that is, rather than a thing one does. Comment over there!
(Edit: link was broken before because I forgot I had edited the title and URL of the post at BVC. It’s fixed now!)
This is not the final New Worlds Patreon post for the month, as there is one more Friday to come — but that one will (as is traditional) be devoted to a “theory” essay, so this is the last one for this topic! We turn our attention to restaurants, a fixture of life very characteristic of our modern society, but not unique to it. Comment over there!
The New Worlds Patreon wrapped up its fifth year at the end of February, and now you can get the Year Five collection!
Featuring discussions of everything from different forms of government to issues of representing invented languages on the page. Get it from Book View Cafe (via our shiny new storefront! we have both epub and mobi!), Barnes & Noble (for Nook), Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, Indigo, or Amazon US or UK. (Be aware that the Amazon US link gives me a small commission. Despite that kickback, though, I strongly encourage buying from sources other than Amazon when you can; BVC sells Kindle-compatible mobi files, too.)
This is only the ebook, by the way — the print edition will follow next month!
The “banquets” I’ve attended at academic conferences and SF/F conventions are a pale echo of the sumptuousness that word evokes. This week, the New Worlds Patreon looks at feasting — comment over there!
I got through a rather startling number of books the last two months. Cut for significant length.
How much would the contents of your kitchen spice cabinet be worth five hundred years ago? The New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to the outsized importance of herbs, spices, and other seasonings in the economic and political history of the world. Comment over there!
Drying, freezing, salting, pickling, jugging, and more — the New Worlds Patreon is looking at methods of food preservation! Comment over there.
Earlier today I posted to Twitter about how I’d been beating my head against a plot problem for about an hour, decided to give up and try again after dinner*, and then five minutes later my brain gave me a usable idea at last.
*The last week or two, I’ve been writing in the afternoon instead of my usual late-night stints. No, I don’t know why.
Naturally, several other writers have chimed in to confirm that yep, that’s often how it works. Of course the difficulty is, that isn’t always how it works; ignoring a problem is not a surefire solution for dealing with it. We’ve got abundant evidence from psychology that doing something else can be a good way to activate the problem-solving parts of your brain . . . but sometimes walking away is actually just you procrastinating. And half the time, you can’t really tell which one you’re doing until afterward.
For all that my job has many awesome aspects, this is not one of them. When I worked at a bookstore or on a Christmas tree form, it didn’t matter too much how enthused I felt on any given day. Sure, the job was more fun when I was into it for some reason, but fun or not, I could get it done. All it really took was the discipline of “you won’t get a paycheck if you don’t show up for work.”
Writing does also require discipline, of course — especially when you’re writing a novel, which is very much the “endurance sport” end of the job. I have long since lost count of how many days I didn’t particularly feel like I was in the zone, but once I sat down and made myself start, it actually went just fine. But the thing is, discipline will only get you so far. If you’re staring down the barrel of a scene like today’s, where I knew what it needed to accomplish but not how to make it do that, a scene I’d been kicking down the road for days already without ever clicking over into a concrete plan to make it go . . . you can’t just will the ideas to happen. Ideas are like cats. Some days you have to coax them out with treats and feather wands. Other days they start walking over your face at three a.m. demanding attention, and no, sleep is not more important than they are. And some days they just want none of it, no matter what inducements you offer.
After this long at the job, I have plenty of inducements. I know the value of things like associating particular music with a particular project, so that sometimes I can jump-start the creativity by putting the music on. I can sit down and logic my way through the structural elements surrounding the question marks, or I can get in the shower and hope for the magic inspiration juice that’s in the water to make things click. (Yesterday that resulted in a second session of writing, even though I’d already written enough for the day, because I had ideas and didn’t want to lose them.) But sometimes . . . sometimes the answers just aren’t there, and they just won’t come.
(I do want to note, by the way, that I’m talking specifically about being empty-handed on a bit of story, not being empty-handed more generally. I had a spate of that latter issue around this time last year, and it’s a different kind of scary. It’s the fear that not only will the solution to this plot question never come, but nothing at all will do so, ever again. That one is obviously much worse, and the solutions to it require you to dig deeper to figure out what the source of the difficulty is.)
I’ve been a writer for long enough that I don’t actually fear that I’ll be stuck forever on a plot problem. Sooner or later I’ll figure out a baseline functional answer, even if it’s not as good as I would like. (Sometimes that’s what revision is for.) But when you’ve got deadlines, you often need “sooner” rather than “later,” and the longer a stuck patch drags on, the more stressful it becomes.
And when you’re a full-time writer . . . in many ways this is a dream job, and I know it. But let me tell you, the part where you kind of need your creativity to perform on command in order to get your paycheck is not its best feature.
Just as not all thieves work in groups, not all criminal groups are primarily about theft. For the last week of March, the New Worlds Patreon takes on organized crime. Comment over there!
It had to come eventually, in any discussion of theft and worldbuilding in speculative fiction: this week the New Worlds Patreon is talking about the trope of thieves’ guilds. Comment over there!
