Want to know more about collaboration?

Alyc and I will be teaching an online class in May about collaboration for writers, drawing not only on our experiences writing the Rook & Rose books together, but also on my work for Born to the Blade and Legend of the Five Rings. The class is free to sign up for, so if you’re interested (or if you know people who would be), you can check it out on the Clarion West website!

Bag of Giving: epic Greek adventures for a good cause!

Last week I joined forces with Mike Underwood, Cass Morris, Marshall Ryan Maresca, and Dave Robison for an epic session of Agon as GM’d by Sharang Biswas. This turned out not to be the game I thought it was, not quite; I’d bought Agon many years ago at GenCon, but apparently it’s been significantly redesigned, I think for the better — the original edition looked very “grim ‘n gritty,” while the new version has a stronger aura of fun. We had a blast, and you can watch the results on Youtube.

The impetus behind this was Bag of Giving, a charity fundraising effort that’s pulling people together for interesting one-shots. Each month they pick a charity to support; for March it’s the The Hero Initiative, which helps comic book creators facing things like medical emergencies. But you don’t have to donate to that group specifically; you can choose any charity you like. (I’ll note, given the current situation, that we chose our charity well before the invasion of Ukraine. Donations to help refugees would not go amiss.) Then just send a screenshot of your donation, minus personal information, to contact at bagofgiving dot com.

To provide some incentive, every $5 you donate gets you an entry in a giveaway for a book bundle! The titles on offer for March are:

  • An Unintended Voyage by Marshall Ryan Maresca
  • Driftwood by Marie Brennan
  • Give Way to Night by Cass Morris (hardcover)
  • Liar’s Knot by M.A. Carrick
  • Shield and Crocus by Michael R. Underwood
  • We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen (hardcover)

We thank you in advance for whatever donations you make!

Let’s have a chapter on men

I’m starting to wonder what it would be like to read a book on daily life in X place and time that starts out by telling you most people, even among the upper classes, spent their days running their households, engaging in textile production, raising children, or (if they were wealthy enough) overseeing servants who did that work for them, and then has a section describing how men’s lives differed from that norm.

I know there are reasons other than direct patriarchy why such books aren’t organized that way — because men’s lives have historically been more varied, the descriptions of their activities requires more words if you aren’t just going to blow them off with a few sentences, which would make for a hell of a long chapter on the male experience — but I’ve read a lot of works in this informal genre, and after a while you really start to notice how thoroughly that experience is centered, and then women’s lives are a sidebar. It would be an interesting trick to flip it around, highlighting the fact that by far the most common occupation across a given society was “domestic manager,” and most of ’em were women.

New Worlds: Staying Warm (the actual essay)

(Apologies; once again I neglected to correct for the BVC site rebuild by reposting the essay here. That shouldn’t be an issue for much longer, though!)

I am infamous among friends and family for how easily I get cold. But I maintain that this is only natural: at temperatures below about sixty degrees Fahrenheit (fifteen degrees Celsius, for those of you on that system), human beings can die of hypothermia.

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New Worlds: A Light to Live By

I’m a night owl. If I’m up to see the sun rise, something has gone horribly wrong at one end of my day or the other. And while I’m theoretically there to see the sunset, in practice I hardly pay attention to it, unless I’m outside for some reason.

This luxury is brought to me by ubiquitous artificial lighting.

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New Worlds: Fuel for the Fire

Energy sources are a big topic of conversation these days. With fossil fuels being both damaging to the environment and increasingly difficult to acquire, we’re looking into a wide variety of alternatives — some of which are cutting-edge, and others of which are very old indeed.

The one option that’s been with us from the start has been muscle power. Our own to begin with; later, after we domesticated animals, we got to use theirs instead. For millennia, everything from agriculture to textile manufacture to metalworking has been carried out with sweat and toil, fueled by the food we and our livestock eat. But of course, you can’t elbow grease your way to everything. No amount of direct labor will cause food to cook, nor pottery to harden, nor ores to smelt.

For that, we needed fire.

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New Worlds: Disaster Relief

Because fantasy in particular is full of tyrannical rulers and terrible governments, I suspect there are many readers who assume the reaction of a historical king or queen to a flood, fire, famine, or other disaster was “suck it up — and yes, you still have to pay your taxes.”

I’m not going to say that never happened, but it was less common than you might think. Telling the peasantry to suck it up and still pay taxes is a fantastic way to get revolts — and even if those revolts don’t threaten to topple the throne, every farmer marching against you is a farmer not growing the crops your economy relies on. While you did get the occasional ruler both cruel enough and shortsighted enough to shrug off that danger, most of them at least made some attempt to deal with the underlying problem, however ineffectively.

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A belated Yuletide post

Finishing the draft of the third Rook and Rose book and then turning right back around to dive in on revisions means I never got around to posting about Yuletide until now!

But I definitely need to post, because the prize for going above and beyond the call of duty goes to LookingForOctober. I knew before the authors were revealed that someone had written me a Howl’s Moving Castle fic, “A Wizard of Wales,” followed by a sequel fic, “A Wizard in Ingary” — but not until reveals did I discover that the same person had also written me a THIRD story, this one for the Gabriel Knight series of video games: “Fate of the Children.” Three fics from one writer! And as if that weren’t bonanza enough, someone else wrote me a Howl fic, “In Which a Thesis Is Not Written.”

It makes me feel embarrassed that I didn’t have the time or energy to write treats the way I used to, in the misty past when I had more leisure. My assignment this year was “Gammer’s Garden,” a Chrestomanci fic for a prompt that made use of the decision to allow “Worldbuilding” as a character-style tag this year. No canon characters appear in the story, but it explores the history of the Pinhoe family and their dwimmer magic, with a connection to a detail of canon I’ve always found interesting.

Hopefully next Yuletide I’ll be able to pay it all forward!

New Worlds: Fire Prevention (the essay)

(I failed to repost this essay here like I intended to. Apologies to anyone who tried and failed to reach the BVC site! We are working like mad to have the new site up soon.)

As I said in last week’s essay, it’s in the public interests of a society to keep fires from spreading. It’s even more in those interests to keep them from starting in the first place — and because of that, government regulations designed to prevent, spot, and slow down fires go back a very long way.

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New Worlds: Fighting Fire

(We are getting very close to BVC being up and running again! But we aren’t there yet, so once again, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is hosted here on my site.)

As devastating as fires can be nowadays, we have ways of dealing with them. In my kitchen there sits a canister of fire-suppressing chemicals; on my ceilings perch little disks that scream bloody murder when they smell smoke or carbon monoxide; if something goes wrong, a big truck will roll up and hook itself up to a hydrant that will spew out all the water I might need, at high enough pressures to reach upper floors with ease.

But rewind the clock, and things get ugly fast.

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New Worlds: Emergency Medical Services

(We have great hopes that the Book View Cafe website will be back up and running soon! Until then, I will continue to post my Patreon essays here.)

If something goes wrong — a fire; a home intruder; but especially for the purpose of this essay, a medical emergency — I know exactly what to do. I’ll pick up my phone and call 9-1-1, the emergency number for the United States. Someone on the other end will send an ambulance full of trained medical personnel, who will administer some aid on-site and then (if necessary) take the patient to the hospital, siren blaring all the way.

There are many reasons to be glad I live in the twenty-first century, but it’s startling to me that if I rewind the clock just fifty-five years — to 1966 — this seemingly obvious and sensible concept would not have been available to me.

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New Worlds December essay, redux

On request, I’m reposting the next-to-last non-theory essay from the New Worlds Patreon, since the downing of the Book View Cafe website has rendered it inaccessible. Also, for those of you wondering what happened at over BVC, the short form is: we’re gearing up to give the site a major and long-awaited overhaul . . . and in the course of the gearing up, it, uh, went belly-up. >_< But the good news is that we’re on track to roll out the new! improved! site! very soon, and it’s going to be so much better once we do.

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