Another fifth Friday of the month, which means another bonus theory essay for the New Worlds Patreon! Today we take on the question of whether you can have potatoes in Middle-Earth — which is to say, whether you’re allowed to mix and match your worldbuilding influences. Comment over there!
Fourth in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.
A few months ago I got a smartwatch, and one of the things it measures is “stress.” Mine, uh. Thinks I’m basically about to explode at all times?
And this isn’t just “okay, yes, I’m under stress.” So is my husband — if anything, more stress than me — and he has the same brand of smartwatch, but it thinks he’s much more chill. So naturally, I wondered what the watch is using as the basis of its evaluation.
Turns out the answer is heart rate variability — which, yes, does appear to be robustly correlated with matters like anxiety and PTSD, along with physical fitness; more fit = better HRV. I do get exercise, and I am not that badly off with anxiety and such, so why is my stress rating so high?
I think I found the answer when I went looking for what can improve HRV. (It doesn’t just reflect your state of mind; there’s evidence that influencing HRV directly can in turn affect how you feel.) One of the most promising answers, where “promising” translates to “something I can try myself at home,” is diaphragmatic breathing, aka belly breathing. When we’re stressed, we tend to tighten our abdomens and breathe more in the upper chest; when we’re relaxed, we breath more from the stomach. Because our brains are gullible chemical sponges, it goes the other way, too: if you deliberately breathe from the diaphragm, you can reduce your feelings of stress, whereas if you breathe from your upper chest, you’ll increase feelings of tension and anxiety.
That much, I already knew. I’d never made a concerted attempt to use that knowledge, though, so I downloaded an app that’s designed for breathing exercises and set it to the timing mentioned in one HRV study, a ten-second in-out cycle, and tried doing that for five or ten minutes. Lo and behold, I can see the stress rating dropping in my smartwatch’s data. Okay, so, yes, this can improve my HRV and thereby reduce the stress metric.
But here’s the real kicker: doing that made me start to notice how I’m breathing throughout my day.
And the answer is, really, really astonishingly badly. It turns out that when I’m focused on something else, I tend to begin breathing very shallowly, and maybe even hold my breath? In small doses that’s fine — quite natural — but if I’m doing that on a regular basis, uh, I think I may know why my smartwatch thinks I’m about to explode. So now my project is to check in with myself periodically and notice if I’ve fallen into that pattern. Over time, I think I can retrain myself to breathe better as a matter of habit. If I’m right, I’ll probably see it reflected in my watch’s data.
But I may — should — also see it reflected in my life. I don’t think I’m super stressed on a psychological level . . . but that’s the kind of thing you quite possibly don’t notice until it’s gone.
Wrapping up a month of the functional arts, the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look the wonders we have wrought with metal! Comment over there . . .
You’d be forgiven for thinking I title half my poems in Latin, given “Damnatio Memoriae” and now “Draco Urbis,” which I have just sold to Julia Rios at Worlds of Possibility. I swear, it isn’t true! Okay, yes, I do have two other unsold poems with Latin titles, but I’ve also got more than two dozen that aren’t of that type.
Anyway, this one was a long time coming — at least eighteen years, maybe more, since I don’t remember when I first came up with the idea; that’s just when I created the file that was my abortive attempt to write the concept as a short story before running aground on my lack of plot. And then I also wrote a version of this in a different poetic form, a tanka instead of the mirror cinquain version that’s the one I’ve sold. But I’m very pleased with the result, and I’m looking forward to seeing it published!
I’m a big fan of weaving, embroidery, and the various other textile arts that are the subject of this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay. Comment over there!
Third in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.
I don’t remember where I got linked to this, but the Guardian has a ~5 installment series of weekly emails about how to “reclaim your brain,” i.e. dial back the amount of time you’re spending each day on your phone. The tilde is there because you get an introductory email at the outset and a week six bonus, so it’s actually seven emails all told — and they do sign you up for a couple of other things once that ends, which isn’t entirely great, but on the other hand the stuff you get signed up for is e.g. “Well Actually,” which is a fairly positive-oriented newsletter about health and wellness, so it could be worse. Still and all, you might have to unsubscribe from things after “Reclaim Your Brain” ends, if you’re not interested in other emails.
In general, the series gives you instructions on how to figure out the average amount of time you use your phone each day and take a good look at how that time is being spent — obviously there’s a difference between three hours spent doom-scrolling social media and three hours spent immersed in a great ebook. Then they walk you through techniques to help you break the negative habits you have around usage. All of this more top-level advice is paired with personalized accounts from a guy who realized he’d become extremely unhealthy in his relationship with his phone and social media, so you get both the analytical and emotional sides of the tale.
I, uh. Still need to sit down and implement some of their advice? My issue with my phone isn’t actually social media, it’s games like solitaire, but it’s still true that I’m not happy with how much time I wind up unthinkingly spending on things of that type, rather than something I would find more rewarding. Especially since I have a strong tendency to reach for them in any idle moment, e.g. standing in line at a store, and it’s entirely possible that downtime of that sort is a vital component of my work: if I’m poking at a game on my phone, I’m more likely not noodling with a story in the back of my head. Over time, that’s going to add up to a problem, since “let yourself be bored” is quite possibly a key element in creativity.
But even though I’m not yet a success story for the Guardian’s series, I do recommend “Reclaim Your Brain” to anybody who would like to reduce their phone usage. You can always be like me and save the emails for later . . .
Book View Cafe has started up a YouTube channel for author readings — it’s a great way to sample the works in our catalogue, if you enjoy listening to fiction as well as reading it on the page. I’ve done recordings of samples for many of my titles there, and those are starting to roll out; if you want to hear me reading the prologue from Midnight Never Come or from In Ashes Lie, go check ’em out!
Our second “functional arts” essay for the New Worlds Patreon is kind of a twofer, maybe a threefer: ceramics, glass, and a side diversion into the more decorative topic of mosaics! Comment over there . . .
It’s been several years since I put out one of my mini-short story collections, but a new one is en route! A Breviary of Fire honestly could have been ready a bit sooner, but I fell into a slightly OCD determination to balance out the regional groupings within the collection so they had equal numbers of stories. Because of this, the publication dates of the stories range from 2005 to 2023. They’re all based on folklore and mythology in some fashion, but not European fairy tales (those have gone into Monstrous Beauty and Never After), nor on folksongs (those will be getting their own collection, probably next year).
A Breviary of Fire will be out on the twenty-first of this month. You can preorder it via the links here or wait for it to come out so you can buy it direct from the publisher, Book View Cafe; there will also be a print edition, but I’ve been juggling too many things to have that quiiiite ready in time for simultaneous publication with the ebook. I will definitely post here when the ebook and print pub dates happen, though!
The May theme for the New Worlds Patreon is the functional arts, so we’re segueing out of ancient ruins into architecture as an art form! Comment over there.
My seventh collection from the New Worlds Patreon is out today! Topics I covered during that span include empires, beggars, labor unions, and saints; you can get it in both ebook and print, and pick up the rest of the series, too, if you’re so inclined.
The New Worlds Patreon is ending April with a topic near and dear to my archaeological heart: the question of how much ancient sites are ever truly “lost.” Comment over there!
Not all ancient works take the form of giant rocks. Some of them are carved into the earth itself — so the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at geoglyphs! Comment over there.
The Pyramids of Egypt, the Argonath of Gondor . . . the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at the wonders of megalithic architecture. Comment over there!
When my parents moved out of my childhood home two years ago, I made my goodbyes to the neighborhood thinking there was no reason I would ever go back there.
Then I realized the path of totality this spring would pass right over my old house.
My best friend’s father still lives here, so we got lodgings for the price of some batted eyelashes, a few chores done around the house, me talking to a granddaughter who apparently idolizes the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and some jam and brownies made by my husband. Plane tickets were still expensive, of course (especially since we were uhhhh not on the ball about buying them), but last week we flew down to Dallas in the hopes of seeing the eclipse.
Despite some dire uncertainty, the skies cooperated. Clouds started to drift through around the time the eclipse began and thickened as we approached totality, but just as that phase began, a clear patch opened up, and we saw the eclipse in its full glory.
. . . yeah. In the words of a recent xkcd comic, “A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like somebody broke the sky.”
The light doesn’t noticeably start to dim until about 50%, and up to maybe 97% or 98%, it still only looks like a thunderstorm is about to roll in. Then there’s a sudden and — if you were an ancient person who didn’t know why this was happening — catastrophic downward slide into darkness, your only illumination coming from the ghostly flare of the corona around the black hole that has eaten the sun. The sky becomes an alien place, twilight hovering overhead while the fringes of the horizon turn to ink. For a few minutes you can look directly upward, no protective glasses needed, watching the wisps of corona dance across distances our brains can’t even fathom.
Then a diamond-bright flare piercing the heavens as the sun breaks around the trailing edge of the moon. Within a minute, you’re back to a kind of cloudy-seeming day — an astonishing demonstration of how bright the sun truly is, that even a tiny sliver of it can light our way.
Pictures of an eclipse don’t really do it justice. Most of them are close-ups of the sun and moon, which fail to capture the overall effect. The way the world sinks into night for a few minutes out of the ordinary, the sky inverts and the air goes cold and the light becomes otherworldly. A close-up picture doesn’t convey why ancient people had so many myths around what was happening, so many fears about why the gods had chosen to take the light away and what must be done to bring it back. Even knowing the orbital mechanics involved, even having a precise measurement of how long it would be before normalcy returned, it was an eerie experience.
I am really, really glad my friend’s father took us in, the clouds held off, and I had a chance to witness this.
Temporarily redacting some of what I read in March, so this is a shorter post than usual.
Legends of Rotorua and the Hot Lakes, A.W. Reed, ill. Dennis Turner. Last of the folklore books my parents picked up for me during their travels in New Zealand and Australia. This one is not only regional but to some extent focused on toponymy, which is to say, the stories behind why certain places have the names they do — which connects it a bit with Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places, though so far as I know the Maori don’t have the same practice of using toponyms in daily conversation as a way of commenting on and influencing each other’s behavior.
A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman. Continuing my efforts to read some of the anthologies that have piled up unread in my wish list . . . this one focuses specifically on writers from South, Southeast, and East Asia telling stories based on folklore from their own heritage, and I really appreciated the explanatory note after each tale. Even when I could recognize the source on my own (which wasn’t all the time), I liked seeing the authors talk about why they chose that one, what it was their brains snagged on and wanted to respond to, etc. My favorite may have been Rahul Kanakia’s “Spear Carrier” — certainly not the only one I liked, but I’m writing this post while out of the house and unable to glance back at the stories, and that’s the one that stands out most distinctly in my memory (in a good way), a really interesting sort of time travel/portal angle on the Mahabharata.
The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal. Second of the Lady Astronaut books. These are interesting to look at from a structural standpoint, because their subject matter — humanity needing to establish colonies on the Moon and/or Mars before the Earth becomes uninhabitable in the decades following a massive meteor strike in the ’50s — means these have much less of the conventional plot shape than most SF/F novels. They have to cover years at a time, in a sphere of activity where progress is made up of incremental advances rather than a solution assembled and delivered in a lump, and so while the ending delivers a milestone, it’s less climactic than most stories. Whether you like these will depend much more on how much you like the journey to that point, with all the technical and political and interpersonal challenges to be surmounted along the way (some of which will, in very realistic fashion, not so much get surmounted as fade into the background). I do like that kind of story, and without getting into spoilers, lemme just say the bag was one of the most effectively horrifying things I’ve read in quite some time.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo. First novella of a series I’ve been reading about for some time. The cover copy made getting into this a little rockier than it needed to be, because it focused my attention in the wrong place for how the story actually begins, but once I got past that I very much enjoyed it. This pulls off the trick of being able to suggest a large and vivid world despite working in a confined length — and I know I will get to see more of it as I continue the series!
An Enchantment of Ravens, Margaret Rogerson. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve largely gone off reading YA for the time being, but this one was on my list and I was in a mood for something about fae. Rogerson does a pretty good job with them, in part because this avoids some of the stereotypical YA feel: yes, there’s a hot faerie prince the protagonist is in love with, but said protagonist is convincingly established in an adult life of her own, and as such, she spends part of this book debating what love even really is, and whether what she’s feeling qualifies for that name. The realm of the fae is compellingly detailed (and avoids the bog-standard Seelie/Unseelie divide), the threat there feels real rather than contrived, and I think my only real quibble is that there’s one detail at the end which I wish had been delivered just a little bit differently. Sadly, Rogerson does not seem to have written more in this world, because I would probably read it if she had.
For April the New Worlds Patreon is taking a jaunt through ancient relics in the landscape — though as long as we’re talking about prehistoric rock art, I figured we might include modern graffiti as well! Comment over there . . .
Lately I’ve been working my way through the old TV adaptations of the Peter Wimsey mysteries, both the Ian Carmichael ones (most of the books that don’t have Harriet Vane, leaving out Whose Body? and Unnatural Death) and the Edward Petherbridge ones (most of the books that do have Harriet Vane, leaving out Busman’s Honeymoon).
The folklorist in me is generally fascinated to see adaptations and to compare different adaptations against one another. In this case the two sets of miniseries are working with different texts, but it’s still possible to compare them more broadly. Edward Petherbridge struck me as a touch too muted for how I imagine Peter’s dialogue and behavior, but he’s a vastly better physical match than Ian Carmichael. By contrast, I think Petherbridge’s Bunter (Richard Morant) seems far too young? He looks like he would have been about twelve in World War II, though Wikipedia tells me he was nearly forty at the time of filming. He also doesn’t quite manage Bunter’s self-effacing manner the way Glyn Houston does with Carmichael — and while I sort of like the character visibly having a mind of his own, it didn’t quite feel like Bunter to me.
(I do wonder if Petherbridge was incapable of horseback riding, or at least of bareback riding, since they gave that bit of Have His Carcase to Bunter instead of Peter. Or maybe they just wanted Bunter to have a chance to show off.)
There’s no doing comparisons on Harriet Vane, since she’s only in one set of the miniseries, but I liked her quite a bit. I would have liked to see those books get four episodes, though, the way the Carmichael ones generally did; three felt cramped, especially on Gaudy Night — not surprising, given that’s by far the longest of the novels. Mind you, I wonder what a modern adaptation could do with three episodes, since our approach to pacing is a good deal faster than it was in 1987. How much more of the story could you have fit in if not as much time was spent on a character coming into a room, setting down their things, walking across the room, etc?
I wasn’t watching these shows super closely; they were serving as background entertainment while I did things like sort papers for taxes, since I remember the plots well enough not to get lost if I wasn’t paying close attention. Between that and my less-than-perfect recall of said plots, though, I can’t say a great deal about the adaptations on that front — I welcome thoughts from those of you who have seen these! The only thing that truly jumped out at me as a flaw, because I had re-read that section not long before, was the very end of Gaudy Night. They shaved down Peter’s conversation with Harriet much too far, I think, transforming the culmination of their romance into merely “Harriet gets over her hangups.” Gone is Peter’s apology for his earlier behavior, where I can never help but wonder if it doubles as Sayers meta-textually exhibiting hindsight on her own authorial choices: it would not surprise me in the least if she wrote Strong Poison thinking she had a great setup, then got to Have His Carcase and realized she couldn’t steer them toward a HEA with the situation she’d created for them, then had to write Gaudy Night (in which Peter barely even appears) before she could untangle her own narrative knot. Maybe not; maybe she always planned for them to travel that long and thorny of a path. But Writer Brain can absolutely imagine her painting herself into a corner and then having to paint a way out. And if so, I don’t mind: it produced a much more interesting result than a more conventional romance — the latter being more what the adaptation gave us.
But like I said, thoughts welcomed from those of you who have watched any of these!
Year Eight of the New Worlds Patreon is going to be a busy one for theory posts, as there are five months with five Fridays in them! To start us off, I recommend the merits of being a goat — comment over there!
Lack of belief in gods is not solely a modern concept, as this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay explores. Comment over there!
