A new month, a new week, a new essay from the New Worlds Patreon! This time it’s honor — in two different senses of the word, which overlap but are not quite the same thing. To find out what I mean, come on over to Book View Cafe!

One of the funding goals the New Worlds Patreon hit very early on was a fifth bonus piece in the months that have five Fridays. I use these to talk about how to worldbuild, rather than what to worldbuild about, and this month I get metaphorical: thinking about your world as a palimpsest, containing the incomplete and half-erased layers of different social structures and practices.

Remember, the New Worlds Patreon isn’t just the essays: it’s a photograph every week for patrons (themed to that week’s topic as much as I can arrange), ebooks at the $3 and above, the ability to request topics at $5 and above, a bonus essay on how I’ve approached worldbuilding in my own work at $10 and above (which lately has focused on Sekrit Projekt R&R, to show the process more or less “live”), the ability to ask me questions about worldbuilding in your own work or someone else’s at $25 and above, and at $50, a critique from me every month. If that sounds appealing, or you’d just like to support the project, you can do that here!

Are we moving ever upwards into a more glorious future? Or are we in a constant state of decline from some past golden age? Or, perhaps, are we going in circles? The New Worlds Patreon is discussing concepts of time this week. Comment over there!

The New Worlds Patreon exploration of time continues with a discussion of time and society: how we interact with it and how it shapes our lives.

Comment over there!

Hourglasses and sundials and clocks, oh my! This week the New Worlds Patreon is discussing the devices we use to keep time, all the way from the most primitive to the high-tech precision of atomic clocks.

Comment over there!

Wrapping up the New Worlds Patreon tour through the supernatural world, we have faeries! Which are often said to come out to play at this time of year — but that’s a very Celtic concept. What happens when you try to talk about faeries in other parts of the world? Is there even any such thing?

Comment over there!

October continues in the New Worlds Patreon with the corporeal undead! Of which there are many kinds — more than you tend to see in the zombie-and-vampire landscape — and nearly as many things they can represent, from disease to sexuality to the Vietnam War.

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From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we’re talking about ghosts! Welcome to October . . .

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, you are not permitted to read what I have written — just kidding. Let’s talk about censorship!

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, a topic near and dear to my heart: the printing press! (Without which I would have no career, because it’s bloody difficult to make your living off the written word when the only way to make copies is by hand.) Its history is more complex than I was taught in school, and much more interesting.

Comment over there!