This week’s essay for the New Worlds Patreon should really be titled “Ways to Make Yourself Smell Good,” because it’s also about scented lotions, oils, soaps, shampoos, bathwater, and everything else we use to counteract our natural tendency toward whiffiness. But “Perfume” was shorter and catchier, so I went with that instead.
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For the time being, Book View Cafe seems to be holding steady, so the New Worlds Patreon has gone back to its usual home there, with a post on jewelry, and the human tendency to hang something shiny off pretty much any body part that can hold it. (And if it can’t hold it, that’s what piercing is for.) Comment over there!
Book View Cafe seems to be back on its feet <knocks on wood>, so the New Worlds Patreon is returning to its regularly scheduled home there, with a post on the culture of dueling. It’s the first of two duel-themed essays; look for the other next week!
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.
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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.
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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?
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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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