This didn’t go up on Friday, but better late than never: medical month continues in the New Worlds Patreon with germs and bad air! Competing theories for what causes disease, which overlapped just often enough to obscure the fact that one of them was wrong. Comment over there!
As befits the material, the topic of epidemics expanded wildly out of proportion with the rest of last week’s essay on disease in general — so this week, the New Worlds Patreon is talking about plagues and their effect on society. Grim stuff, but hugely influential in history, to a degree I think we sometimes underestimate in modern times. Comment over there!
My lovely Topic Backers for the New Worlds Patreon have selected “medicine” as this month’s theme — which was supposed to begin with a different essay, only halfway through writing it I realized that a) it needed to be two essays and b) I had also started in the wrong place. So we begin with disease itself, and the mind-boggling extent of its effect on our history and our world. Comment over there!
This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we wrap up the topic of travel (for now) with air travel, space travel, magic travel, and so forth. Comment over there!
And remember that patrons get extra bennies, like photos every week, ebooks, chances to vote in the topic polls, extra essays, and more. More details on Patreon!
The New Worlds Patreon tour through the subject of travel continues this week on the water! Which is a very different game from traveling over land, and everything from physics to religion gets involved. Comment over there!
I’m totally riffing off of “Paul Revere’s Ride” for this installment of the New Worlds Patreon. Since I need some principle on which to divide the topic of travel, I’m using the different modes by which we go: on land, by sea, and then . . . well, you’ll see. 🙂
So I’ve hung one lantern in the belfry-arch, to signal that land is up first. Comment over there!
From the start of the New Worlds Patreon, I’ve been offering my patrons a weekly photo, many of them drawn from my travels around the world. It’s appropriate, therefore, that our topic du mois should come around at last to travel — beginning with some top-level considerations, like why people travel, what happens when they do, and the importance of infrastructure. Comment over there, or become a patron over at Patreon itself!
The question of how to gracefully work expository detail into a story was too large to address in a single essay, so the discussion that began in March continues today, with character, scene, and plot-level methods of integration.
If you’ve been enjoying the New Worlds Patreon, please consider becoming a patron! You’ll get weekly photos and can opt for a variety of other rewards, like ebooks, voting in the monthly topic polls, bonus behind-the-scenes content, and more. I post the essays on Book View Cafe rather than restricting them to patrons only because I like the broader range of discussion that becomes possible — which is especially key when I’m trying to give a sample of the different ways things have been done throughout history and around the world — but it’s support from my patrons that make the whole series possible. I never could have embarked on this project without that support, so I thank each and every one of them.
The initial tour of the New Worlds Patreon through governmental topics ends on the question of what form that government takes. Next week we’ll be back with part two of the exposition question — how you work all your lovely worldbuilding into the story. Comment over there!
Not all of the rationales for someone to be a leader fit into last week’s essay, so this week, the New Worlds Patreon continues that topic in a more spiritual vein: divine rights, i.e. the religious justifications for kingship (or whatever term is assigned to the leader in question). Comment over there!
In order to hold power, you need some rationale for why you should have it. This week the New Worlds Patreon delves into some of the foundations of power, and some considerations that go along with them. Comment over there!
The New Worlds Patreon is finally tackling a fairly central concept we’ve missed up until now: government! Beginning with the lack thereof, i.e. the largely egalitarian social structure often found among mobile hunter-gatherer groups, and the two types of status that shape how people are treated. Comment over there!
Another Friday, another New Worlds Patreon essay! This week I round out the discussion of visual arts with something near and dear to my heart: photography. Is it even an art form? Come and find out why some people say ‘no’!
I’m not sure why, but it turns out my last two posts about new Patreon essays going up failed to post as scheduled. My apologies for not noticing that! I’ll keep an eye on it this week and manually push it if I have to.
Anyway, this month we’re talking about art! Starting with a discussion of the lines along which we declare things to be Art vs. Not Art, then continuing on to sculpture and, as of this week, painting — less the specifics of style and technique, more the uses to which we put such things. Comment over there (including on the older posts)!
(Edit: yeah, something’s wrong with WP, as this post also missed going live as scheduled. I’ll look into fixing that.)
I saw this news several hours ago, but didn’t want it to come across as a terrible attempt at an April Fool’s joke. Vonda N. McIntyre, one of the founding members of Book View Cafe, has passed away. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two months ago. The news of her illness rocked everyone at BVC; Vonda was a bedrock of our organization, and we’re still figuring out how many of us it will take to fill the gap she leaves behind.
I never had the pleasure of meeting her in person, but she was the beta-reader for my New Worlds collections — a wonderful mix of encouragement and suggestions. And, of course, she was an amazing writer; tributes to her work are popping up all over the place. We will all miss her greatly.
With two years and counting worth of essays in the New Worlds Patreon, there’s a rather large elephant in the room, which is how you communicate all your lovely worldbuilding to your reader. I’ve finally figured out some ways to articulate that process, the first part of which is this month’s bonus theory post.
I haven’t nearly finished addressing the topic of cleanliness in human societies — we haven’t even started on personal hygiene — but since the month is nearly over, this segment of the New Worlds Patreon will wrap up for now with trash. Next week, for the fifth Friday in the month, I’ll be back with a bonus essay!
My fellow Book View Cafe members and I are exceedingly pleased to announce that our site is now ensconced in a much better hosting platform that will not give us the problems we were having in December and January. In celebration — and to thank you, our lovely readers, who have been so patient through all those troubles — we are having a SITE-WIDE SALE this week, 20% off everything in the store. No coupon hoops to jump through; just load up your cart, and we’ll apply the discount at checkout.
I’ve built up a surprisingly large pile of titles with BVC over the years. If you’re interested in picking one of those up, you can choose from:
Plus a great many more! We have Brenda Clough’s time-travel trilogy The River Twice, Meet Myself There, and The Fog of Time (which came out during our outages and really took it in the teeth as a consequence), and all kinds of titles from Sherwood Smith, Vonda N. McIntyre, Judith Tarr, Laura Anne Gilman, Linda Nagata, Katherine Kerr, and many, many more. We have fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, mystery, romance, literary things, funny things, sexy things, informative things — all kinds of stuff. And it’s all 20% off. So come browse our catalogue and help us celebrate our new home!
The New Worlds Patreon continues digging into the dirtier side of life with a pass through personal sanitation. Be grateful for the technology we have today . . .
This week’s New Worlds Patreon essay delves into that most fragrant of topics: sanitation! To bait you into clicking that link rather than going “ew, no thanks,” I will use my favorite piece of historical trivia on this topic, which is that there was a time and place in history where human waste was so valuable, people literally stole it. To find out where, when, and why, head on over to Book View Cafe!
