This week, the New Worlds Patreon launches into Year Three! As part of the celebration, I’ve added a monthly poll where my patrons at the $5 level and above can vote on the topic for the upcoming month . . . and my wonderful, amazing, fantabulous patrons voted for the thing I thought nobody than other me wanted to hear about, which is sanitation. So this month we’re starting off with water supplies, and in upcoming weeks I’ll be talking about bathing, trash heaps, and whether premodern cities really were open sewers or not.

The ebook for Year Two will be out in early April, with copies going to patrons at the $3 level and above before that. If you’d like to become a patron, you can do that right over here — let’s start Year Three together!

In the excitement of Book View Cafe’s new hosting provider being stable enough for the New Worlds Patreon to return to its usual home, I forgot to announce the latest essay here! Last Friday’s contribution was on honeymoons, and you can still head on over and add your thoughts.

I’m also pleased to announce a book giveaway to celebrate the second anniversary of the Patreon! Six lucky patrons will receive signed books from me. If you’d like to have a chance at a prize, just sign up before this Friday!

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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From ghosts and corporeal undead, the New Worlds Patreon proceeds to witches! They’re about a lot more than just pointy black hats and brooms, whatever the holiday decorations aisle at your local drugstore might have you believe.

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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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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.

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This week on the New Worlds Patreon over at Book View Cafe, we discuss handwriting: calligraphy, cursive, chicken scratch, all kinds, and the things those styles say about the people and societies that use them.

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This week on the New Worlds Patreon, literacy! Something every reader of these essays possesses . . . but whether that ability is common or rare depends on a lot of factors.

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One of the funding goals for the New Worlds Patreon was a fifth essay in the months that have five Fridays, focused on techniques or underlying concepts rather than specific details of culture. This month over on Book View Cafe I rant about monolithic worldbuilding: fictional societies where something (religion, fashion, sports, whatever), is exactly the same for every single person, with no regional, historical, class, or other variations.

If you’ve been enjoying these essays and aren’t yet a patron, now is a lovely time to become one! (My birthday is tomorrow.) Patrons get photos, ebooks, bonus essays, the opportunity to request topics — even direct feedback on their own work at the higher levels. We aren’t too far from the funding goal that would add a regular Google Hangout for patrons in which we can discuss worldbuilding more generally (on a rotating schedule to accommodate people in different time zones).

Another week, another New Worlds Patreon post! There are five Fridays in this month, so next week you’ll get a “theory post,” but today we wrap up this pass through religion with the question of religious specialists: shamans, priests, monastics, diviners, and so forth.

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