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.)
The blogger Slacktivist has a periodic series of posts he titles “Smart people saying smart things,” where he links to and quotes from a handful of solid pieces by other writers. I’ve happened across several great posts recently, so I’m going to steal his approach and modify it a bit here.
A really good discussion of how things change when you got published, and how to bear in mind that meeting you may be a really big deal for a reader of yours — yes, even if you don’t think of yourself as being all that famous. If they love your work, they love your work, and it doesn’t matter if you haven’t sold as much as Author A or won as many awards as Novelist N. And while trying to be extraordinary for them may be daunting, you don’t have to be; simply meeting you is out of the ordinary. All you have to do is be a good kind of out of the ordinary — i.e., remember that this may mean more to them than it does to you, and don’t be a jackass. Also, if somebody’s a fan of your work, respect that; don’t grind down their joy by grinding yourself down in front of them. They may love a short story you’re embarrassed by. They may praise the exact thing you wish you could revise out of your last novel. That’s okay. Accept their delight as the gift it is.
I also want to call out one specific thing Mary Robinette said, about taking advantage of people. We see this cropping up a lot in allegations of sexual harassment: some guys are knowingly and maliciously using their social power to get what they want, but others are the equivalent of that guy with the enormous backpack who turns around without first checking to make sure there’s clearance for it. They don’t realize the pressure they’re applying simply by opening their mouths — and because they don’t realize it, they may apply it harmfully. We’re social monkeys; we like to do favors for the shiny monkeys, because then some of their shine rubs off on us. If you’re a published author and you ask a fan to do something for you, pay attention to what you’re doing. Don’t exploit their goodwill. Don’t ask them to do things that will be burdensome, or if you do, make sure you compensate them fairly. Always thank them.
A potted history of the different ways internet culture has dealt with trolls across its brief history, and why it keeps on burning us out. What she says about the internet changing so fast — I honestly hadn’t even heard the term “cancel” used in that context yet, because I am out on the very edge of the social media pond, and those ripples hadn’t yet reached me. But this lays out very clearly how we haven’t yet figured out a good way of dealing with social interaction online, and the effects that’s having on other parts of our lives, including the way we interact with narrative media. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope one exists, and that we find it sooner rather than later. Because the anthropologist in my looks at what we’ve got and wonders how long we’re going to lurch along in a car that’s on fire before we either fix it or decide as a society that getting where we’re going faster isn’t worth the third-degree burns we suffer along the way.
Palmer means stoicism in the specific philosophical sense, not a general “grit your teeth and bear it” approach. I don’t know much about philosophy, so the majority of her post was news to me, and very interesting — tangentially the part about stoicism as a metaphysics, but more to the point, stoicism as ethics. She makes some good points about why it is well-suited to being the philosophy of those in power, and why even for the downtrodden it can be both a wonderful lifeline and a dangerous trap, encouraging us simply to accept the world the way it is, rather than striving to change it. And it also makes me think about writing fiction, and the unexamined assumptions that can be hard to get around in your worldbuilding . . . like the idea that we can change the world, not just in a localized sense, but a general progress one. Humans didn’t always have that idea, and it’s easy to forget that.
What happens when the “Tiffany problem” isn’t about small things like plausible medieval women’s names but rather the lived experience of people around you. I like her point about physical intuition, and how reading broadly can help us build up the kind of instinctive understanding that helps us process what is and is not likely to be true in other people’s lives. It’s an angle on the subject of empathy I haven’t seen before, and reminds me of a thing I’m still flailing at in the New Worlds Patreon, which is how to explain the instinctive feeling I have that some kinds of worldbuilding hang together plausibly and others don’t. Fundamentally, the answer is that I’ve read a lot about a lot of different cultures, so I have that intuition about the ways they work; I’m not sure it’s possible to boil that intuition down to a checklist of questions to ask, without doing the reading first.
(Also, this essay gives me some additional vocabulary to talk about what skills I still lack in the kitchen, so hey, bonus.)
I’m having nostalgic memories of when my first novel was released, thirteen years ago . . . on April Fool’s Day. (Yes, I spent rather a lot of time persuading myself that no, my editor wasn’t going to say “haha, fooled you!” and then the book wouldn’t come out.) This year I’m managing to dodge that day — which is good, because I have not one but two things out!
The first is New Worlds, Year Two: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuuilding, which you can get at Book View Cafe — i.e. direct from the publisher, and it’s a little bittersweet, because Vonda beta-read this for me — or Amazon US or UK, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, and Indigo. And if that’s not enough anthropological and worldbuilding goodness for you, there’s always New Worlds, Year One: A Writer’s Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding, the collection from the first year of the New Worlds Patreon.
The second thing out today is my short story “Vīs Dēlendī” at Uncanny Magazine. Their Kickstarter backers got this a while ago, and half of the contents went live earlier, but as of today the entire issue is available for free online: fiction, poetry, articles, and interviews. One (1) Internet Cookie to anyone who can identify the main folksong that inspired this story; fifty (50) Internet Cookies to anybody who can identify the other folksong that contributed to it, without which this refused to cohere into an actual story. (Offer null and void after the podcast interview with me goes live, wherein I talk about both songs.)
No joke! Go forth and enjoy!
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!
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!
With the second year of the New Worlds Patreon having wrapped up, it’s time for it to emerge from its chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly ebook! New Worlds, Year Two: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding is now up for pre-order at Amazon US and UK, Barnes and Noble (Nook), Google Play, and Kobo. iTunes and Indigo will follow shortly. The book will be out on April 2nd!
Also, a glitch with the plug-in I use to crosspost from my website to Dreamwidth recently glitched. Everything still crossposted . . . but on a private setting, which means none of you could see it. So if you missed it, the posts were, in sequence:
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 post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)
A truly comprehensive survey of wedding customs around the world and throughout history would probably fill several volumes. I’m not going to attempt that; we’d get so far down into the weeds we’d never see the sun again. Instead I’m going to do a more top-level sweep of the steps involved in getting married, with some attention to the specifics of how those can manifest.
It starts with engagement, i.e. the promise to get married later on. This doesn’t have to last for a long time — it can be as short as the gap between “hey, want to get married?” and finding an Elvis impersonator at a drive-through Las Vegas chapel to hitch you two together — but the longer the gap is, the more preparation you can do. Today’s wedding-industrial complex pushes the ideal that you should do a lot of prep (and spend a lot of money on it), which echoes yesteryear’s necessity of assembling a wedding trousseau. (I’m reminded of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s line in The Lion in Winter, dismissing the likelihood that Richard and Alais will get married any time soon: “The needlework alone can last for years.”)
But even engagement can involve more than mere agreement. There may be a prenuptial contract to negotiate, or permission to secure: from parents, a master, a liege lord, or anyone else with the authority to gainsay a match. Posting the banns is or was required in a number of Christian countries, giving the general public a chance to raise objections — though usually only within set limits, e.g. “he’s got a wife in another town.” This also creates a mandatory waiting period, helping to stave off the buyer’s remorse that often afflicts the clients of those drive-through Vegas chapels.
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)
The counterpart to arranged marriages are ones where the spouses choose each other, often referred to as a “love match.” When there’s no matchmaker involved (be it a family member or trained professional), it’s up to interested parties to find and woo their own future husband or wife . . . which can be a very fraught process.
Before we dive too far into that, I should say that there’s often courtship involved in arranged marriages, too. The Japanese matchmaking process is called miai and means “looking at one another;” nowadays it begins with looking at a photograph, but in the past it might instead be kagemi, a “hidden look,” arranging for the man to secretly glimpse the woman without her knowing. If that goes well, the families proceed to their children meeting face-to-face, usually in a series of three dates before a decision is made. European nobility sent portraits as advertisements for their kids, and the prospective pair might exchange letters to get to know one another if they couldn’t meet in person.
But with love matches/autonomous marriage, courtship plays a much larger role, because it’s the means by which people even find possible spouses, conduct their evaluations, and seal the deal. So let’s dig into that.
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)
Last year I spent the month of February discussing marriage-related topics. This year, as Valentine’s Day approaches, I’d like to return to that subject — because as I noted at the time, there’s more to talk about than can fit into a mere four essays.
(Spoiler: it won’t fit into eight, either. Though the next time I loop around to this, we’ll be looking more at things on the periphery of marriage, rather than marriage itself.)
I said in those previous essays that historically speaking, marriage tended to be seen less as an alliance between two individuals, and more as an alliance between their families or nations or whatever. Because of this, it isn’t surprising that autonomous marriage — where individuals choose their own spouses, with nobody else getting a say in the matter — was far less common than arranged marriage. Even today, something like half of all marriages worldwide are arranged marriages.
[Note: As Book View Cafe works on migrating to a better host, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is running here.]
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It only does so much good to make our bodies smell better if everything around us reeks. So from perfume we turn to incense — and also potpourri, pomanders, scented candles, and everything else you can use to cover up less-than-pleasant aromas in the world around you.
Many of the things one can say about perfume apply here, too. Incense was historically often expensive, because the components were rare or had to be traded across long distances; the kadō art form in Japan and its associated party games exemplify the way its creation and appreciation could be elite activities. You can divide the scents into the same categories as with perfumes and blend them in the same way — though there’s less of a tendency toward gendering in scents for a room than for the body.
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.
Comment over there!
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!
I have hopes that Book View Cafe’s hosting woes will soon be solved, but until that happens, the New Worlds Patreon will continue to run here! (And y’know, 2019 is a splendid time to support your local worldbuilding blogger. I’ll soon be putting out the second collection, and all patrons at the $3 level and above will receive an electronic copy!)
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At the beginning of the second year of this Patreon, I did two posts on body modification. Despite devoting so much time to the topic, I only touched on tattoos in passing — because they’re a complex enough topic that I couldn’t possibly do justice to them while also talking about piercings, stretching, bone reshaping, and so forth. Now, as we approach the end of that second year, let’s loop back around and give tattoos their due.
We don’t know for sure how old tattoos are because soft tissue doesn’t preserve well, and the tools of the trade (needles and pigment) aren’t readily distinguishable from the needles and pigment used for other purposes. But we know that Ötzi, the ice-mummified man found in the Alps, had sixty-one tattoos on his body; that rather suggests a well-established tradition, not something he’d made up himself the previous week. Since he died over five thousand years ago, we can safely say the practice is quite ancient.
Due to Book View Cafe’s ongoing problems with Hostgator (soon to be solved by leaving Hostgator for a company we can actually rely on . . .), this week’s New Worlds Patreon post is here at Swan Tower again!
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I couldn’t resist giving this essay that title, but the truth is that I can’t give exact instructions on how to fight a duel, because — like pretty much everything discussed in this Patreon — there’s a lot of variation both geographically and historically. A gun duel on the western frontier of the United States in the nineteenth century was not the same as a sword duel in eighteenth-century London, and neither of them is like an Indonesian knife duel.
But I said in the last essay that for my purposes, a duel is distinguished from any other one-on-one fight by the existence of certain formalities marking it out from normal combat. Those formalities have some common threads, and if we approach a duel sequentially, we can tease those out.
