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!
Hello, everyone! You may notice that your regularly scheduled New Worlds Patreon essay is in a different place this week. That’s because Book View Cafe, its usual home, has been having massive and ongoing problems with Hostgator, which as of me posting this are not resolved. (And even when it seems like they’re resolved, the site keeps going down again.) So this week I’m posting here on my own blog, and will continue to do so until I’m sure things are stable again over at BVC. (If you’re a regular reader of Swan Tower who doesn’t normally click through to BVC for my Patreon essays, welcome, and I hope you enjoy!)
With that out of the way, let’s get down to business!
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Sometimes when we talk about a code of honor, we mean an amorphous thing, a vaguely agreed-upon set of standards that have never been formally defined. Other times, we mean a very well-defined thing, with a name and specific tenets known to all.
. . . or do we?
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!
I didn’t actually plan to have this ready just in time for Cyber Monday, but that’s how it’s worked out.
New Worlds, Year One is now available in print! You can get it from Amazon (US and UK), Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, Book Depository, IndieBound, and Indigo (in Canada). You should also be able to get your local store to order it in.
Speaking of local stores: if you would like a signed copy of anything from me, the way to do that is to contact Borderlands Books in San Francisco. They’ll notify me, I’ll head up there and sign it, and they’ll ship the book to you.
And finally, if you’d like to order a photo, feel free to browse these galleries and let me know what catches your eye. I can order prints on normal photo paper, but also on a wide variety of other media: acrylic, glass, aluminum, canvas, wood, and so forth. Prices vary depending on the medium and the size you want, but drop me a line and I’ll give you an estimate.
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!
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.
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.
Comment over there!
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!
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.
Comment over there!
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.
Comment over there!
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.
Comment over there!
I might be at Worldcon, but the New Worlds Patreon continues! This week it’s religious texts, looking at the different types of thing that get venerated as scripture, and how such things get marked out from secular material.
Comment over there!
From the sites of religion, the New Worlds Patreon continues onward to the practices of religion, from prayer to asceticism to sacrifice to hallucinogens.
Comment over there!
