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Posts Tagged ‘patreon’

New Worlds: Staying Warm (the actual essay)

(Apologies; once again I neglected to correct for the BVC site rebuild by reposting the essay here. That shouldn’t be an issue for much longer, though!)

I am infamous among friends and family for how easily I get cold. But I maintain that this is only natural: at temperatures below about sixty degrees Fahrenheit (fifteen degrees Celsius, for those of you on that system), human beings can die of hypothermia.

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New Worlds: A Light to Live By

I’m a night owl. If I’m up to see the sun rise, something has gone horribly wrong at one end of my day or the other. And while I’m theoretically there to see the sunset, in practice I hardly pay attention to it, unless I’m outside for some reason.

This luxury is brought to me by ubiquitous artificial lighting.

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New Worlds: Fuel for the Fire

Energy sources are a big topic of conversation these days. With fossil fuels being both damaging to the environment and increasingly difficult to acquire, we’re looking into a wide variety of alternatives — some of which are cutting-edge, and others of which are very old indeed.

The one option that’s been with us from the start has been muscle power. Our own to begin with; later, after we domesticated animals, we got to use theirs instead. For millennia, everything from agriculture to textile manufacture to metalworking has been carried out with sweat and toil, fueled by the food we and our livestock eat. But of course, you can’t elbow grease your way to everything. No amount of direct labor will cause food to cook, nor pottery to harden, nor ores to smelt.

For that, we needed fire.

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New Worlds: Disaster Relief

Because fantasy in particular is full of tyrannical rulers and terrible governments, I suspect there are many readers who assume the reaction of a historical king or queen to a flood, fire, famine, or other disaster was “suck it up — and yes, you still have to pay your taxes.”

I’m not going to say that never happened, but it was less common than you might think. Telling the peasantry to suck it up and still pay taxes is a fantastic way to get revolts — and even if those revolts don’t threaten to topple the throne, every farmer marching against you is a farmer not growing the crops your economy relies on. While you did get the occasional ruler both cruel enough and shortsighted enough to shrug off that danger, most of them at least made some attempt to deal with the underlying problem, however ineffectively.

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New Worlds: Fire Prevention (the essay)

(I failed to repost this essay here like I intended to. Apologies to anyone who tried and failed to reach the BVC site! We are working like mad to have the new site up soon.)

As I said in last week’s essay, it’s in the public interests of a society to keep fires from spreading. It’s even more in those interests to keep them from starting in the first place — and because of that, government regulations designed to prevent, spot, and slow down fires go back a very long way.

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New Worlds: Fighting Fire

(We are getting very close to BVC being up and running again! But we aren’t there yet, so once again, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is hosted here on my site.)

As devastating as fires can be nowadays, we have ways of dealing with them. In my kitchen there sits a canister of fire-suppressing chemicals; on my ceilings perch little disks that scream bloody murder when they smell smoke or carbon monoxide; if something goes wrong, a big truck will roll up and hook itself up to a hydrant that will spew out all the water I might need, at high enough pressures to reach upper floors with ease.

But rewind the clock, and things get ugly fast.

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New Worlds: Emergency Medical Services

(We have great hopes that the Book View Cafe website will be back up and running soon! Until then, I will continue to post my Patreon essays here.)

If something goes wrong — a fire; a home intruder; but especially for the purpose of this essay, a medical emergency — I know exactly what to do. I’ll pick up my phone and call 9-1-1, the emergency number for the United States. Someone on the other end will send an ambulance full of trained medical personnel, who will administer some aid on-site and then (if necessary) take the patient to the hospital, siren blaring all the way.

There are many reasons to be glad I live in the twenty-first century, but it’s startling to me that if I rewind the clock just fifty-five years — to 1966 — this seemingly obvious and sensible concept would not have been available to me.

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New Worlds December essay, redux

On request, I’m reposting the next-to-last non-theory essay from the New Worlds Patreon, since the downing of the Book View Cafe website has rendered it inaccessible. Also, for those of you wondering what happened at over BVC, the short form is: we’re gearing up to give the site a major and long-awaited overhaul . . . and in the course of the gearing up, it, uh, went belly-up. >_< But the good news is that we’re on track to roll out the new! improved! site! very soon, and it’s going to be so much better once we do.

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New Worlds: The Subtle Art of Naming

(Because Book View Cafe is still having technical difficulties, I am posting this week’s Patreon essay here.)

The last few theory essays have discussed language on the page. For the final one of both this calendar year and Year Five of my Patreon, I’d like to offer some concrete advice on how to create words and names that support the feeling of a plausible secondary world.

This isn’t about the phonology and orthography, the sounds and spellings used in a name. (We already discussed that way back in Year One.) Instead it’s about structure, about the underlying patterns and quirks that will make names come to life. In the real world, we don’t name things randomly, so following a few patterns in your story creates verisimilitude.

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New Worlds: Sexual Misbehavior

I’ve already apologized to my faithful New Worlds patrons, but I’ll repeat it here: when I put up the poll for them to vote on the theme for December’s essays, I didn’t do the math and notice that if “sexual behavior” won out, that would mean I wind up posting about sexual misbehavior on Christmas Eve. And not in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense, but in the sense that this post comes with trigger warnings. So my apologies for the bad timing . . . but if you still want to read, you can comment over there. [Edited to provide new link due to BVC site difficulties.]