Games

I really enjoyed this dicsussion of games. We began by talking about place where games appear in fiction. My first thought was Split Infinity by Piers Anthony. It begins with a character who is a competitor in this massive multi-game scenario - a dystopia where the status of the higher-ups depends on how good their stable of gamers is, and the gamers themselves are like serfs. This includes a wide variety of games, some very familiar and others less so.

We also had Kimberly Unger present as a guest, and she is a game developer. That's a very different kind of game, and in fact it's drastically different designing games for a fictional world than designing them for our own.

One of our discussants mentioned that the game tack from Pat Rothfuss' work has been turned into a game that is playable in real life.

Games in fiction do some very interesting symbolic things. They can represent relationships between people, or they can be a way to carry out negotiations between larger groups.

In my Varin world, I created a game called keyzel marbles. Because the actual moves of the game are not relevant to the story, I don't know the precise rules for moving the marbles. What I do know is that it's played on a round obsidian board with cradles drilled for blue and green marbles, and that the object of the game is to outmaneuver your opponent and cross the board.

There are several places in the book where keyzel marbles comes up. The first one is in a scene where an eleven-year-old noble boy named Pyaras starts playing it with a twenty-five-year-old soldier bodyguard named Veriga, and this is perceived as a totally inappropriate form of fraternization by one of the other characters. However, it indicates the beginning of a friendship between Pyaras and Veriga.

I also have the game representing the way that the past can't be recaptured. Another character walks to the gameboard later in the story and starts putting the marbles back to their starting positions while musing on how he wishes he could go back and start over. This then intersects with the Pyaras/Veriga part, because Pyaras objects to the other character wrecking his game-in-progress with Veriga. Veriga has since been hospitalized due to the hazards of his job and Pyaras is concerned that their relationship will vanish with the configuration of the marbles.

The last place I mentioned the game playing a role is in a scene where Lady Tamelera wants to reveal something very important to her servant Aloran but doesn't know how. She invites him out to play keyzel marbles with her, to fill awkward time, but also to try to open up a different sort of relationship with him. The problem is that he doesn't feel comfortable playing a game against his mistress, because it represents a power struggle that he feels is inappropriate to engage in.

Power struggle is one of the big things that games can symbolize. Chess has sometimes been used in science fiction as a form of communication between races. It can reflect or change a power dynamic.

Games are also powerful in folk tales, such as when you play a game with the devil, the fae, or Death.

Games can be critical as a symbolic representation of a larger conflict. If you can engage in single combat instead having whole armies clash, why not do it? If you can play a game and agree on the stakes, might you save many lives?

Games and the ways in which they are played reflect the world around them. If you are playing a game with plastic dice, it's not the same as playing a game with pig knucklebones. Where do the knucklebones come from? Knucklebones, the word itself, makes the game of dice sound exotic and like it comes from a particular period. There are many games of chance or rune-reading. We noted that people have found real twenty-sided stone dice from the Roman period.

Another game from my Varin world, called dareli, is a card game based on the concept of families. It's not played as often as keyzel marbles, but it's meant to reveal things about the world of the nobility and their myopic focus on their own inter-family struggles.

There are a ton of ways to play cards, and more are being invented all the time. There are even a ton of ways to play solitaire.

We spoke a bit about cooperative games. How are children taught via games? What values come out of the game? These are good things to think about when you are creating games for a fictional world. How much is skill? How much is chance? Are people rewarded for defeating others or for creating something?

There are cases where dueling is used in fiction as a test for the children of a person in power, to see how willing one child is to kill the other, to show their ruthlessness for future rule.

I told the story of the red hand of Ulster. The men who were competing for the title of king went out in boats and raced for the shore, having accepted the rule that the first one whose hand touched the shore would become king. One of the men, seeing he was going to lose by a hair, cut off his own hand and threw it ahead onto the shore. He ended up becoming king!

The topic of the film Gattaca came up. In a world where genetic manipulation is common, there is a swimming competition between the genetically perfect child and the natural child. When the natural child won against all expectation, it changed both children's lives because it changed their attitudes about perfection and what was possible, and set up the conflict for the movie.

We also talked about games in Jane Austen, such as games played at a picnic, or charades, or riddle games. Games can become a way of making fun of someone in public, so their stakes can be quite high.

In Monopoly, there is some building, but all opponents are enemies who need to be bankrupted.
In Settlers of Catan, everyone gets points for building.

Kimberly mentioned that this is why there are often specific areas of games set aside for Player-vs.-Player competition.

In Minecraft, the focus is on building.

In massive multiplayer online games, there are many people who only want to fight the AI or non-player characters. This is the largest group. The people who play PVP have a very different focus. Some games will have servers specifically for roleplay, and others specifically for PVP.

Some people are really into customizing characters and costumes, and focus mostly on the customization rewards. In games like Sims or Tomogachi life, the first character people create is most often themselves, and they branch out after that.

When people are playing a game, it evolves its own culture, and that is not always predictable.

We talked about the movie War Games, and the way the videogame Thermonuclear War stood in for the actual conflict, as its outcome reflected a real life potential outcome outside the world of the movie. In this case, the idea of conflict as a game is problematic, because it estranges us fromt he fact that anyone actually playing gets a bad outcome. In this movie, the innocence of the computer was a metaphor for the attitudes of the younger generation.

In the Spy Kids movies, there are several instances of games that suck people in or otherwise come to life. This has become a common trope.

The metaphors and world concepts of games can influence our real-life metaphors and world concepts. This was noted and explained by Anita Sarkeesian in her series of videos.

Generation by generation, people are improving games and increasing representation in them. This is also true of books. Equality gets layered gradually into the cultural canon (there is much more work to do).

Games like Overwatch and Destiny can take on a culture that was not intended by the developers. Kimberly says, "no game survives contact with the audience." She mentioned Riot Games as an example of a developer group with a lot of control over their culture. They have an entire judiciary system with tribunals.

"House rules" are game rules that are idiosyncratic to the place where you are playing them. Not knowing house rules is a problem. It feeds into the idea of games as representative of power.

This week's hangout has been rescheduled due to some thorny logistical problems. We will meet with author Eva Elasigue on Thursday, 7/14/16 at 5pm Pacific. I hope you can make it!

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Bo Bolander and "And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead"

I was thrilled to have Bo Bolander join us on the show to talk about her award-nominated story. I began by asking how "Trail of Dead" came to be, and she told me it was a pastiche of pulp, noir, anime, and Tarantino with lots of sweary shooty. (You can watch the video for the precise quote!).

She was asked to write a flash piece for a literary zine, but "it didn't want to be a flash piece," and "it took off. Bo said she didn't know how it would be received, and that she was taking a risk stylistically, but she woke up at four in the morning one night and started writing the rest of it. It took her two years to finish. I asked if she planned how long it would be, but she said of her stories, "I write until they're done."

She said that the voice really drove the story forward, but there were points as it got more complicated where she wanted to take a white board and organize some things because she wasn't sure how to get some points, some beats she wanted to hit.

Rhye, she says, is basically a replicant in the Bladerunner sense. The story is something of an homage to Bladerunner and to Ghost in the Shell. Rhye doesn't have good self esteem (understatement) and "she kinda needs a hand up." The character of Rack was complementary to her, and Bo only worked with his point of view much later. The two viewpoints are very entangled, and we get to see her view of him, and also how he sees her during the course of the story. (Spoilers!) One revelation about his view of her comes when she sees a version of herself that he has created as a security program. It's interesting to see her considering that.

Bo is working on a sequel to the story and having fun with it, exploring where the characters are going. She says she likes stories that don't spell everything out for you. "You have to do some worldbuilding," she says. She focuses on the character's voice and point of view. History, nuance and detail are not necessarily interesting or relevant to a story.

She says she does worldbuilding a little with what Rhye is thinking, because the world influences that. But it's not always a weakness not to map out the entire world. She focuses in on how the world has made Rhye what she is, beating her down.

I asked about Bo's use of metaphor and simile, which I think is one of the outstanding strengths of the piece. She said that Rhye is broken and mean, but in some ways a lot like her internal voice, so she was easy to write. Sometimes you have to stop and think about how Rhye would see things, because she's going to use what she knows. In a sense, any character is going to use metaphors and similes that reveal things about what they know to compare things against.

Bo says there are stories out there ostensibly using the point of view of (for example) someone from backwoods Florida, but the voice comes out as that of a postgraduate literary person. "If the voice is not there," she says, "I can't get behind it."

Rhye's past helps to construct her narrative, and that is coming into play in the sequel, with some experiences Rhye had between the last story and this one. She has changed. There are changes in story #1, but also more between 1 and 2. Bo gets into her backstory a bit more deeply.

The sequel is apparently a novel. Bo says, "I'm trying to expand everything."

She's also working on a fantasy piece right now, because she says, "I can't do the same thing twice. I get bored really easily." She expressed her admiration for patois and dialect use in the film Fury Road. She says most people don't mess with language much. She says the fantasy work is nice because it gives her a break from Rhye occasionally.

She has posted a snippet of the sequel on her blog.

I asked her about the submission history of the story, and she said one market thought "Trail of Dead" should be a novel instead. Some people objected to all the swearing, saying "Why does she talk like that? What made her like that?" Bo says that after two years of writing and reviews from people she trusted, she went with it despite uncertainty, and then took a breath, and then suddenly got nominated for awards.

Bo expressed her high regard for Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazines, and for the art of Galen Dara.

When I asked whether she had done any research for the story, she said that there had been no research component except that she used to go to the firing range a whole lot, and that helped her with the portrayal of firearm use, which she described as "a zen thing. You have to get out of your head." She had some experience with that having grown up around firearms.

She says it's interesting how much of yourself ends up in your story. "You put so much in, but you don't even notice."

Bo described her writing process as "I get it out in one draft, but editing the entire time." This story ended up with a few line edits at the start but none toward the end. You can't do that with a novel, though, she says, because you have to keep moving. "A novel is such a different beast. You can't make it perfect on the first go."

Bo also spoke to us about her experience with ADD. Never downplay the influence of prescription drugs on the ADD brain, she told us. Sometimes, she has found just sitting down and concentrating to be impossible. "Sit down and write," people always say, but sometimes it can't be done. "You're not lazy." It's not that you're unfocused, or that you don't care. You're not alone. Sometimes your brain needs help. ADD is underdiagnosed especially in women. She took particular issue with the term "airhead" and speculated it might be linked to ADD.

Bo described the feeling of productivity as "amazing" and was happy not to be "frozen in my own indecision." She says she hates portrayals of medication as turning you into a zombie, because that has been so far from her experience.

She says that she has lots of ideas, but not all of them are worth stretching out. "It has to be more than a cute hook. There's got to be something deeper going on." "What's the through line?" she asks. "What is the emotional underpinning?" It's possible to find the point of a story while you're writing it, but it's useful to have some hint of it beforehand.

Bo, thank you for joining us! Readers, if you want more detail, the video is below.

This week's hangout will be on Wednesday, July 13th at 10:00am with guest author Eva Elasigue. I hope you can join us!

#SFWApro

Ken Liu and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Last week were joined by the amazing Ken Liu, who spoke to us about his new short story collection. Ken has in fact published about 120 stories (!), and he says he has collections in other languages like French, Chinese, and Japanese, but that this is his first one to be published in English. He wanted to make sure that he had the right set of stories for an English language collection, and was urged to this by SAGA press.

He said it was important that the stories in the collection reflect what short fiction means to him, and acknowledged Joe Monti for helping him select the stories and choose the order.

Ken says, "I have a different profile in different languages." He says some of his stories don't work as well in particular languages because of the complex issues involved in translation and crossing cultures. Since his stories were all written in English for an English-speaking audience, he said it was harder to pick out which ones to put in the collection because more of them would have been appropriate.

I asked him about a technique he used in two of the stories, which I called "iteration," where he makes lists of alien species and does brief explorations of some of their features, as in "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species." He said that he has always liked experimenting with different forms in fiction, and likes to resist the idea that a story needs to be one particular type of thing with a beginning, middle, and end. He resists "universal" rules and patterns, and in this case was attempting to write a story that is not a story at all, but patterned after an academic scholarly report. Essentially, he says, the story is about how we view the Other, and our tendency to define cultures as superior or inferior. The different aliens read their books but also read one another. He sees aliens as aspects of us as humans, and reading as representing the construction of meaning. Also, he notes that changes in the technology of bookmaking (as when we moved from scroll to codex) influence the way that we create books and define them. We are now undergoing another such change with the advent of electronic formats.

In the second such story, the iterative pieces have to do with alien cognition, and serve as a companion/reflection on a separate, more narrative story. Ken said this one had to do in part with how our metaphor for thinking has changed, as it went from spiritual, to telegraph, to clockwork, to computation.

He views SF/F as an ideal genre for literalizing metaphors and playing with them.

In several of the stories, he chooses to reverse our expectations, as in the story Good Hunting, which begins as a ghost hunter story and then changes when it shifts our awareness to the viewpoint of the fox women themselves. Ken describes it as going from ghost hunter story to "the old ways are lost" story, but then it changes again and reminds us that magic will always be there in different forms. The fox woman finds a way to recover her shape-changing power through steampunk technology. He described it as a way to think about the metaphor of change. Nothing is constant.

We tend to think of cultural preservation as a lack of change, but it's not; living culture is constantly changing. We still make toast, but we don't make it at all the same way we used to. Cultural preservation is about change that occurs with internal agency, rather than with a gun to your head. You as a member of the culture get to decide that this is how you keep it alive and preserve things. We linked this thought back to the idea that culture is both replicated and changed every time it is enacted, and Ken also brought up one of the alien species from "Bookmaking habits," whose method of inscribing books means that they are changed each time they are read.

I also asked Ken about his use of Chinese characters in his stories. Ken said that in the West people have a view of idiograms as mysterious, an impulse to treat them as different or exotic. However, they don't have this aspect in thier native context. They are primarily phonetic to represent speech, with no particular magic quality, though they start with a semantic root in the left-hand radical to hint at meaning, and a phonetic component in the right-hand component. There is a playful and exuberant attitude toward the characters which is often lost; they are not merely recording speech. Ken says that in his stories he tries to convey the Chinese cultural practice of folk etymology for the characters. He compared it with the form of charades played in Jane Austen novels, where people create false etymologies for words like "season" to try to convey them without words.

In one of the stories, a clever lawyer modifies a character in a contract in an undetectable way to change its meaning, exemplifying this playful relationship. I also brought up the use of the character for "umbrella" in the Japanese-based story "Mono no aware." Ken said that there were some similarities between Japanese and Chinese characters, and that the use of the character here was part of the characterization of the narrator, who was a child when he left Japan and went into space, so he has self-constructed an idea of what it means to be Japanese. He is both defensive and protective of his cultural identity to keep it alive. He sees it as something precious that needs to be protected, and is trying to make it alive. He explains it to many people, and those explanations and his final act make it become part of the culture of the ship.

I asked Ken about some of the thematic questions he raises in these stories about the nature of reality, which he called a "huge philosophical question." One way to think about the difference between science fiction and fantasy, he said, was that science fiction holds the idea that the world is knowable, where it might be argued that fantasy does not. It's not so simple, he says, but there is tension between those ideas. He says does not know where he stands on the answer to this question for his own work, though, because The Grace of Kings holds to the idea that the world is knowable. In stories from the collection like "Simulacrum," he meditates on whether the world is knowable. For example, he says, in our world we tend to see "the definitive biography" of a person released, as though this is it, and the totality of a person's being is knowable. On the other hand, there are many different performances of the self, over time and as one presents oneself or interprets oneself differently with different people. We so often act on the basis of habit, and different patterns hold with particular people. In his story, the father and the daughter have locked each other into a limited view of who they are, and each one loves the mask more than they love the changing person behind it. Ken says that maturity of love is when sometimes the love has to change with the person.

We spoke briefly about code-switching, which essentially means altering the way you speak in order to fit different contexts. It's a form of performance and presentation of identity and group membership. Sometimes it is switching between dialects, and other times between recognized languages.

Mirrors also appear in many of Ken's stories. They reflect ourselves and others, and sometimes we even act as mirrors for other people. Ken doesn't view fiction as unrelated to real life. One of its roles is as a mirror, in that he says his work is reflective of real life, but also transforms it. "Worldbuilding" is a distorting mirror, or possibly a corrective one, that will allow us to change or correct biases in real life.


Thanks again for joining us, Ken! The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a fascinating collection, and I hope everyone will read and enjoy it.

#SFWApro

Rewards and Motivation

Naturally, the first thing I think of on the topic of Rewards and Motivation is the classic Old West poster: WANTED: (Criminal X) REWARD. In fact, that can easily become one of the main motivators in a story, but it's not the only one. What motivates characters in a story? Revenge is an all-too-commonly-used motivator. But beyond that, what do we get down to? Moral happiness? Personal connection? Virtue? How is virtue defined?


Kimberly mentioned how villains are necessarily an inversion of the motivations of a protagonist. She mentioned an instance where they use the motivations of a "good guy" but in the wrong way (cross-applied). She had a scenario where bad guys wanted to change the status quo because the status quo would lead to the end of the world. And yes, she said, the bad guys were self-centered and fighting each other, but also having to work together.

Often we talk about motivators in terms of the Carrot and the Stick. "The End of the World" is a pretty big stick, but isn't usually enough to keep a story fully engaging, because it can be very disconnected from what a character cares about.

You need Big Stakes, but in many ways Personal Stakes are more important. There's the (very clichéd and problematic) "get the girl," also, "save somebody" like a relative or a friend.

People are complicated. "People operate against type all the time simply because they're people."

If you want people to connect with your story, it's powerful to have the reader empathize with the character's goals, but it doesn't always need to be direct empathy where the reader says "I have wanted this exact same thing." The connection can be indirect.

Often, we can have highly gender-influenced ideas of what makes an appropriate motivator for someone (such as those listed above). But that isn't necessary. I spoke about my character Tagaret, whose primary motivator at the start of the story is "to escape by means of art." Because many of us are writers, we could relate to that! But I mentioned an instance of someone who had thought that motivation was too "feminine" (we disagreed strongly). There is also the motivation to do something to create change. It can also be expressed in more or less gendered term.

Different motivators and rewards can be used more typically in different genres.

We talked about the motivation of money, which is really a means to an end. For most characters, money isn't inherently motivating for itself, but for what it is used to do, like getting food or shelter. Food is a very basic animal motivator, but can be used to great effect in stories, such as Janice Hardy's The Shifter or Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games.

A character can also be motivated to win a competition with someone else. Kim noted that this motivator was quite commonly used in YA stories she's read.

Sex can be used as a motivator. You have to think about it carefully, though, because you don't want it to seem false and "added in."

Romance and relationships can be used as powerful motivation, though we agreed that in the Romance genre, they weren't typically used as primary motivators, but as secondary ones (at least early in the stories). Very often Romance stories will set up a situation in which the drive to achieve a romance runs counter to a set of other goals held by the two protagonists.

Power rewards are very common. I mentioned how in my book, the main goal is the competition to become Heir to the Throne. This has been the core motivator for a great many stories besides mine! People will also strive to achieve wealth and influence.

In fact, the ostensible reward may just be symbolic of power held over others. I mentioned a case from my kids' school were a girl would bring in fruit roll-ups, which she would then offer to one person, and then "change her mind" and offer to other people, so that she could cause people to vie against one another for her favor. This led us to the insight that when gifts are being given, it's good to consider the motivation of the giver as well as the receiver.

Sometimes, just plain relief can be a huge motivator. Relief from pain might be one example of that. Relief from a form of psychological discomfort, such as that suffered in obsessive-compulsive disorder, might be another (and I've seen it used in more than one book!). Escape from a trap is another, as might be escape from torture. Darth Vader uses killing to "find new ways to motivate them."

Again we come back to threat versus reward, stick versus carrot.

We listed out: threat motivation, reward motivation, competitive motivation, pleasure motivation as being very basic motivations. Most of the time, though, you can build complex things on top of these, and those complex things are given value by the culture of the world you are working in. The motivator of creating a reputation, or being shamed, can be hugely important, but they take widely different forms.

You can tailor a form of motivation to the fictional world you're working in. In order to make sure that a reader grasps it well enough to empathize, though, it's important to set it in a context where it can make sense - to "construct what normal means." Clearly state the motivators you are working with. When an individual possesses idiosyncratic motivations, make sure to define and construct them explicitly in the context of that person's psychology.

A character's own self-concept, and its integrity, can be huge motivators. "Am I a good person?"

We talked about the phenomenon of fat-shaming, and how that behavior can be motivated by seemingly counter-intuitive means. When people become angry at a fat person who feels comfortable in her own skin, it often is because they themselves have been fat-shamed extensively and invested a lot of their time and suffering in struggling against being fat, and their self-concept feels at risk if they consider the idea that all that time and suffering might have been pointless or unnecessary.

When you are working with a story and considering people's goals and potential paths, keep in mind that there is not usually only one path forward - some paths lead to some bad things, others lead to other bad things, and the good that comes out of them can be ambiguous.

I mentioned the idea of positive and negative politeness, because it relates in some interesting ways to the idea of motivations. "Positive" politeness is behavior that relies on the idea that solidarity is valued, and behaviors that express solidarity are thus more accepted. "Negative" politeness relies on the underlying concept of autonomy, and the idea that politeness is honoring a person's space and not breaching their walls. Because they are based on opposite concepts of value, bad things can happen when they cross.

Context is really important. In any given interaction, figuring out what the other person values, and what motivates them, is important for success. Those underlying assumptions of value vary widely depending on who is interacting and in what context.

Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion!

This week's hangout will be tomorrow, 6/29/16 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern on Google Hangouts. We'll be meeting with guest author Bo Bolander to talk about her multiply award-nominated story, "And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead." I hope you can join us!

And if you would like to join in the Dive into Worldbuilding Workshop, join our Patreon here for brainstorming prompts, links, and more.

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Introducing the Dive into Worldbuilding Workshop at Patreon!

Dive into Worldbuilding started in 2011 - five years ago - when Google+ introduced their hangouts feature and I decided it would be fun to hang out with fellow writers and talk about worldbuilding. Since then, it has grown and changed, from just a bunch of friends meeting online with no record except my written summaries, to a meeting that got recorded and sent to YouTube, to a show featuring a wide variety of guest authors as well as regular topic discussions. With each change, my goal has been to reach a wider variety of interesting people, listen to more interesting views on worldbuilding, and share insights with as many people as possible.

Today, I'm taking it a step further with the Dive into Worldbuilding Patreon - which is also the Dive into Worldbuilding Workshop.

This Patreon will do more than just support my research into panel topics. It will help me to pay my guest authors for their time and expertise - but it will also let me help more of you.

By pledging to the Patreon, you'll be effectively enrolling in a worldbuilding workshop. Choose the level of your choice and receive brainstorming prompts, research links, commentary on videos from the show archives, or a peek into my notes. At higher pledge levels you can also ask me questions, get me to take a Ridiculously Close look at your writing, or hang out with me monthly to consult about your work.

I've got a few guest posts up around the internet today talking about this project, and I hope you'll go and take a look! 

At Megan O'Keefe's blog, I've contributed to her series called Drinks with Characters.


At Janice Hardy's Fiction University, I've written a post about Going Beyond the Default in Your Worldbuilding.


At Ann Leckie's blog, I've taken a Ridiculously Close Look at the first six paragraphs of Ancillary Justice.

Deborah J. Ross talks about my Patreon at her blog, with a post featuring her own appearance on the show to talk about The Seven-Petaled Shield.

So enjoy the posts, but most of all, consider checking out the Dive into Worldbuilding Patreon and joining the workshop! I'll look forward to working with you.

#SFWApro

Bathing and Laundry - a Dive into Worldbuilding hangout summary

This topic was a natural one to follow on from last week's Bathrooms hangout! After all, sometimes laundry is done in the bathroom...

We started with close-to home context for bathing and laundry, talking laundry machines and where they might be located, typically in bathrooms or garages (at least in my neighborhood!). Of course, there are also contexts where such machines are not in the home at all, and people go to special laundry rooms or laundromats. We reminisced about collecting quarters to use in laundry machines! These days, apparently, some laundromats use cards instead (which sounds like a good idea).

The technology of a washing machine is also interesting. The latest development is to improve their efficiency in using water and electricity, but the machines themselves were groundbreaking, and life-changing, for many. Doing laundry used to take days, and suddenly it could be reduced to a couple of hours of simply setting it up and looking in on it.

Though Cliff couldn't attend this week, he suggested we speak about the Dhobi, who are a group of people in India whose vocation is doing laundry for others. Wikipedia refers to them as a caste. Traditionally they would pick up people's laundry and clean it by beating it on rocks in the river; the process would take 6 days. This job is a necessary one, but considered lowly because of having to deal with other people's dirt. It has also become more difficult for these people to retain their livelihood because of the introduction of washing machines in India.

Brian noted that the idea of dirty laundry is very powerful. You are not supposed to expose your dirty clothes. Morgan said that even in a laundromat you don't show your laundry to others, or leave it around. I spoke about my experience with a Japanese host family where my hostess informed me that I was supposed to wash my own underwear.

There is a whole range of products designed to clean clothes, and to get stains out of them.

In fiction, I mentioned Ancillary Sword, which includes the observation that someone's personal attendant is attempting to wash paint out of her gloves. I also mentioned that there's a scene in my own book where someone is using a steam press to press napkins. Generally, though, it seems that laundry is not extremely common in fiction.

Having dirt or stains on your clothes is stigmatized. We often make a run for the bathroom as soon as we drop something on our clothes so as to stop it from becoming a permanent stain.

I brought up the relationship between bathing and laundry as regards personal cleanliness. Recently I read an article that talked about how people in the Middle Ages might not have bathed, but that they would have used linen to scrub their bodies down regularly. The person writing the article had done a month-long experiment where they did not bathe, but laundered their linen underclothes regularly, and then reversed the process. Apparently, omitting the laundry was a lot worse! It suggested that people - at least people who were able to afford linen underwear and laundry - did not smell as bad as we might imagine.

I had a strange thought about what laundry would be like for the Imbati caste in my book, because so many of them wear black. You'd definitely have to watch out so you wouldn't accidentally dye things that weren't supposed to be black!

I mentioned the bath scene in the movie My Neighbor Totoro, which is one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies. In Japan, you soak yourself in the bath but you don't get clean there; you get clean in a shower area before you get into the tub. There is less embarrassment associated with being naked in the bath, and more with the actual process of getting undressed. Some people bring washcloths or towels to cover themselves while in the bath, but some do not. We talked about hot spring baths, or Onsen. I told a funny story about how I once took a bath in a tub that literally had a fire under it! (Moral: don't mix up the words for "hot water"= oyu and "cold water"= omizu.)

Che said she'd read that mucus bathing would be more effective than bathing with water. We all shuddered!

We also mentioned architecture and bathing. You have Roman baths, and our baths with showers, baths without showers, showers without baths... Generally there's something to contain the water. You also have the question of whether the water falls straight down or hits you at an angle.

Science fictionally, we have the idea of a "sonic shower" from Star Trek. Author Linda Nagata employed the idea of cleaning the body with nanites.

Controlling the water is one of the main goals of bath architecture. Really you want to have a fully controlled pipeline with a few well-contained openings in it. We mentioned how water pressure was generally created using gravity. You have to watch out to make sure the weight of a full bathtub won't break through the floor!

We briefly mentioned how bathing has increased longevity, and how washing improved health outcomes in hospitals. The question of getting clean if you can't move your body without help also came up, as did the hygiene hypothesis for the rise in allergies.

It was a pretty interesting discussion! Thanks to everyone who attended. This week's hangout will meet tomorrow, Wednesday, June 8th at 10am Pacific. We'll be discussing Rewards and Motivation. I hope you can join us!

#SFWApro

Table of Contents

TOPICS:

1. Alien Senses
2. Architecture
3. Armies, with author Myke Cole
4. Autonomy, Individuality, and Identity
5. Back History of Declining Societies
6. Bathing and Laundry
7. Bathrooms 
8. The Body as a Record of Personal Experience and Cultural Identity 
9. Body Modification
10. Book Titles 
11. Building a world after starting your story
12. Charity vs. Justice 
13. Cities
14. Cities: Making your city work
15. Colonialism and Imperialism
16. Colorism
17. Colors
18. Corruption 
19. Costumes 
20. Crime and Criminals
21. Cultural Ideologies
22. Cultural Interactions/Linking large-scale and small-scale phenomena
23. The Culture of Death
24. The Culture of Oppression
25. Culture Shock
26. Death and Funerals 
27. Dentistry
28. Dialects and Voice 
29. Dining and Eating Practices
30. Disability and Accommodation  
31. Diversity
32. Domesticated Animals #1
33. Domesticated Animals #2  
34. Economics 
35. Economics of Resources and Magic
36. Fairy Tales
37. Families
38. Fantasy Cartography with Christian Stiehl
39. Fashion  
40. First Sentences
41. Food
42. Food, Agriculture, and Diet
43. Friendship
44. Games 
45. Gardens
46. Gender
47. Gender in Language
48. Gender Roles
49. Genre and Description
50. Gestures  
51. Hair
52. Hats and Other Headgear
53. Heroes 
54. High Culture and Low Culture
55. Hobbies and Crafts
56. Holidays
57. Hospitality
58. How Realistic Does a Created World Have to Be?
59. How to Keep Rich Worldbuilding from Bogging Down Your Story
60. Humor and Pranks 
61. Idioms and Proverbs
62. Illness and Medicine 
63. Illnesses, Ailments, and Medicine
64. In-Group Marking (Nicknames, Secret Handshakes, etc.)
65. Inheritance
66. Insults, Privilege, and Power Language
67. Invasive Species
68. Jobs 
69. David J. Peterson and Lawrence Schoen, Language Design
70. Language Barriers
71. Links between Physical and Social in Worldbuilding
72. Literacy and Technology
73. Magic Systems 
74. Making Up Words
75. Manners, Round 1
76. Manners, Round 2
77. Martial Arts, and how they are portrayed in film (video only)
78. Matching Culture and Character Motives
79. Mental Illness - social impacts
80. Metaphors
81. Misunderstandings  
82. Modesty
83. Morals and Values 
84. Music and Worldbuilding
85. Mythology
    
86. Natural Disasters
87. Names, Titles, and Their Social Significance 
88. Naming Characters
89. Neurotypical or Not? with Lillian Csernica
90. Non-Auditory Languages 
91. Oceans
92. Parenting
93. Personal Faith
94. Personal Titles, Honorifics, etc.
95. Pets 
96. Physical Exercise
97. Place Names and Geography
98. Point of View Characters as Ambassadors to Your World (1) 
99. Political Systems
100. Pregnancy and Parenthood
101. Privacy 
102. Privilege and Intersectionality
103. Pronouns
104. Prosthetics 
105. Psychology 
106. Realism in Worldbuilding
107. Religion 
108. Religion 2 - daily practices and diversity
109. Religious Privilege
110. Research
111. Roads and Infrastructure
112. Roles in Government
113. Rewards and Motivation 
114. Schools and Education
115. Seasons
116. Setting up Alternate Social Parameters
117. Social Media
118. Social Stereotypes 
119. Sports, with Tim Wade
120. Strength and Weakness
121. Subconscious Worldbuilding
122. Suspension of Disbelief and the "Show, Don't Tell" of Worldbuilding
123. Swearing 
124. Threats vs. Acceptance
125. Tools
126. Travel
127. Vermin
128. Villains 
129. Water
130. Worldbuilding Process (summary only)
131. Worldbuilding Under the Radar

SPECIAL GUESTS: (Alphabetical by last name)

1. Brad Beaulieu, The Lays of Anuskaya
2. Aliette de Bodard, Obsidian and Blood/ Xuya/ House of Shattered Wings 
3. Bo Bolander and And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead
4. Jenn Brissett, Elysium
5. Maurice Broaddus, The Knights of Breton Court/ Pimp my Airship
6. Maurice Broaddus, The Voices of Martyrs
7. Joyce Chng/J. Damask, Wolf at the Door/ Rider Trilogy 
8. Myke Cole, Breach Zone 
9. Carrie Cuinn, Semiotics and Worldbuilding Without Visual Imagination
10. Alyx Dellamonica, The Nature of a Pirate
11. Malon Edwards, The Half-Dark Promise and other stories
12. Eva Elasigue, Bones of Starlight
13. Fábio Fernandes, Obliterati
14. Laura Anne Gilman, Silver on the Road
15. Laura Anne Gilman, The Cold Eye
16. Randy Henderson, Finn Fancy Necromancy
17. Nancy Hightower, The Acolyte 
18. N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth Trilogy/The Fifth Season  
19. Jeffe Kennedy and Pages of the Mind
20. Fonda Lee and Exo 
21. Stina Leicht and Cold Iron
22. Stina Leicht - The Fey and the Fallen  
23. Tonya Liburd, Through Dreams She Moves
24. Henry Lien and Pearl - also, the world premiere of Radio SWFA!
25. Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings
26. Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
27. Ken Liu, The Wall of Storms 
28. Pat MacEwen, Coyote Song, and Forensics
29. Usman T. Malik, The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn and other stories 
30. Marshall Ryan Maresca, An Import of Intrigue
31. Haralambi Markov, The Language of Knives
32. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Signal To Noise  
33. Megan O'Keefe, Steal the Sky
34. Cat Rambo, Beasts of Tabat
35. Kelly Robson, Waters of Versailles
36. Deborah J. Ross, The Seven-Petaled Shield
37.  Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories
38. Nisi Shawl, Everfair
39. Andrea Stewart, The Changeling Wars
40. Isabel Yap, Milagroso, The Oiran's song, and other stories 
41. Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Traveler of Worlds