Shining Moon Episode 17: Worldbuilding

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon, Episode 17. Today, we’re departing from genre concerns to talk about the art and craft of worldbuilding. My guests today are Marie Brennan, Beth Cato, Rachel Handley, and Kenneth Hite.

For more information on Marie Brennan, visit swantower.com, Twitter @swan_tower, or her Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/swan_tower.

For more information on Beth Cato, visit her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.

Stories in this episode:

Marie Brennan:

 “The Naming of Knots” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #388, August 10, 2023.  https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/issues/issue-388/

"Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya, " Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #373, January 12, 2023. https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/issues/issue-373/

Beth Cato:

Prognostiqueso , appeared in Daily Science Fiction, July 29th, 2022  https://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/parapsychology/beth-cato/prognostiqueso 


The Recipe Keeper, Flash Fiction Online, January 2022 https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/the-recipe-keeper/

Rachael Handley

The Spaceship of Theseus Full House Literary https://www.fullhouseliterary.com/prose-script/the-spaceship-of-theseus-by-rachel-handley 


The Sound --  Sonder magazine, April 27, 2022  https://sonderlit.com/2022/04/27/runner-up-the-sound-by-rachel-handley/

Tina Connolly

The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections, Tina Connolly, Tor.com 2018 (https://www.tor.com/2018/07/11/the-last-banquet-of-temporal-confections-tina-connolly/)

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:01.462)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 17. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we're departing from genre concerns to talk about the art and craft of world building. My guests today are Marie Brennan, Beth Kato, Rachel Handley, and Kenneth Height. Let's start with some introductions. Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professor's hard work to the game of 100 Candles and the shorts novel Driftwood. Along with several poems and over 80 short stories. As half of M.A. Carrick, she is also the author of the Rook and the Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning with the Mask of Mirrors. For more information, you should visit her on swantower.com, Twitter at swan tower, or her Patreon at swan tower also. There's definitely a theme. She's got really good branding. You can always find her. Thank you for being on today, Marie. It's wonderful to have you back on the podcast.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (00:46.239)
There's definitely a theme.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (00:54.739)
I'm astonished you're willing to let me be here three times, but I appreciate it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00.944)
Nebula award winner Beth Cato is the author of A Thousand Recipes for Revenge from 47 North plus two fantasy series from Harper Voyager. Her next book, A Feast for Starving Stone, will be released in January. She's a Hanford, California native now moored in the driftless area, usually with one or two cats in close orbit. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter... we still do Twitter?

Okay, @BethCato. Hello Beth and welcome to the podcast.

Beth Cato (01:32.473)
Thank you for having me and I am a Nebula nominated. I am not a winner, alas.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:37.406)
Oh, I am so sorry, did I read that wrong? Oh, well, perhaps one day it'll be accurate. Perhaps this year, who knows?

Beth Cato (01:41.605)
I just wanted to thank you for elevating me. Like that.

Kenneth Hite (01:45.684)
That's right. We're doing some world building right now.

Beth Cato (01:49.418)
Appreciate the vote of confidence.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:51.39)
Yeah, we just went into alternate reality. I apologize for that.

Beth Cato (01:54.293)
Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:55.677)
I like that alternate reality.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:57.618)
I like that alternate reality too. We should totally go live there. 

Rachel Hanley is a queer disabled fiction writer, fiction poet, and academic based in Dublin, Ireland. Their work has been published by the Liminal Review, Arlen House, Dreich, 365 Tomorrows, the Magical Press, and Ellipsis Zine. Their debut collection of short stories, possible worlds and other stories, has been published by Ellipsis Imprints in September of 2022. I'm sure there's more that has happened since then, but we will get to that in due time.

Hello, Rachel. It's nice to meet you in person at last, as it were.

Rachel Handley (03:19.093)
Thanks for having me on, I'm super excited to capture a group.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:24.734)
I'm really pleased to have you. Kenneth Height has designed, written, or co-authored 100 and more role-playing works including Gurp's Infinite Worlds, Trail of Cthulhu, the Dracula dossier, Knight's Black Agents, Bubblegum Shoe, which I love the title of, and Vampire the Masquerade, fifth edition. His other works include two volume Tour de Lovecraft, Cthulhu 101, The Thrill of Dracula, the Cthulhu Wars, and the Nazi Occult for Osprey, the Lost in Lovecraft column for Weird Tales,

and an annotated edition of Chambers, The King in Yellow, as well as four Lovecraftian children's books. Half of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast, he lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and his non-Lovecraftian wife, Sheila. Hello Ken and welcome to the podcast.

Kenneth Hite (04:11.848)
Hello Deborah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here, finally.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:17.794)
I'm so sorry that we weren't able to include you previously.

Kenneth Hite (04:20.56)
No, that's all right. It was my ridiculous schedule.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:24.474)
It happens, believe me, I understand. We're gonna dive right into the questions and we're gonna start with the simplest or possibly the most complex question, which is where do you start with building a brand new world?

which is a huge question and it's going to probably take some unpacking. So I'm going to say, I'm going to start at the top with Marie. I'm going to say, where do you personally start with a new world? Do you start with how it diverges from our reality, like alternate history, or do you start with a single image and go from there? How do you, how does it begin for you?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (05:02.407)
It varies from story to story, but probably the most consistent answer for me is that when people will sometimes ask, oh, you know, do you start with a plot or with a character? My two smart ass answers are, I reject your false dichotomy and I start with the world. For me, it's very common, especially with short fiction, I would say, that what happens is there's some cool bit of world that suggests a plot and a character to me. And so what I start with is that little nugget.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:16.841)
Haha

Deborah L. Davitt (05:29.102)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (05:32.135)
But that nugget could be anything. It's not that it's, oh, I always start with figuring out what the environment looks like, or the religion or something like that. I've got one beginning of a story drafted, which isn't going to be finished until I figure out where I'm going with the plot. But for whatever reason, I don't remember what sparked this, I had the idea of a world where if you touch an object that belonged to you in a past life, you get memories of that previous life.

And so the plot that was suggested by this is that it goes very wrong with the protagonist's daughter and her recently deceased, very abusive mother, that the mother's personality takes over the daughter because she's been reincarnated like that. I don't know where I'm going with this conflict. But from that idea of you get these memories, other things start branching out. That there are flea market type places where you can go to finger through lots of different objects to see

were any of them yours and are you going to get a memory off of it? And the idea that you don't go to these places until you're a certain age because it's better not to get those memories until you're old enough to kind of cope with them a little bit, which is why it's a problem with the young daughter. Just stuff builds outward from that starting point. For me, where do I start? I start with the thing that gives me the idea for the story, basically. It could be a whole wide array of things.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:40.631)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (06:55.471)
I love reading anthropology, history, mythology, all these different things that for me are a very rich source of those inspirations.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:05.218)
Fair enough. I find that it very much varies from story to story for me as well. Beth, how do you get started with it? Because there in A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, there are so many different little things that are different from our world, but it's all an integrated tapestry. I was wondering where you got started for that novel, for example. What was the starting point?

Beth Cato (07:30.481)
Usually for me, it's a matter of a basic plot. Like basic, like this is what this character is and these couple of things happen. But from there, for me, world building is everything. And because my recent novels have all been very strongly historically based, it's a deep dive into research. That is the first thing. And it means...

Marie Brennan (she/her) (07:48.951)
It's a deep dive into research. That is the first thing. And it means going online, trying to find primary sources from the time period of hiking.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:51.278)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (07:54.765)
Going online, trying to find primary sources from the time period if I can. Archive.org is a really good source of really old out of print things like For A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, 16th, 17th century English cookbooks of French recipes. You know, things like that, lots of old books. Just nice thing about writing about a secondary role that's based on a musketeer era. France is that there are lots of books out there that go into the history of French food.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (08:02.311)
things like for the revenge 16th 17th century English cookbooks of French recipes, you know, things like that. Lots of old books, just nice thing about writing about the secondary role that's based on the Muscatier era of France is that there are lots of books out there that don't mention history of French food, which is such an honest burden to research, you know, having to read about all of this.

Beth Cato (08:24.309)
which is such an honor's burden to research, you know, having to read about all of this fantastic food and integrate it into the world. But since my main, but I have a main character who is a chef with a capital C and her, she deals with cooking magic. So trying to bring in all of these authentic historical details about cooking as it was in that period without colonialism and its influences, I really wanted to get those details right. And to me, that's what makes it really rich role building.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (08:28.999)
fantastic food and integrating with the world. But since we're in a pandemic, so I remain true to who is a chef with a capital C in her she deals with cooking magic. So trying to bring in all of these authentic historical details about cooking was in that period without colonialism and its influences. I really wanted to get those details right and that's what makes it.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:53.942)
Yeah, research definitely counts and it definitely creates an aspect of trust between you and the reader because once you've established your bona fides in that way, they realize that they can trust you and they can go a little bit further into this new world with you. Ken, obviously with you, you primarily develop worlds for games.

Beth Cato (09:10.447)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (09:17.334)
Mm.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:19.391)
the more intricate the world is, the more people can get into it and bounce off of your ideas and create their own things. Where do you start?

Kenneth Hite (09:30.032)
Well, my glib answer that I repeat on my own podcast every chance I get is start with Earth, because in role playing games, there is a sort of a tradition of starting in these sort of deracinated fantasy worlds that, you know, it may be it's like, this is kind of like Vikings, but there's no, you know, connection to anything that anyone cares about unless they've read a 300 page book of backstory. And my argument is no one cares about a 300 page book of backstory. They already cared about Vikings.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:37.918)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (09:52.223)
Thanks for watching!

Deborah L. Davitt (09:55.038)
Ha ha!

Kenneth Hite (09:58.788)
start as close to Vikings as you can, if you want Vikings to be the cool thing that you're doing in the game. So, you know, I start with Earth. And then secondarily, I like Marie's idea of starting with sort of the central concept. And in my case, it's the, what is the game about? What are you doing in the game? So for the Dracula dossier, I started with the idea, Dracula is an after action report of British intelligence.

the unredacted version of that falls into the hands of the players, and now they're in a spy thriller. And so everything sort of comes off that central concept that is the core idea of the game. It's why you're playing this game instead of, you know, 50 other games. And it's harder to do with a deracinated fantasy world because there is nothing that's particularly special about your, you know, Elfland that isn't true of every other Elfland, but something that is, you know.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:49.394)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (10:56.188)
got a central story or a central conflict or a central activity for the players to do, that's what you ideally, in my way, should be building the world around. And again, as you say, as a game designer, I'm primarily doing setting. I don't have the option of doing characters and plot because the characters are the player's job and the plot is the GM's job. I'm literally just building worlds and building setting. And I kind of have to do it as deeply and...

Deborah L. Davitt (11:14.487)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (11:24.044)
as excitingly and as story producingly as I can. So, you know, it's sort of like the opposite of Beth. I'm not looking to avoid bad things in my universe. I want bad things in my universe because that's what causes adventure and fiction and danger and all the things that role playing games are about.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:28.781)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:43.986)
Absolutely. I like this mental image that I have of you basically having a telescope almost and you have it aimed at earth and you're putting these filters in place over the top of it and seeing what details pop out from it. I like that.

Kenneth Hite (11:53.446)
yet.

Kenneth Hite (11:57.072)
very much like the optometrist. Better like this or better like this, or in this case, worse like this or worse like this.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (11:59.153)
I'm not sure if you're better like this or better like this. Or are you just worse than this? Yes. Or worse than this? Ha ha ha.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:01.331)
Yes!

Rachel Handley (12:05.245)
Thanks for watching!

Deborah L. Davitt (12:07.19)
Rachel, how do you get started? Where is your starting point?

Rachel Handley (12:13.385)
Um, I would say like my, my starting point is very similar to Mary's, but usually it's an image that pops in. Um, or it's just one particular thing. So it's usually, it's usually just, just an image pops into my head and I think, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what will happen with that. As if it's not my job to then go, to then go write that and figure that out. And like, I just kind of experiment with that image. So it could just be.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:21.591)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (12:44.466)
It could be a particular world that I end up imagining, like what if it were the case that ships were all alive, but also to get this. But sometimes it's just like a piece of dialogue that kind of hints at what that world might be or what kind of situation I'm actually looking at. Usually it's a very short snippet of whatever it ends up being. That's always the starting point for me.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:01.939)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:12.762)
Understood. Yeah, I'm somewhere between all of you. I do use in-depth research. I do use my academic background to sort of feed into and draw things out from. I do start with an image every now and again and it just becomes a web. And that sort of leads me into my next question, which is...

where I often fall down because I want to build and build and build and build and I want I have so much world in my head and there's only so much space for it to be on the page in a short story. How much world building is the right amount of for the length of story at hand? I'm going to bop back up to Marie because I know that you have like an entire you know role playing game and novel several novels worth of stuff for Rook and Rose. How do you

determine how much of that to unleash on the unsuspecting reader when you're only writing a short story.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (14:14.399)
Well, okay, the short story specifically, because when it comes to the novels, the reaction we've had from some readers is, too much is how much we've put in there. But it depends on what the reader's looking for. I would say – because I was trying to think of a way to give a useful answer to this, because it's not like we have units of measurement for worldbuilding, right? And so how do you define quantity, even? And what I landed on is that –

Deborah L. Davitt (14:23.31)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (14:34.798)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:39.36)
in fathoms.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (14:40.779)
Regardless of the length of story, what I personally as a reader like is enough worldbuilding to make the setting feel textured. And that's the word that best for me encapsulates the feeling of. It's not just that it has the cool idea at the center that is making the story go. It's that there are the bits around it that make it be not just and then fill in stock imaginary setting here, but that there are the little like tasty bits of flavor sprinkled through where some particular side detail.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:49.272)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:03.952)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (15:10.771)
gets world-built just a tiny bit, especially in a short story, you don't need the whole explanation for why do they plant trees over people's graves instead of putting headstones or something. That's actually a detail I put in an unpublished novel of mine, but they plant you trees. Like, why do they do that? It doesn't matter. Just mentioning that detail of like, oh, you know, I'll go, you know, put that in front of my parents' funerary trees or whatever. And I go, ooh, trees, that's cool.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:14.462)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:21.633)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (15:36.307)
Like that's the stuff that makes the setting feel to me like it is real, like it has sensory qualities beyond what is required for the plot. I love stories that put those into the corners. And so for me, the amount of world building is the amount that gives it that three-dimensionality, that tactile feeling, so that it feels like it comes to life in my mind.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:58.65)
One of the things that I've been told about my novels is that they tend to overwrite reality for people because once they come out of it, they're still thinking poured stone as opposed to cement and things like that. So that's the right amount of world building for a novel length. But when I'm going to be trying not to drown a reader in a short story, it's it's.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (16:10.429)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:22.75)
Again, the optometrist, is it better this way or is it better that way? Maybe, okay, now that I'm over 6,000 words, it might be time to cut out some of the details. Beth--I'm sorry. Sure.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (16:31.855)
Yeah, and certainly, if I can just add, so the Patreon that I've been running for like six and a half years now, it's all about world building and it's about digging into those corners of like what are the things that could be world built in a setting? And even in a short story, there's constantly little details passing through that yeah, I could world build that. I can't do all of them. It's true. Like if I took every single like...

Deborah L. Davitt (16:54.336)
Hehehehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (16:55.651)
Oh, well, the characters are wearing clothing, therefore I should talk about the clothing, and the characters just ate a food, I should go into detail about the food, and there is music and I should talk about the music, and, like, you can't do every bit of it. So you do still have to pick and choose which are gonna be the most, like, flavorful bits to drop in there.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:06.454)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:11.794)
Yeah, and we're going to take that and we're going to go to Beth because obviously flavorful is where she lives. How do you orchestrate your recipe for the perfect short story? Because you have been in Chicken Soup for the Soul numerous times. You are a master of flash fiction. How do you world build in such a small space, but so effectively?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (17:18.398)
Yeah, I was just thinking that. Yeah.

Beth Cato (17:19.365)
Thank you.

Kenneth Hite (17:19.514)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:38.678)
How do you know how much world building to put in that immerses the reader and then lets them go again after such a short amount of time?

Beth Cato (17:48.289)
no matter the length, it is all about having the ability to write a rough draft that is total crap. That's really what it comes down to. It's like if I'm writing flash fiction and I know my end goal is for, say, a codex contest and it needs to be 800 words, that means it's okay if my rough draft is 1500 words, because I'm trying to figure out the story and trying to figure out my characters and I can cut from there.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:54.983)
Hahaha!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (18:04.751)
and it needs to be 800 words, that means it's okay if my rough draft is 1500 words. Because I'm trying to figure out how to fill in the characters and I can cut them out. And I can make it inside second and get tight and functional to make it work for the ultimate length. It's the same with long-term stories, it's the same with the chicken soup story, which is basically, it's autobiographical, but there's a tiny bit of fiction element to it just because you've gotta make it fit in that 1200 word count, or whatever count space.

Kenneth Hite (18:08.408)
I'm sorry.

Beth Cato (18:14.633)
And I can make it concise. I can make it tight and functional to make it work for the ultimate length. It's the same with long short stories. It's the same with the chicken soup story, which is basically it's autobiographical, but there's a tiny bit of fiction element to it just because you've got to make it fit in that 1200 word count, 1200 word count space. But you know, it's all about writing that rough draft. And for a novel, it means just, it's a stinky draft. It is horrible. It's, you know.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (18:35.047)
But you know, it's all about writing that rep draft and for a novel, it's just, it's a stinky draft. It is, I don't know, it's, you know, and I hate writing rep drafts. It is a long process of high anxiety for me where I am trying to push out as many words as I can each day because I know that things are currently broken and it's why it's weak boxers.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:42.705)
Hehehe. Hahaha.

Beth Cato (18:45.245)
And I hate writing rough draft novels. It is a prolonged process of high anxiety for me where I'm trying to push out as many words as I can each day because I know the thing is inherently broken and it drives me bonkers. So I'm always so glad when I have that initial draft done because then I know, okay, I already know I need to fix these things. And as I read it, I know I'll find a lot more, but now I can go back and I can fix it. And that's when I look at all of that world building where I do throw in like,

Marie Brennan (she/her) (19:00.255)
So I'm always so glad when I have that initial haircut done because then I know, okay, I already know I need to fix these things. And I say, we're gonna know all the time, well, I'll work it, you know, I can go back and I can fix it. And that's when I look at all of that world building where I do throw in like, all those details, all of the glue, all of the clothing, all of that texture that's so important. And that's when I cut.

Beth Cato (19:14.945)
all of those details about all of the food, all of the clothing, all of that texture that's so important. And that's when I cut. I'm like, okay, I'll leave this bit here, but I'll move this about the clothing to here with the characters in better light. And I swap things out or I realized, no, I really don't need this paragraph at all. It's superfluous. And it's all about finding the pacing for that role building. And that can mean switching a chunk out from one chapter to another, or even moving it to another book sometimes.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (19:23.687)
this bit here but I'll move this above clothing to here with the characters in better light. And I thought things in there, I realized no I really don't need this paragraph at all, it's superfluous and you know it's all about kind of the-

Deborah L. Davitt (19:44.222)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (19:44.765)
And where it is the hardest to figure out the pacing for role building, I would say, is when it's a sequel book. Because then you're not only doing the role building, but you're having to somehow incorporate what happened in the previous book or books. And that is so difficult. And every book that I've had to write a sequel for presents an entirely new, horrible challenge in that regard. And that was one thing when I did A Thief for Starving Stone, I actually wrote a synopsis of the first book.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:51.144)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (19:51.305)
And then you're not only doing the role building, but you're having to somehow incorporate what happened in the previous book or books. And that is so difficult in every book.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:58.903)
Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (20:03.111)
that I've had already seen before presents an entirely new horrible challenge in the regard. And that was one thing when I did a piece of service done.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:08.238)
Hahaha!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (20:11.959)
I actually wrote a synopsis of the first book, to put at the beginning, and I'm sure I've done that for all of my other books, because it made it so much easier, because I don't have to try and squeeze all those details in to the main narrative. There it is, right in the beginning, to refresh people's memory between once or years since they read the other book. You know, maybe so much easier. Yeah, I definitely made it. Highlight was the synopsis of the beginning. Yeah, we...

Beth Cato (20:14.701)
to put at the beginning. And I wish I'd done that for all my other books with sequels because it made it so much easier because I don't have to try and squeeze all those details in to the main narrative. There it is right in the beginning to refresh people's memory if it's been months or years since they read the other book. And it made it so much easier for me.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:21.066)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:25.731)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:33.842)
Yeah, I definitely highly endorse the synopsis at the beginning, not just for the reader, but for yourself, because it is, depending on how long it's been since you wrote the first novel, it may be very useful for you to go back and go, oh, yeah, that happened.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (20:43.556)
Yes.

Beth Cato (20:56.013)
Yep, exactly!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (20:56.295)
I've seen more of those summaries lately, and we did them for the Rook and Rose books. Amen. I think they need to become common because it makes pacing the story so much easier.

Beth Cato (21:05.47)
It really does. It really does.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:08.558)
Ken, you obviously don't have the question of length of story at hand, but you do have to know how much worldbuilding is the right amount for a game, because some games are meant to be one-shots. Some games are meant to be full-length campaigns that will be played over the course of months or years.

How much world building do you do for a one shot versus for a campaign? And how do you know when you're done?

Kenneth Hite (21:39.924)
Um, the amount of world building or, uh, setting detail, whatever it is for a one shot has to be enough. I mean, this is my goal through everything. One shot source book, whatever my goal, which I admit I don't always hit is that every sentence should inspire play at the table. There should be no waste sentence in the in the in the thing.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:04.375)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (22:09.284)
No one should be reading my connective tissue. They are here because they need actionable, you know, fun to have. And so I come closer to that in some books than in others, but that's always the goal. So for a one-shot or a single adventure, you really have to sort of make sure that you are, you know, establishing what is 1937 Cleveland like in as few sentences as you possibly can

Deborah L. Davitt (22:18.291)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (22:25.887)
Thanks for watching!

Kenneth Hite (22:38.996)
put people into that spot so they can move forward, but also so that they have leverage and they can think, are the cops corrupt or are they not corrupt? And you have to be able to answer that question, ideally by introducing an NPC who is a corrupt cop and you're all right, okay, I get it. And then you can build out that sort of feel of the adventure. So it's very much, I imagine like, you know, set dressing an original Twilight Zone where there was just gonna be that one 30 minutes.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (22:42.815)
So some of them have leverage and we can put it in the clock. So that's where they, not correct, but you have to be able to answer that.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:50.274)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:06.253)
Yeah!

Kenneth Hite (23:06.84)
And that's all we're ever gonna see of William Shatner on that plane or whatever. And everything has to say, what's happening? What's going to happen? What's this gonna feel like? And so that's really the goal with a single adventure is, like everything, there should only be, you know, playable sentences in there. But for a single adventure, it really has to direct you and drive you to not a specific course of action necessarily, but to a specific, you know, feel and, you know, choice universe, right? Is this...

Marie Brennan (she/her) (23:08.16)
And that's all we're ever gonna see. It's gonna be center on that plane or whatever. And everything's gonna be safe. What's happening? What's gonna happen? What's gonna be like? And so that's my...

Deborah L. Davitt (23:11.817)
Hahaha

Kenneth Hite (23:36.592)
a place where I need a gun or do I need to fast talk people? And that should be, you know, made apparent as you go in. So you're describing the bar and is it a friendly bar? Is it a working class bar? Is it a fancy bar? You know, are you gonna get in a fight in this bar? All of that needs to be established in as few sentences as you can because the job of the adventure is to sort of support that play that the players are.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:44.733)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:03.018)
Yeah, I like that as a response. And when you're dealing with a campaign level or a full setting book or something like that, obviously, you can have a little bit more connective tissue, but you obviously will have way more NPCs, way more way more pieces of setting to deploy, and it can be a more varied place.

Kenneth Hite (24:22.876)
Yeah, and when I have written short stories, it is a constant urge to over explain, especially if you do it in an alternate history, you want another story the same length in the back where you just give the timeline, or you have the horrible thing that happens in all alternate histories, where the character looks at a map of the world for no reason. You just have to discipline yourself and say, no, that is bad, there will be no, as you know Bob moment in this story, and you just have to pull it out.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:30.486)
Ha ha ha.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:38.018)
Yes.

Rachel Handley (24:43.181)
hahahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (24:43.47)
Hehehe

Kenneth Hite (24:51.3)
And so you might be able, I did a short story called Bad Beat for Aaron Burr that took place in a world where Burr's revolt was succeeded and he took over Mexico. And so you just have to sort of establish what the setting is like as you go past. So it's like, James G. Blaine is on the dollar coin and you're like, all right, that was a thing. And you just move forward and you just have to have these sort of, like I think Marie was saying, these sort of impressionist moments that give you a sense of a bigger world outside the constraints of the story.

And that's something that I look for in a short story or in a film even is, is this story going on outside Bill Shatner on this plane or are we doing really just a stage play? Nothing wrong with stage plays, but you really, I think for a work of prose fiction or a role playing game, especially for prose fiction, you need to feel that world is big and extends off the side. And if you took a left turn instead of a right turn, you'd be in a whole different story.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:21.995)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:25.656)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:47.51)
I totally agree with that. Rachel, how much world building is the right amount for you? How do you balance it?

Rachel Handley (25:59.674)
I, that's pretty tough because I think that it's going to be different from story to story. It just depends on how well your reader is going to connect to the characters. So like in certain stories where there's only a little bit of kind of as better as development, I might not need to do that much world building at all.

Rachel Handley (26:27.997)
completely different to what anyone's ever experienced in real life, then there might need to be a much bigger effort in terms of the world building itself. I honestly don't think I get to choose that book. I kind of feel like when I'm writing it, it kind of does it for me. I know with perspective I'm writing from.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:53.294)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (26:55.345)
And that character ends up kind of informing me of, you know, which details are going to be relevant. I think a lot of world building is the difference between what's normal for your character versus what's normal for the reader and writing from the character's point of view rather than the reader's point of view. So again, it depends on your perspective as you're going in. As long as it's different from your reader, you're probably going to have.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:02.05)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:12.376)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (27:24.729)
certain elements of world building, according to those different characters and so on.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:30.878)
Yep, character centric focus does tend to change what your camera view shows. I completely agree with that. And as somebody whose characters talk to her in her head, and I mean that in the best possible way, not in the please take me away to the nice place with the white coats and everything like that. I let them determine sometimes what I'm telling. So yeah.

Kenneth Hite (27:38.58)
Thanks for watching!

Rachel Handley (27:44.189)
I'm going to go.

Rachel Handley (27:55.693)
Yeah, yeah, same, same. It's like, to some extent, it feels like it's up to them. It's kind of like, oh, okay, I'll go do that now.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:06.398)
I've had characters who decided that something that I had written in the outline was stupid, that they were not going to do it, and I was insane for having suggested it. And I go, you're right, it was dumb. I won't do that. We'll get there a different way. So, characters are pushy, but sometimes they're absolutely right. 

Rachel Handley (28:20.753)
Hahaha!


Deborah L. Davitt (28:33.77)
We already sort of covered my next question by talking about how do you immerse the reader in this new world without drowning them in details. We sort of already covered that, but do you wanna say something about that, Marie, anyways?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (28:45.128)
Yeah, because there are a chunk of this is basically a question of craft around how does the exposition happen? Because it's not just about how much information is in the story, it's how are you presenting it to the reader. And this one is interesting to me because I know what I personally like as a reader, and it's what I do in my fiction. And we get readers, especially for the Rook and Rose books, which, you know, Publishers Weekly called our world building tediously detailed. So

Deborah L. Davitt (28:53.976)
Yes.



Marie Brennan (she/her) (29:12.135)
go us. You know, Alyc and I are both anthropologists, so we did a shit-ton of worldbuilding for that one, because we like it. But some readers adore the way that we handle it, and others are drowning. Because it's not that we don't explain to you how things work and what they mean, it's that you won't be able to say, ah, yes, the explanation of that is on page 17. Because we do it through contextual clues and through how the characters are interacting

Deborah L. Davitt (29:12.807)
Hehehehe


Deborah L. Davitt (29:39.516)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (29:42.043)
rather than there being that moment where you can find the one to three paragraphs that just lay out for you how does this work. And obviously we talk about infodumps being a bad thing, but it's only an infodump basically if people don't like the scale of how you're explaining. I've heard that with Tom Clancy thrillers, they are massively infodumpy, and that is what Tom Clancy's readers show up for. That is why they are reading this book. Yeah. But like—

Deborah L. Davitt (29:57.345)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:03.402)
They do, they do.

Kenneth Hite (30:04.762)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (30:08.999)
I think probably a lot of Sanderson's readers from the impressions I'm getting from reviews and discussions I've heard, they want us to explain more because they are used to reading books where there is much more of a, and here is the explanation. It's scaled to a level where they like it. It doesn't feel like an info dump to them. But Alys and I would rather, because the Rook and Rose books are co-written with my friend Alys Helms, with those, we drop you into it and you will get the clues you need along the way. And some readers draft.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:26.03)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:36.317)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (30:37.347)
Right, so it's partly taste and it's expository technique of how are you doing things. I won't even usually put an appositive after a noun. What I'll do is I'll structure the sentence such that he put his hand on the hilt of his kabbash and took comfort from the feel of the sword or something. I put that rather than his kabbash, a sword. It's going to be later in the sentence. I think that there's actually a high level of craft fiddliness.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:56.94)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kenneth Hite (31:00.958)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (31:06.375)
that goes into that question of how do you keep the reader from drowning?

Deborah L. Davitt (31:06.919)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:10.958)
I like that answer. I personally, I've been accused by some people of explaining too much in my Eda Earth books. And I'm like, I came out of fan fiction and I had lots of people who were sending me emails saying, I don't understand this. So in the next chapter would be my explaining this to them. And they would come back to the chapter of that and said, we still don't understand it. So the next chapter of that would be more explanations, explained a different way from a different person's point of view.

Did you get it this time? Okay, we got it. So I'm used to having to hold the reader's hand a little bit, but there are different ways of doing it, as you said, where you can put it in subtly as opposed to necessarily having a full page information dump. And I used to read Tom Clancy when I was a kid because my dad was reading him. And I recently tried to pick up my dad's old books out of wanting to feel a connection to my dad again. And I realized, I can't read this anymore.

Kenneth Hite (32:08.589)
I guess the third way is the is the Tolkien. Oh, I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:09.494)
Uh, Beth--Oh, no, go ahead. The Tolkien way.

Kenneth Hite (32:14.74)
gonna say the third way is the Tolkien way where you put it all in the appendices or in the Silmarillion which no one reads and then you've done it for those fans. Right, yeah, but mathematically no one reads it. But you've done it for those fans and then everyone else can sort of go along and pick it up or not out of the sort of established, you know, inferential way that Marie's talking about.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (32:20.337)
Mm.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:20.683)
Yes!

Rachel Handley (32:23.116)
Oh

Deborah L. Davitt (32:23.365)
Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (32:24.319)
I read it.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (32:28.691)
Yeah!

Deborah L. Davitt (32:29.538)
Hahaha!

Kenneth Hite (32:43.952)
If you have that kind of space and that kind of luxury, I mean, that's the advantage of being a role-playing game designer is we're writing the appendices. We're not writing the Lord of the Rings. And so we almost have the opposite problem is how do you get people to pay attention to what they should have read back in the little text box and said, oh, by the way, everyone in this is a vampire without saying, you know, Armon bit you like vampires do cause he's a vampire. Remember the text box. You have to sort of just hope that people are

Deborah L. Davitt (32:50.775)
Yes.

Kenneth Hite (33:13.028)
are pulling out, you know, the vital pieces of information. And for that, I don't think that there's a better way than the, rather than the appendix to preface. So when you're gonna do this story, you set it out, you say, okay, Game Master, here's the actually important stuff that you really need to know to run this. We're gonna mention it again, but here it is. So it's sort of the opposite of your, why is this not on page 17? This is, it is on page 17, it's in the index.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:23.319)
Mm-hmm.


Kenneth Hite (33:41.124)
Explanation, comma, page 17, go there. And that's sort of the opposite job that we have in presenting story because we're trying to enable, it's almost like we're trying to do a story Bible for the writer as opposed to doing the actual story in that case.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:45.393)
Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (33:59.659)
I was actually just thinking this story Bible thing, yeah, that if it's a setting I really love, I will be interested in going and reading that extra material, but the story itself still needs to contain enough explanation for me to follow, right? It can't be like, okay, I'm going to drop this in here, and the only way you'll understand it is if you go read that appendix. Then in fiction, the authors failed. Games are a very different beast in that regard. I'll admit, I ran into...

Deborah L. Davitt (34:08.449)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (34:13.46)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (34:27.207)
the experience of not having read that sidebar or, in fact, much of the thing. A friend of mine was running a Numenera game. I absolutely wanted to play in my friend's game. I wasn't that interested in the world of Numenera. It just isn't my aesthetic. And so I mostly hadn't read the book. And so stuff comes up and I'm like, okay, I have no idea about this.

Kenneth Hite (34:40.263)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (34:46.864)
That sounds very new numenera-y right. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:48.416)
That's when you play the Amnesiac character.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (34:50.375)
Yeah. We actually were all amnesiac. The GM decided to say that all of our characters had amnesia to kind of explain why we didn't know the world.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:59.522)
that works. Just to continue on the role play thing and how you develop things and how you point the reader to information, I've been looking at a game called Teeth. And this is a Forge in the Dark hack that is much more extensive than their typical hack is. It's set in 18th century England, but there's waves of corruption moving over the land and things like that. The way they decided to set up their book is

Every couple of couple of lines as they're as they're building their world as they're building this NPC. It has footnote see this page and that page then there's two lines later see this page and that page so it says backwards forwards constant movement through the book and like While that's very thorough it to me is like can't can we please just have me sit in one place at a time and find all the information in a linear fashion as opposed to having to

Marie Brennan (she/her) (35:40.927)
see this page and that page.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (35:51.891)
Just having sit in one place at a time and find all the information that's in their linear fashion and those things are having to move the soul in the realism that should be up. I can't just have my eyes open on one page.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:58.114)
scroll because I'm reading this in a PDF, I can't just have my finger on one page and constantly flip back and forth. It's definitely better for a physical artifact than it is in PDF form, which is something that people also have to think about when they're when they're designing games and when they're designing books these days is, are you publishing electronic? Are you publishing hybrid? Are you how are people going to experience this? But that's tangential, so I'm going to rein myself back in. And I'm going to go back to Beth and I'm going to say, how do you go about immersing the reader in this new world without drowning them in details? How do you find that balance for yourself?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (36:26.759)
Hahaha

Beth Cato (36:40.413)
First of all, I wanted to say a big pardon if there's noise. I have a thunderstorm going on right now and it is dumping rain outside. So if you hear any background noise, that's what that is. So I've been trying to mute when other people are talking so it doesn't interrupt the feed at all. So with that said, for me, I think an important facet that hasn't come up yet, when it comes to the approach and getting the world building right, voice is one of the most important things. It's like what Marie was saying with...

Marie Brennan (she/her) (36:43.475)
I have a thunderstorm going on right now and it is dumping rain outside so if you hear any background noise, that's what that is. So I've been trying to meet with you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (37:03.534)
Mm, yes.

Beth Cato (37:09.997)
the approach that they use for those books. If you, having that kind of that tone, almost an academic expertise and having that tone, it works really well if you're phrasing things and if you're approaching it that way. And I guess you'd have a different kind of academic approach if you're doing some gaming materials, it depends on how immersive it is and how it's written. But yeah, I think having voice and having the format for the voice also matters. It's like...

I just did a story for the first time that was very experimental for me because I used the epistle format. Everything was done in the form of letters that this character was writing to their mother. So I was kind of trying to find the balance of I didn't want a whole lot of, as you know, Bob kind of segues to bring information, but still keeping the tone and making it sound like it was written by someone who was in the late 19th century and having that kind of vocabulary and that kind of flow and using that to help me piece the information.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (37:47.647)
So it was kind of trying to find the balance of I didn't want a whole lot of, as you know, Bob kind of sideways-divided information, but still keeping the tone and making it sound like it was written by someone who was in the late 18th century, having that kind of vocabulary and that kind of flow, and using that to help increase the information. So how much would someone in that time period say about this subject matter? You know, it really helps to inform how much you're putting into the story.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:52.346)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (38:07.257)
How much would someone in that time period say about this subject matter? It really helps inform how much you put into the story because you do have to think like, like Deborah, like you were saying, sometimes the characters talk to you and sometimes they're very chatty. And sometimes if you are the great author God and you try and make them do something and they say, nope, yeah, it's like, oh, okay, I plotted this out. And yeah, they honestly would not do that. I screwed up character. What would you do?



Marie Brennan (she/her) (38:21.175)
And sometimes they're very chatty. 

Deborah L. Davitt (38:21.102)
Mm-hmm. Yes, they are.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (38:21.175)
And sometimes if you are the very other side, and you try and make them do something, and they say, no. Well, it's like, oh, OK, I've plotted this out. And yeah, they honestly would not do that. I screwed up. Who care for what they do? They will see what they say, and then you go from there. But you've got to keep the voice together and make it feel like it fits within the role. Because if you try and force them to fit into a pod, it's going to come to everyone. People are going to recognize it.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:28.109)
No

Deborah L. Davitt (38:35.522)
Hehehehe

Beth Cato (38:37.005)
You listen to what they say and then you go from there, but you've got to hear the voice and you've got to make it feel like it fits within the world because if you try and force them to fit into a plot, it's going to come through. People are going to recognize it and it's just not going to work.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (38:51.109)
It's just not going to work. I unfortunately read books that were clearly written by somebody who had an outline from 15 years ago, and they decided to not listen to their characters. They have lost the thread of where the characters were.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:51.318)
Mm-hmm. I've unfortunately read books that were clearly written by somebody who had an outline from 15 years ago, and they decided to not listen to their characters and they had lost the thread of where the characters were, and they're trying to force them through the paces of the outline. And you can tell. You can absolutely tell. It's sad.

Beth Cato (39:10.773)
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:16.49)
I'm going to be skipping over my last question. So I'm going to just go to Rachel to try and finish this off with, how do you immerse the reader in this new world without drowning them in details? And then we're going to move to each other's stories.

Rachel Handley (39:30.933)
Yeah, I guess, again, I mean, I would agree with Beth in terms of the voice. And like I was saying before, what the character is telling you to do. And again, the perspective that you're writing from becomes one of the most important things because it's about what makes sense for that perspective. And if that is what the reader is engaging with, then if you're doing it right, if it goes well, then...

Deborah L. Davitt (39:42.253)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:51.721)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (40:00.721)
there shouldn't be too much or too little. I do quite like kind of contextual building. So I quite like world building where I leave a bunch of stuff out, but that it's so normal for the characters to do that at that point, that makes total sense. That's what I really, really like. And I like reading stuff like that as well, because as a reader, it feels a little bit like a mystery.

but in a nice way, not in a I am drowning kind of way. So I guess, yeah, again, it's like, it's all down to the character and kind of what feels right for that character and interaction like between them. And I was just thinking when we were talking before that one of the ways that TV shows go wrong is when, in the last season, you're just thinking, a character wouldn't do that. They wouldn't do that.


Deborah L. Davitt (40:28.503)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:55.2)
Yes.

Rachel Handley (40:55.501)
And it's kind of like, it's the same kind of thing, right? It's like, yeah, you just haven't taken on board all of this world building and completely wrecked it. And it's like, it's a very similar thing.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:04.768)
Yeah.

Yeah, when a different group of writers comes in and suddenly the characters are acting like pod people, it is definitely disconcerting and very disheartening. And that's usually when I quit watching. 

So, all right, we're gonna move into the section of the broadcast where we talk about each other's work. We're gonna start with Marie with the naming of knots, which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, issue 388 on August 10th of 2023.

Rachel Handley (41:11.037)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (41:16.965)
Yeah. Like community.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:35.518)
In this novelette, I'm going to say the name wrong. Tseges?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (41:38.981)
I guess yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:40.746)
I did I got it right and this Tseges is a thief and a good one out to rob the rich and make himself less poor when mid burglary his entire sack of loot is stolen from him by the legendary thief known as the rook The rook has a proposition for him come work with him in addition in exchange for getting into a fortress filled with information that requires a second Person for the job the rook will give him information on a variety of targets amongst the wealthy elite of the city

The Rook is famous for not killing, but plans to make a public example of the nobleman who allowed a bridge to fall into the river, killing 53 people and contaminating the water supply for everyone on the lower banks. The story is replete with details from the Rook and the World's Cape. The gods have both faces and masks, which they might turn towards you. The city is rife with corruption and greed. The Rook, an established character, meets with a new character who speaks in a lower class dialect that sounds smooth and unforced.

How did you go about fitting this piece into the Rook and the Rose puzzle? Because obviously you have to work a hand and glove with Alice. Alyc? Did I say it right? Alyc, thank you. Alright.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (42:39.519)
Alyc. Yeah. Yeah, so I wrote the story myself. This one wasn't done collaboratively, though Alice read through it and gave me comments. And it's funny because probably if you looked at it, you would think, oh, what happened was that Marie decided she wanted to write about that bridge collapse, which is a background thing in the novels where they're trying to fix what went wrong with that and replace the thing that cleaned the river that got broken by the bridge.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:50.05)
Okay.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (43:07.807)
And in fact, you know, the story came about because I wanted to make the rook stand like a companion cube out of portal on a pressure plate. Like, we had done that in the role-play game that gave rise to these books. I remembered that image. I wanted to make that happen, so I needed a plot to make it go. The challenge really was that I did have to make a lot of decisions about what not to include here. And it's a similar sort of thing.

Deborah L. Davitt (43:14.673)
Hehehehehehehehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (43:32.999)
when writing historical fiction. Because in a sense then there is a very detailed canon and in a very detailed setting that has been, you know, already made for me by history. And I have to decide which bits of it go into the story. When I was working on editing this with Scott Andrews, the editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, there were things where like, he kept on pushing it, why could the new Mannaut that cleans the river not be replaced? He wanted an explanation for that. And I'm like...

Deborah L. Davitt (43:37.822)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (43:57.831)
That requires me to mention another entire magic system. I'm trying not to stick into this story, and it involves a bunch of complicated things about the interactions between those magic systems. You do not want me to open that can of worms, Scott. And so it was very much, again, about that really fine-grained craft thing of finessing the sentences that present this can't be done in a way that will just leave the reader with a feeling of, okay, there are reasons. I don't need to know the reasons right now.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:11.054)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (44:27.298)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (44:27.347)
And there were other places where Scott was like, oh, you know, rather than just saying the metal of this numenade, you know, I think like bronze would be a really good idea for this. I'm like, no, it can't be bronze because reasons of magic system. It's a made-up metal. I'm not going to mention the made-up fantasy metal that exists here. Leave it alone. Yeah, so there was a lot of stuff where I had to be like, that is just gonna lead us down a path of more detail than I think this story needs.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:41.806)
hahahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (44:54.547)
But one thing that I will say about it, because this is again, some of that, how do you get the exposition across to the reader? A lot of the story hinges on Numenotria, which is one of the forms of magic in our story. And I deliberately set it up such that the first thing you see Tsegis doing is having to figure out like a kind of like a puzzle lock almost for getting into the building where there's a Numenotrian defense. And so he has to get past that.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:54.945)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (45:20.119)
And by taking this piece of worldbuilding and making it a problem he has to solve, that gives me a very natural reason to go into detail about how it works. So a chunk of your, how do you get this detail to the reader, is if the characters are arguing about it, or it's a problem one of them needs to solve, or something where you make the worldbuilding a thing that is a point of conflict, then that helps you a lot with explaining stuff.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:20.268)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:29.505)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:36.99)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:43.094)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:46.642)
I did that a lot in Etter Earth because I have multiple magic systems and so one of them is basically summoning and evoking spirits and working with ley lines and things like that and then you have the more sciency sort of ones where they're working with atomics and things like that and so I have two characters who are constantly sniping at each other about which magic system is better and then they can explain why they're better because therefore we have a perfect excuse to talk about it.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (46:14.589)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:17.282)
All right, we're gonna move to Beth with Prognostiqueso, which appeared in the late lamented Daily Science Fiction, July 29th of 2022. In this flash piece, a narrator owns a cheese shop and can tell fortunes by the crumbs left behind by her customers. A young woman accompanied by her boyfriend comes in to ask if they have a future together, given his history of aggressive driving. The narrator gives her the bad news that he's about to cause an accident with his driving.

And as she glances down into the remnants of the girl's cheese, she realizes the accident he caused is about to kill both of them. She hustles the girl out of the way of the shop window just as a car from her vision crashes through it. In terms of world building, fortune telling isn't a secret in this world, which is otherwise indistinguishable from our own. There are signs up warning people that their futures will be read, sort of like, you know, the signs that we see saying, this is under surveillance, cameras in use. There are actual security cameras and insurance plans and more.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:10.838)
How did you decide on this blend of the fantastic and the mundane?

Beth Cato (47:16.173)
Well, having it take place in kind of our world, our reality, it makes the role building a lot easier because a lot of that initial structure is in place, especially for flash fiction. I mean, that makes it a whole lot easier. When you're working with 1,000, 1,500 words, you can't go into the big, deep alt history. You've got to keep the, you have to have a very small cast and you have to be very focused.

Well, I know it's taking place in our world, our reality. It makes the world building a lot easier because a lot of that infrastructure is in this, especially for transportation. I mean, that makes it a lot easier. We're working on 1,500 works. We can't go into the big big, oh, this is great. I could say, you have to have a very small camera. I could do that for a long time.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:23.478)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:27.5)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:37.622)
Oh, I don't know. I keep trying.

Beth Cato (47:43.734)
So that made it easier. So that meant my focus in this story was entirely on making the magic around cheese plausible. And it really is like the reading of tea leaves, except it's reading cheese crumbs. Because why not? So I was able to have fun with that and what you can do with that. And anyone who knows me knows how much I love cheese. It's like, well, of course you would write something like that.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (47:50.723)
magic of a cheese block. And they really like to accept a cheese block. Because why not?

Deborah L. Davitt (47:53.294)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:58.252)
Hahaha

Marie Brennan (she/her) (48:03.195)
And anyone who knows the answer to which I left the question, please leave a comment below. Or send it right now. And I hope to see you again soon. This story has always been my all-time favorite.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:06.664)
Hahaha

Beth Cato (48:08.281)
And I have to say this story has one of my all time favorite titles because it's such great.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:13.07)
Mm-hmm. It's a wonderful title.

Beth Cato (48:17.153)
It's just so punny and fun and you know exactly what the story is about just from the title because it's prognostica so it's prognostication and geez I mean it's all right there.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:25.027)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (48:30.33)
right? Leaning on what history has already established for you, as Marie said before, is a wonderful way to, and then you just diverge in little ways, and then you come back to it. So you are making this outline around reality and having their interstices that connect you back to reality so your reader is more willing to go with you. I like that. It works perfectly in this piece. Rachel.

Beth Cato (48:42.03)
Yes.

Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:58.514)
The spaceship of Theseus, which appeared in Full House Literary, this microfiction is just 354 words long. I count it. There's a creeping sense of horror evoked as a sentient ship that has taken humanity to the stars and from there, backed home to Athens, slowly rots in the atmosphere of Earth. Pieces of it are replaced, a play on the ship of Theseus, philosophical problem, until its mind is removed from its body and placed in an under glass in a museum, where it can only beg passersby to notice it.

Rachel Handley (49:07.933)
I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:28.342)
This is a particularly dark and evocative piece. It's remarkable for how much it packs into such a short space. A lot of the world building is left to inference, as you said that you like to do. It's not mentioned, for example, why humans had left Earth to begin with or why they were now permitted to return. So there are these pieces that are missing and the reader's mind just sort of bounces off of it going, but I want to know more, I want to know more.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (49:37.615)
as you said that you like to do. I have not mentioned, for example, why humans have left Earth to begin with or why they were now committed to return. So there are these pieces that are missing, and your Ariba's mind sort of bounces off of it, going, but I want to know more. I want to know more. Why is it not going to explain? I'm going to fill in these holes on my own, because that's what I do, because I'm a human being, and I have patterns, and I have pattern recognition. If you have any...

Deborah L. Davitt (49:52.29)
Why is this not being explained? I'm gonna fill in details on my own because that's what I do, because I'm a human being and I have patterns and I have pattern recognition. If you'd had more space, would you have included those sorts of details? Or why did you choose to leave them out if space wasn't an issue?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (50:02.143)
space, would you have included those sorts of details? Or why did you choose to do it when the space wasn't there?

Rachel Handley (50:08.513)
Yeah, so with that initial story, when I first wrote it, I did just want it to be a kind of a riff on the philosophical thought experiment. It obviously got very dark as it went on. Yeah, yeah, like I really like it, even though it's kind of like bleak. But so like originally I wanted it to be like that, but

Deborah L. Davitt (50:27.578)
But wonderfully so!

Rachel Handley (50:38.213)
I ended up putting it in the short story collection, Possible Worlds, and I ended up connecting it to one of the other stories in there that actually gives way more context. So I actually got to eat my cake and have it too, because I got to go back to that story, like maybe like a year after I actually wrote it, and just kind of went, ooh, this would work, and this might explain why this is going on. It actually...

Yeah, there's like a huge, there's a series of links through several of the stories in the collection and that became one of them. So I got to do that, which was really cool. But initially when I first wrote it, I was just thinking, I wonder what it would be like if we put like emotion and character into this thought experiment that already exists. So, and the thought experiment is just, this ship is being replaced bit by bit. And the question is,

Deborah L. Davitt (51:14.158)
Oh, that's lovely.

Rachel Handley (51:34.365)
can we have personal identity over time and how much of us needs to be replaced before we're not the same person. So that was like the starting point. And then I kind of went, okay, but what if the thing being replaced is something that is recognizably a person? What if it's from that perspective? And then, yeah, I just kind of went off from there and obviously went super bleak with how that would work out.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:00.266)
No, it works beautifully. It works beautifully. I can't believe how much you managed to pack into such a short space. It's a really well-developed story. All right, we're gonna bop back to Marie Brennan with constant Ivan and clever Natalia, which again appeared beneath ceaseless skies, this time on issue 373, January 12th of 2023.

This is a delightful story simmering with world-building details. Constantine sets himself a task to receive a prophecy from the moon turtle, but then reasons out that since there are two moons, there must be two turtles. These turtles, once he's reunited them for the first time in long ages, give him a prophecy that he'll move what's impossible to move. And when he hears about a caravan wagon that cannot be moved without the proper horses, he resolves to help the warman who owns it. Clever Natalia, not knowing that this is... Clever Natalia.

not knowing that this is actually a test to find a new leader for her caravan. He finds sea horses, the horses of the dawn, the horses of dusk, and finally a horse made from the bones of the mountains themselves. And clever Natalya on seeing them and him and his steadfastness and courage decides he would make a decent leader for her caravan if he chooses to stay with them. So this story is infused with a strong sense of Slavic folklore, but it's, I know you do your research when you write.

Was this based on any particular folk story? Did you come up with a whole cloth? Because it fits like with a click in my head, like this is something that has to have been established previously, this fits so perfectly into the Slavic folklore tapestry in my head that already exists. Did, is this whole cloth yours? Or did you base it on anything? Or how did you come up with it?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (53:39.763)
It's not based on a specific story. It is definitely based on motifs that show up in folklore. I refer to this story as me going full metal folklorist because we had come up with this idea of this story because the Constant Ivan and Clever Natalia thing gets referenced in the Rook and Rose books as the interaction between two characters mirrors it a little bit. We had the idea of this story whereupon I thought, why shouldn't I write it?

Deborah L. Davitt (53:49.934)
Hahaha.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (54:08.431)
And I just, I leaned full on into the folklore that I, you know, in traditional real world folklore generally it would be that Clever Natalia is setting a challenge for her suitors, but listen, I decided that it shouldn't be quite so, you know, the woman is the prize in this contest kind of feeling. So it's altered from that a little bit. But things like, yeah, he, you know, gets the horses from the four directions and they are not normal horses and don't ask how physics works here because that is not the point. It's a folktale. Yeah. But I...

Deborah L. Davitt (54:09.262)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (54:19.337)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:34.126)
That's not the point.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (54:38.159)
It feels very Slavic because that's what the names are modeled on, but the underpinnings of it are really just more broadly stuff that you see a lot of in European folklore. Yeah, it was entirely a thing of we had come up with this narrative as part of the banter between these characters, but in order for the banter to be fully comprehensible, we needed to know the story it was referring to. Now that we knew the story, why shouldn't the story get written?

Deborah L. Davitt (54:41.479)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (55:03.703)
So it was really just fleshing out a quarter of the world because I love folklore. That's really all it boils down to.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:11.646)
Well, it comes across and it's beautiful. We're going to, again, in the interest of time, because I know that at least one of us has to leave relatively soon, we're going to only do two more stories and then we're going to do the reading from Beth Kato. So we're going to pop to, I'm having such a hard time deciding between stories because they're both wonderful. We're going to go to Beth Kato's The Recipe Keeper, which appeared in Flash Fiction Online, January, 2022. I have read this one before. It is wonderful.

So rereading it for the podcast was just a lovely revisiting. So in the story, the humans in an alien world have been subjugated by alien conquerors who forbid them memories of their own culture, executing them for using their own language or singing songs from earth. Against this backdrop, a woman exchanging recipes with other humans has to keep them in her own memory, pure oral transmission, nothing written down, and runs the risk of being caught and killed for her actions.

In terms of world building, this could be modeled on any number of resistance movements here on Earth, which certainly informs and gives depth to the setting. What gave you the direct inspiration for this story?

Beth Cato (56:22.181)
For me, it really came down to legacy and culture and what's passed down, what's important to us, what forms our culture at a basic level. Like you in your synopsis there, bring up music is a major facet of that. For me, because I love food, I have a recipe blog, and that's just a subject that I share a lot.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (56:22.591)
We really came down to legacy and culture and what's passed down, what's important to us, what makes us.

What forms our culture kind of basically? And like you in your synopsis there, bring up music, you know, is a major aspect of that. But for me, because I love food, I have a recipe blog, and that's just a subject that I share a lot online and it's something of great personal interest to me. It's about recipes and personally what they mean to us and how they're passed down. I mean...

Deborah L. Davitt (56:40.254)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (56:49.745)
online and it's something of great personal interest to me. It's about recipes and personally what they mean to us and how they're passed down and food and how food is made and what ingredients are used is it's something I think a lot of people don't consciously think about but it is a major source of control and it is a major source if you read about colonialism.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:55.241)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (57:00.255)
food and how food is made and what ingredients are used is something I think a lot of people don't consciously think about, but it is a major source of control. It is a major source if you read about colonialism.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:14.294)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (57:19.033)
Controlling the food that people were given is huge. It's like in our modern world, people think of Navajo fried bread or Indian fried bread, depending on where they are in their country. And they think, oh, this is Native American food. Not so much is because when they were forced onto reservations after the great majority of them were killed on the travails getting to the reservations, they were supplied with all purpose white flour and baking powder and salt.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (57:19.315)
control the food that people are given is huge. It's like, in our modern world, people think of Navajo fried bread or Indian fried bread, depending where they're from in the country. And they think, oh, this is Native American food. Not so much is because when they were forced onto reservations after the very majority of them were killed on the travails, they made sure the reservations they were supplied with all.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:21.87)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (57:49.097)
and things like that, and oil. What can you do that? You can make a basic bread and drop it in oil and fry it up. So it's completely a result of that really horrific past. And now it's unfortunately the most well-known Native American food in the country. And it's something that is really only invented for, was only invented in the past hundred years or so. So thinking of things like that from our world, it's not hard to translate that to science fiction.

So thinking of things like that from our world, it's not hard to translate that to science fiction, even in a classroom, because I think that, you know, everyone understands recipes, we need to put them together, and adding the danger to it, where is this dangerous thing to help and share, but it makes sense, there's a logic to it.

Beth Cato (58:17.213)
even in a flash format, because I think, you know, everyone understands recipes and the importance of food and family gatherings, and then adding the danger to it where it's this dangerous thing to know and share. To me, it makes sense. There's a logic to it.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:17.739)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:32.758)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there absolutely is. And this is a tangent and I promise I will make it brief, but you talk about food as a method of control. One of the things I learned about in my sociology classes was about cults and how cults will maintain a specific diet, which is very high in carbs and very high workload at the same time, but it is this free fast energy, but then it leaves you with nothing that your brain can process.

Beth Cato (58:49.061)
BLEH

Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:03.378)
And so you're in this constant state of mental exhaustion, because you're being physically worked and you don't have any of the resources that allow you to have long, long burning energy and so on and so forth. And so yeah, food is control.

Beth Cato (59:03.908)
Yep.

Beth Cato (59:16.333)
That's a great point, yeah. Yeah, denial of food is also part of that, absolutely.


Deborah L. Davitt (59:21.822)
Yes. Yeah. All right. So we're going to move to Rachel again with The Sound, which appeared in Saunders Magazine on April 27th of 2022. In this flash piece, the people of the world become aware that plants around them are singing, though it sounds like screaming. The rural folk here at first, the people in the cities only later. They actually go on little tourism jaunts to go try to listen to the to the to the screaming because it's this why won't you perform for me thing that the city folk have.

Only when people begin to sing back to the plants does the incredible riot of noise begin to fade to a whisper. This could be our world, in most respects it is. How would you say that you world built the differences?

Marie Brennan (she/her) (59:55.934)
This could be our world, in most respect it is. How would you say that the world could be a good system?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:03.248)
and you're on mute.

Rachel Handley (01:00:08.209)
that happened to one of us was like... So I think that in terms of building the differences, I was just... part of it was like kind of borrowing from what the world is actually like and how people do interact with the things. So one thing I was thinking about was kind of like people going on safari or people going to zoos. I kind of like...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:11.022)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:32.253)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (01:00:32.413)
looking at the animals and kind of like tapping on the glass and going, hey, go, you know, hey, go do something that entertains me. And it was kind of, it was kind of from that really. And what I wanted, wanted to do in there was like, the reason they think the plants are screaming is that it's so, so loud that people's ears start to bleed. And it's, it's real bad for human beings that this is happening. And I kind of like the idea of, um, what if the things that we think are kind of

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:50.241)
Mm-hmm.

Rachel Handley (01:01:02.641)
I'm just there for our entertainment, get to get their revenge. And that was basically it for me, just giving them a position of power rather than just being, you know, just observing like a nice plant or a nice tree. And that was really the starting point for it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:09.655)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:20.076)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:23.31)
All right. We are gonna move on from our mutual admiration society to talk about the last banquet of temporal confections by friend of the podcast, Tina Connolly. It's appeared in tour.com in 2018. This is a spectacular novella. This is my second time through it. And I had read it when it first came out. And so reading it again for the podcast was again a lovely experience.

In this novella, a pretender has taken the throne of a kingdom and has taken hostages for the good behavior of his cooks, among whom is Danny, a baker who's learned how to use the magic of rose time to invoke memories and those who eat his confections. His wife, Saffron, is a hostage for the good behavior and integrity, serving as a food taster for the Duke. Each memory on display at the banquet is linked to others telling the story of how Saffron and Danny met married and failed to resist the traitor king until the day that the king decided that he wanted their confections in his life, and would stop at nothing to get those delights for himself.

In the end, it's a confection that inflicts on you all the pain you've observed that sends the traitor king into a coma, allowing the kingdom to reshape itself in his unfortunate absence. I'm gonna turn this over to you guys, and I'm gonna start with Ken, because he hasn't had a chance to talk in a little bit. When you were reading this, did you, what did you find that she did effectively to make this a second world fantasy realistic and hit home for the audience?

Kenneth Hite (01:02:41.908)
I mean, I have sort of a, and I may have alluded to this at the very beginning of my bit. I have sort of an allergy to secondary worlds because when I read something like this, I think of Michaela Reznor's wonderful Medici cooking fantasies. And I wanna say, why is this not on earth? Why do we have to have a fantasy world? Why can't you just put this?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:51.671)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:01.62)
Mmm

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:03:03.751)
not on earth. Why do you have to have a pantsuit on? Why can't you just make this, you know, with Italy or Germany or any other place where there are awful things?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:05.506)
Hehehehe

Kenneth Hite (01:03:08.956)
you know, in Italy or Germany or any other place where there are awful kings and cool cooking. Why does it have to be in a fantasy world? And so part of the problem for me when I, and even really good secondary world fantasies trigger this for me. When I was reading Lies of La Calamora, I spent the first third of the book saying, why are we not in Venice? What is wrong with you, Scott Lynch? And it was, it took me so long to get past that. And this is, you know, perhaps my...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:27.732)
Mmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:32.218)
Hahaha!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:03:32.384)
It took me so long to get past that.

Kenneth Hite (01:03:37.68)
damage, but whatever. I was exposed to the ill-earth war at an early age. And so, when I'm reading it, the world-building for me almost, I mean, it's effective, obviously. It builds this world of food magic and the rest of it. But the world-building is almost like someone has gone to a very great degree of trouble to build a one-for-one model of something that I already have.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:03:46.975)
So when I'm reading it, the world building for me almost, it's becoming effective obviously, it builds this more of a few Patrick and the rest of it, but the world building is almost like someone has gotten a very great, you know, someone to build a one for one model of something that I already have.

Kenneth Hite (01:04:06.712)
And so I feel like the world building, the effect of it is, and I don't want to harsh on the story at all. The story works very well, but the world building per se, always with secondary world fantasy strikes me as almost wasted effort because with, well, with probably great deal more effort, as Beth can speak to, you could have done this same story, you know, with real places that I actually have an emotional investment in already, as opposed to just.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:04:09.055)
like the world building would be affected by these. And I don't want to march on the story at all. The story works very well. But the world building per se, in many ways, is the central and most famous. These friends of mine almost based in Africa. So it would be well worth probably breaking more after the events we do. We could have made the same story, but with the old lightsabre, I actually have very nice little investment in already, I think, because I'm sure many in most areas

Kenneth Hite (01:04:34.62)
You know, I'm sure Danny and Rosemary are wonderful people, but it's like, you know, you really have to be in some sort of way, either doing a deliberate fairy tale like Marie's story or one for the morning glory by John Barnes, which is maybe the only secondary world fantasy I've truly loved, you know, since whenever. But to have a secondary world that just sits on its own is

It's like watching someone do an interpretive dance. It's like, I'm sure that's great, but it's not my vibe. And then so that's part of the problem with it for me. And I don't wanna bag on the story because the story is, it's structured well, the characters are great, everything else. But maybe because I'm so professionally consumed by setting, my reactions are a little idiosyncratic on this.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:28.094)
Mmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:32.59)
That's fair enough. Everybody has their own tastes and their own interpretations. I will say that when I was attempting to read Locke Lamora, I didn't have the reaction to the setting. I had a reaction to how he was telling the story, and I wasn't able to finish the book because of it, because every chapter was ending on a cliffhanger, and then we would change to the past, and then the past would end on a cliffhanger, and then we would go to the future again, and we would end on a cliffhanger. I was sitting there going, I know exactly what you're doing. I know why you're doing it. I don't like it.

Kenneth Hite (01:05:36.016)
Yeah. And it's, you know.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:05:45.855)
to be able to finish the book because of it. Because every chapter would end up on a bookmarker, and then we would change to a book path. And we would pass it on a bookmarker, and then we would go to the teacher again, and we would end on a bookmarker. And I would see them like, I know exactly what you're doing. I know exactly what you're doing.

Kenneth Hite (01:05:54.095)
Mm-hmm.

Kenneth Hite (01:06:02.924)
Yep, yep, yep. I'm not, right. It's a terrible fate and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Well, maybe on my worst enemy.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:03.006)
Leave me alone. Yes.

Rachel Handley (01:06:04.017)
Laughter

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:06:05.439)
It is the hazard of reading as a writer that you see the machinery going sometimes.

Rachel Handley (01:06:09.473)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:16.172)
Yeah, my husband tells me that I am a terrible person to watch TV with for the exact same reason. Beth is raising her hand in the background.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:06:19.699)
Yeah! Yep!

Kenneth Hite (01:06:19.785)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Rachel Handley (01:06:20.053)
Yeah, same. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:27.666)
Alright, so I'm going to turn to Marie since you do like secondary world fantasy.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:06:31.78)
Clearly.

Kenneth Hite (01:06:31.828)
Let's try and salvage the hideous dump I've put this podcast into.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:06:40.479)
I'm definitely coming at it. So one of the things that I did notice, because I was thinking about world building as I read it, is that with short fiction in particular, there's a lot more leeway to just kind of put a detail in and not have to work out all of its implications, because those implications are not this story. And so in particular, the kind of central conceit here that there is this herb rose time, which if you prepare it properly can give you different kinds

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:40.951)
What did you like? Hehehehe.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:07:10.999)
We don't have to worry about what the effect of that is on society in a bigger sense. Where does this fit into religion or something, or how does this affect history and the way that they remember it? None of that matters because it is entirely here to serve the purpose of this banquet where this is being used to create a certain arc of effects and you get the exposition about the history through the effects of the herb and so forth.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:15.843)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:28.962)
Hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:07:38.863)
So yeah, those larger implications of it don't have to be considered because it is a piece of short fiction. We're more willing to accept that it's just not going to go in those directions. Sort of contra to Ken's comments. Though I don't know, in a way I think we wrap around to agreeing because there is just enough of the politics built to make the story go and no more.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:43.188)
Yeah.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:08:04.131)
And so yeah, there's not a lot of depth put into the dynamics of the politics in this world. There's just like, here we basically have an evil usurper, that's what you need to know. Beyond that, details aren't really provided. And certainly if they had been provided, then you would be turning this into a novel very rapidly. It doesn't need to be a novel. But that part of me that likes the textured, detailed world that I...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:10.536)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:15.359)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:23.032)
Yes.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:08:29.123)
I could give a long answer to why are things secondary world not rather than history, but that is not this podcast. I like that kind of thing. We can get to that episode later. I do like the things that take it away from the real world for aesthetic reasons or thematic reasons or whatever. But yeah, this is very much built around its core purpose. And it's detailed because there are multiple steps in that process, but it's not, or rather it's long because there's multiple steps.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:36.174)
It could be, it could, it could become a podcast.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:08:58.311)
but there's not a great deal of surrounding detail built in.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:03.094)
Mm-hmm. Beth, what did you like? What didn't you like? And what did she do effectively to make this secondary world built to your satisfaction? Or not?

Beth Cato (01:09:18.052)
Well, for me, I love this. And when you're asking for story suggestions, it's one that I was like, oh, I vaguely remember reading this years ago, and I had to dig up a link to it. And so I read it again two days ago, and it was the first time I'd read it since it first came out, too. So that was nice to get to have an excuse to revisit it. Because I've known Tina Connelly for, gosh, over 10 years now, because we were both there on Codex in the early days and all that stuff.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:32.812)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:09:37.287)
and family for gosh, over 10 years now because we were both there in my projects and early days and all that stuff.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:42.972)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (01:09:45.773)
For me, what really works and what is kind of the core of the story is the emotion. It is a story that is really about emotion and memory and ties that into food, which for me, with my background, what I write about, that's no wonder I like that about the novel. It really is. Now, I will say that one thing that stood out to me, rereading it.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:09:46.691)
I mean, what really works and what is kind of the core of the story is the emotion. It is a story that is really about the emotion and memory and ties that into... Yeah. Which frankly, you know, my bad now. Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:59.469)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:04.611)
Hahaha

Kenneth Hite (01:10:05.512)
A slam dunk for you.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:10:08.424)
It really is. I will say that one thing that's just, we're reading it now, and you're like, gosh, five, six hours?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:08.509)
Hehehehehehe

Rachel Handley (01:10:09.373)
I'm going to go to bed.

Beth Cato (01:10:12.921)
Now, you know, like, gosh, five, six years after it came out, and I think just, I guess being deeper into craft, it did really stand out to me this time that the Duke really had no nuance. He was just a bad guy. And the first time I don't think that really, I was so into the emotion of the piece that I didn't really pay attention to that. But this time I did notice that he was very much the caricature of the evil king.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:16.542)
Mm-hmm.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:10:18.495)
as being vibrant craft. I did, it didn't really stand out to me this time that the dude really had what he wants. He was just, yeah, the guy. Yeah, and the first time I don't think that really, I was so into the emotion of the beast that I didn't really pay attention to that. This time I did notice that he was very much the caricature of the evil king. Yeah, so.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:28.94)
Yep.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:41.43)
Yeah.

Beth Cato (01:10:42.113)
But at the same time, and so I was left kind of with, I wish there could have been a little more nuance to that. But to me, it's a beautiful story if you love what some people would consider pro's, but I really enjoyed the lushness. To me, there's a very poetic sense to the writing, talking about the memories, talking about the food, talking about the flavors, and I really liked that kind of thing. I could see other people bouncing off that.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:10:44.499)
And so I was left to regret, like, I wish there could have been a little more nuance to that. But to me it is, it's a beautiful story if you love what some people would consider it so very close. But I really enjoyed the letters. To me there's a very poetic sense to the writing. Talking about the memories, talking about the food, talking about the flavors. And I really like that thing.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:58.102)
Mm-hmm.

Beth Cato (01:11:09.993)
And that's perfectly cool to each their own. But I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:16.738)
All right, and Rachel, things you liked, things you didn't like, things that you thought were effective, things that were less so.

Rachel Handley (01:11:25.293)
I really liked the emotion coming through from Saffron in the story itself. I thought that was really well done. I agree with Beth on the one-dimensional aspect of our opposition in the story. That felt a little bit... And also, it's kind of like... I'm so sorry, but I'm not one of those people who loves food. I like three foods.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:41.646)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:51.639)
Yeah.

Rachel Handley (01:11:52.261)
And when I go to a restaurant, I pick my one food. And then every time I go back, I pick the same food, right? So yeah, no, no. It's the same. I'm like, yeah, no, no. I do it just because my food now. That's the food I've chosen. And if I could genuinely, except for like pizza and like chocolate, like, or maybe one additional thing, if I could just take a pill instead, I would. So like the food.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:58.474)
I unfortunately do the same thing. But I do that for dietary reasons. So.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:12:00.32)
I'm going to go back up and do some food. Maybe it's the same thing. Yeah. But I do that for dietary reasons. Yeah. I speak for food now. That's the food I chose. I mean, generally, it's excellent.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:09.006)
No.

Rachel Handley (01:12:21.233)
So the food stuff for me never quite clicks, I think just because of that. And because I'm more sci-fi than I am fantasy, and this leans way more towards fantasy and like historical fiction, I think it didn't click with me just because of that, just because of preference. And again, like Ken said, it's not the story, the story is great, it's me. And how I kind of like mix the...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:27.555)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:42.003)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:47.283)
Hahaha!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:12:47.419)
Thank you.

Rachel Handley (01:12:51.049)
mix of the characters. One thing I did think was quite nice because I like doing this myself is having the main character called something that you put into recipes so I thought that was quite nice. But yeah I was just kind of like okay but where are the spaceships? But I did think it was like well crafted.

Kenneth Hite (01:13:01.053)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:08.763)
Hahaha!

Kenneth Hite (01:13:11.062)
Right. We needed to be spaceships in Renaissance Italy for Rachel and me to like it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:12.303)
They're under glass in the museum!

Rachel Handley (01:13:18.527)
Yeah, no, that's, yeah. So like, I did really enjoy it, but there were definitely things that like, just didn't click just because of who I am as a person, which makes sense. That's what all stories end up being like, right? To your personal taste, to some extent.


Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:26.006)
that didn't quite work.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:37.91)
Absolutely. And that's why we have this segment is because sometimes stories hit and sometimes stories miss and it can all depends on the audience. we're going to jump a little bit ahead of schedule because I know Ken has to leave a little early and so i'm going to ask you can do you have any upcoming or recent projects you'd like to talk about or promote before we go to best doing her reading from. Sorry, not 1000 recipes, but from a feast for starving stone.


Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:07.243)
Yes, that one.

Kenneth Hite (01:14:07.4)
Look at that. Yeah, my ongoing plug is for the podcast. Ken and Robin talk about stuff available wherever you find podcasts. My current project is we're doing a second edition of Trail of Cthulhu. My Lovecraftian role playing game at Pelgrane Press. We're working on that right now. It should be kickstarting. We've told people November, but I can tell you it's going to be probably more like February or March.

the actual Kickstarter will launch. We will hope to have some quick start stuff in November for people that we've led down the Primrose path. And then this fall and winter, I will be annotating a selection of Arthur Macken short stories. So the entire Little People mythos and all of the stories that inspired Lovecraft specifically will be in one collection. That'll be from Arc Dream Press. And I'll be following up my annotated chambers with an annotated Macken.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:37.154)
Yeah, Kickstarter's are a pain.


Kenneth Hite (01:15:04.648)
Quite frankly, if I could do one thing for the rest of my life, it would be annotate A-list horror writers from a hundred years ago so that people can read them now. And so this is going to be great fun. And hopefully people who like Arthur Macken or like Lovecraft or like annotations will enjoy it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:23.294)
All right, well thank you for having been on. I really appreciate you having been here. He will be back for the Lovecraft episode in two episodes. So be ready for more feisty opinions there. And thank you for having been on.

Kenneth Hite (01:15:37.34)
feisty and somewhat more well-informed opinions. Thanks for having me, Deborah. And it's great to meet all the rest of you. This has been great fun.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:42.018)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:47.402)
Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Kenneth Hite (01:15:49.768)
Bye!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:52.818)
Now Beth, can you give us a reading from A Feast for Starving Stone?

Beth Cato (01:15:58.417)
Yes, I can. This is the second book in my series. The first book is A Thousand Recipes for Revenge. That is out now from 47 North. So my trick was to find a reading area that would not have be super spoilery, of course, because it is the second book and there are major things that happen in the first book. So I'm going to read part of the back cover and then I will get to a reading bit that goes into, as I was saying earlier, world building through food specifically.


reading bit that goes into, as I was saying earlier, world building through food, specifically French inspired food. So, two countries at war, delicious taste of magic, and the fierce princess comes to gauge in a rousing adventure by the author of A Thousand Mice Piece Forward Mention. Princess Solon's marriage and his royalty should have unified the continental neighbors of Virginia and so on, so on, and the braves against a common enemy.

Beth Cato (01:16:28.865)
French-inspired food. So, two countries at war, a delicious taste of magic, and a fierce princess comes of age in a rousing adventure by the author of A Thousand Recipes for Revenge. Princess Solon's marriage into royalty should have unified the continental neighbors of Virdanya and Solon's homeland of Braes against a common enemy, the country of Albion. Thanks to Albion's cunning sabotage, Virdanya is now Braes' lethal rival.

and the day Brazian sailors washed ashore near Solon's chateau are just the beginning. Arriving in the midst of danger, Ada Garland, rogue chef to the gods, is desperate to reunite with her daughter Solon. Not only has open war begun, it's become heart-wrenchingly personal. Ada's long-lost beloved Brazian musketeer, Captain Erwin Corr, is now being held in a Ferdinian prison with execution imminent. And her daughter has been tasked with the near-doomed responsibility of uniting violently adversarial countries in peace.

So that's the basic blurb for the book. Just to repeat something I said earlier, Ada is a chef, that's with a capital C, because it is an important title within her world. She has a magical understanding of food. As an empathetic chef, she can remotely perceive how other people taste food and tailor her cooking to meet their preferences. Her power is enhanced by the grace of the five gods who oversee different facets of food and food making within her world.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:34.375)
Hehehehe

[Excerpt snipped for copyright reasons]


Deborah L. Davitt (01:23:12.215)
Interesting.

All right. Thank you so much for having shared that.

Beth Cato (01:23:16.793)
So those are some real historical implements there, including the salamander tool. That's what they really used for creme brulee and things, you know, three, four centuries ago. And that's all integrated in there.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:23:17.135)
So that's the idea. So those are some real historical health influence there, including the salamander tool. That's what they really use for permeability and things, you know, three to four centuries ago. All integrated in it. Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:23:24.724)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:23:28.658)
Nice! All right, so we're going to move quickly now to ask you all what you have coming out or recently out that you would like to talk about or promote. We're going to start with Marie.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:23:32.351)
Thanks for watching!

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:23:41.074)
So, since I had sent in a bunch of Rook and Rose stories for talking about worldbuilding here, that trilogy just finished up with Labyrinth's Heart in August, so the series is complete. You can read the whole thing now with all the possibly excessive chewy worldbuilding detail depending on your preference. I also have a...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:23:57.159)
Hehehehe

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:23:59.879)
The Waking of Angintyr, which is a sort of Norse-styled, it's based on a particular poem out of Old Norse literature. It's my Viking revenge epic that is out in the UK right now from Titan Books, and it will be coming out in the US in November, on November 14th. So that is in the process of coming.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:24:16.726)
Very nice.

Beth, you obviously have a feast for the starving stone coming out in January. Anything else you'd like to promote?

Beth Cato (01:24:28.481)
meantime, you know, the first book, it's a duology. So it's just two books. 1000 Recipes for Event is out now. You can buy it anywhere. Amazon, of course, is the big, limbing choice. And they've certainly been promoting the ebook quite a bit. But you can order it through any indie bookstore as well. And it's also in audiobook, which thrills me to bits, because none of my previous books were put into audiobooks. So I encourage people to get that and listen to the really beautiful narration that is far better than what I just did.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:24:31.106)
Yes.

Marie Brennan (she/her) (01:24:46.879)
which tells me that it's because we're going to think this is what's worth putting to audio. So I encourage people to get that into that really beautiful narration that's far better than what I just did.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:24:51.839)
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:24:58.471)
Rachel, what do you have coming out shortly or recently that you'd like to promote?

Rachel Handley (01:25:04.749)
So I'm still very much on the promotion wagon for Possible Worlds and Other Stories because it's not a year old yet, it will be soon. And then I'll ease off. But that collection came out December 2022. And I'm currently working on things, so building up a second collection of short stories with the same press, Ellipsis and Prince.

But also I'm working on a novel and I can't really say much more than that. But I am working on a novel and things are very weird and very cool already. So yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:25:38.454)
Haha

Deborah L. Davitt (01:25:46.53)
That is excellent. All right. So we're going to wind this up with a little preview of next week. Next week will be episode 18, Speculative Poetry 3. We will be featuring the works of Rebecca Buchanan, Alicia Hilton, and Lorraine Shine. We will see you all then. Thank you very much. And we are out.