Joseph Carrabis – Page 153 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

World-Building – Miscellaneous

Something is crucial to your world-building if your story is dramatically changed when you remove that thing.

Not everything tied to world-building is major. Except when it’s a central element to a story, meaning removing it dramatically changes your story.

That noted, here are some miscellaneous world-building items to be aware of.

Fun (Sports, Leisure, Music, Free Time Activities)
“Fun” is based on culture and language. A funny joke in English bombs in Mandarin and is completely flat in Hopi. All “leisure” time activities will be culture based, and much of that will be predicated on climate/weather.

However, leisure time concepts may translate well. Fishing is both a vocation and avocation on Earth. Imagine a water planet or a planet where the dominate life is aquatic in nature. They may go mammaling. Transpose everything from this world’s fishing to that world’s mammaling and you could have a fascinating first-contact story.

A telekinetic culture may have sports like ours but players will be heavily penalized if they use telekinetics. They may be allowed to bludgeon opposing team members with their hands and feet (if they have them) but hurling rocks at them telekinetically results in a 3-game penalty.

Music is heavily culture based, but beyond that we have “music” because our environment supports the transmission of longitudinal (compression) waves. Western music is based on the thirteen notes but non-western music systems vary on the number of notes and variation is reflected in the difference in tunings and instruments themselves. Other worlds may support lifeforms with hearing vastly different from ours, hence their music will be vastly different. If those cultures developed in environments that don’t support longitudinal waves, is there music at all? Or what would they have that we’d consider “music”?

Leisure time activities tend to be sensory-dependent as a rule (hence music would be different if the other culture’s ears weren’t designed to detect longitudinal waves). A Jovian would “paint” using radium-based “paints” as their “vision” developed on a planet where our visible spectrum couldn’t penetrate the clouds and the planet radiates like a sun-in-the-making; they wouldn’t have eyes like ours, or what served as eyes would be radiation detectors (perhaps Geiger counter like stalks?).

Life forms

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“I have an incredible opportunity to share”

Re: Trying to help you sell books. I’ve tried to do this with two other friends in years past. No luck. It’s hard to sell a one-off book profitably on pay-per-click basis – both hardcover or an ebook series. I have not found any way to make it happen. There are some folks out there who prey on new authors and try to get them to sign up for a training series on how to sell their book. The only thing they sell, it seems, is their training series and dashed hopes. Sorry I can’t help you there and don’t know anyone who has succeeded. – Matt Van Wagner, internationally recognized Adwords authority

I received another “incredible opportunity” in my emails a few months back.

Normally I dismiss such offers and let it go at that. This time other authors who received the same offer contacted me asking my opinion.

A few things to note before diving in; the offer deals with Amazon Ads. I have nothing against Amazon Ads, lots against misleading marketing. Especially to vulnerable markets.

The current indie-authorverse is vulnerable because it is a young market. Young markets, like young children, like young animals, are innocent. They don’t appreciate that the nice man offering them candy might hurt them, hence are open to predation. The young, markets or otherwise, don’t have the same filters regarding purchases that experienced purchasers have. Think of it this way; Someone buying their first car looks for different things than someone buying their third or fourth car. Should you be shopping for car #10, you don’t ask lots of questions because you know what you want and what to look for.

The same is true on the marketing side. How you market to a first time buyer is different than how you market to an experienced buyer. Good salespeople and marketers use different buzzwords (think keywords but in commercials, print, and in-person) based on who they’re pitching at the moment and the general maturity of the audience as a whole.

How do I know this? I owned and ran an international marketing advisory company for over 25 years and wrote three books on the subject. How do I know this happens to authors? I talk to authors from everywhere and do research, research, and, umm, oh yes, research.

You can stop reading after this section
Amazon is in the business of selling ads, not books, food, sporting equipment, coffee makers or anything else. Their percentage on any sale is relatively minimal compared to what they make from the ads for that sale.

Some people run successful Amazon Ad campaigns for a while – note “for a while” – because Amazon learned from Google to change the ad-buy algorithms periodically without letting people know, hence any winning Amazon Ads strategy fails given enough time.

Anybody with a repeatable, infallible method for selling products via Amazon Ads (or anything else) will give you a guarantee because they know they have nothing to lose; their method is repeatable and infallible.

Read what follows and let me know if you see any guarantee.

The received email
Continue reading ““I have an incredible opportunity to share””

Shaman Story Chapter X – Council of All Beings

Read Shaman Story Chapter X – Mr. Zelli’s Ice Cream.

Shaman Story Chapter X – Council of All Beings

Voices dance over me like ants at a harvest. I shake with the deep bellow of whale song, the answering trumpet of elephant, am tickled with the chirping of crickets the size of busses. A spider wraps me in her web, places me on her back. Her chalice’s grate “Ha-angg—on-n,” and she balloons up into the sky.

“Where are we going, Grandmother?”

Her chalice’s grate again. “Coun-n-c-cil-l—o-of-f—A-a-ll—Be-ei-ingg-s-s. Yy-you-ur-r—Ggrannd-d-ffa-a-ath-ther-r—i-s-s—wai-ai-ait-t-inn-g-g.”

We descend through clouds, through fog, through mist, through water, through waves, through oceans into the earth, through boiling rock and land on an island deep in the sky.

“Buppa!”

He lifts me in his arms. “Are you ready, Gio? Are you ready to meet your friends?”

The island grows and grows and more and more arrive. John and Running Water and Apara and Chan and Joe Swota and Erdös and Lan and Han and Timbe and Rose and Bee and Spider and Moose and Hummingbird and Hawk and I recognize them even when they don’t look like I’ve seen them before.

“You’re passing!”

“Do you see me who I am, Gio? Do you see me who I am?” It’s a game to them, too!

My friends teach me to play their games and ask me to teach them mine.

Then a voice I’ve not heard before. A voice of fire, like a mountain. A throat clearing that sounds like trees falling in a forest. “Hello, Gio.”

“Hello.”

A wall of sky offers me its hand. I hold stars and planets and galaxies in mine, not even knowing what they are.

“Who are you?”

More Chester aka Chestette aka The Mighty Ches

I mentioned Chester previously.

I mention here that we don’t know if Chester is actually a Chestette. Since shooting this video, Chestette has introduced us to her kits (we share in upcoming videos) so we’re sure Chester has transed, and more due to our ignorance than anything on Ches’ part.

But isn’t that most often the way? Our own ignorance causes more problems than it provides solutions?

I mean, “Ignorance is bliss”? Really?

I’m dumbfounded at how the most educated people can be the most ignorant.

Blinders are amazing things.

Especially those of our own making.

I tell people there are two things I abhor; ignorance and incompetence.

But there’s a caveat attached. To me, ignorance is when someone refuses to learn something. Incompetence is when someone refuses to do something (or attempt it).

I’ve got no problem with someone studying something and not getting it. I don’t consider them ignorant, actually quite intelligent. It takes a lot of intelligence to know when something’s not working for you. You may still want to play at it, and that’s great, too. You may figure out why it wasn’t happening and make it work.

Ditto someone not being able to do something. I put a lot of work into my writing. People ask me how I got so good. Easy, I worked at it. Others may love to write and know they’re not good at it.

Well, first thing is, they’re better at it than the person who refuses to give it a try.

The people who refuse to try are the ones I shake my head at, walk away from. Afraid you won’t be any good? Get over it. You won’t be when you start. That’s why you practice. But refuse to do it, period? Someone puts a gun to your head, I hope you come up with something better than “I won’t be any good at it” because your options are “I’m not good at it” and “I’m dead.”

Ches didn’t mind our ignorance. Ches was happy to educate us. We were grateful to be educated.

And of course, we shared peanuts once our confusion – caused by our own ignorance – was alleviated.

World-Building – Belief Systems

Belief systems are part of the anthropologist’s triad – culture, language, myth (belief). These three are so intertwined I can’t imagine studying one without drawing deeply of the others. Our personal library contains ~300 books on different belief/faith/mythological/folkoric systems. If you count ebooks, the number goes over 1,000 volumes (and note my bias there).

But what about using belief/faith/mythological/folkoric systems as part of your world-building?

Margaret Atwood postulates a radical cultural change brought on by an exaggerated belief system in The Handmaid’s Tale, and that culture’s language evolves to sustain the belief system. Probably the best known blend of culture, language, and belief system is in Tolkien’s Trilogy. Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia series does an excellent job of blending these elements, but it’s all predicated on Helliconia’s weather (and perhaps you’ll appreciate how intertwined everything is when one builds a world from scratch).

Create a mythology only if such is necessary to move the story forward or is integral to the plot.

But again and to me, it comes down to “create a mythology only if such is necessary to move the story forward or is integral to the plot.”