The Augmented Man Video Series Episode 5 – “Tell Me About Her”

 
Episode 1 – “Good Run, Trailer?”
Episode 2 – “Massively Scarred”
Episode 3 – “Learn Chess, Yes”
Episode 4 – “To Feel”

Sabine Rossbach
Joseph Carrabis
The Augmented Man

Hyacinthe Feeds

Patterns.

The Wild is full of patterns.

Learn those patterns and you can be The Wild’s friend.

Over all our years of interacting with raccoons, we’ve come to know their patterns.

Especially those that aren’t listed on “official” websites as “raccoon behavior.”

But realistically, why should The Wild follow the guidelines of some “official” website?

We watch Hyacinthe and know what it means.

Kits, soon.

For now, she dines.

Enjoy.

 

World-Building – Getting Readers Interested in Your World

[Much of this series is excerpted from a post on Phoebe Darqueling’s blog]

World-building is an interesting and amusing phrase to me. I don’t think it existed as such when I started writing professionally (1970s). Perhaps people understood it without naming it as such. Consider authoring concepts such as atmosphere, character, description, dialogue, narration, pace, plot, POV, scenes, setting, structure, style, tone, viewpoint, … are we whirling them all into the single term, world-building? Okay, so long as we recognize the whole is the sum of its parts and a weakness in any one of them is a weakness in all of them.

World-building is the art of getting readers more interested in your story than they are in their own story.

 
World-building is in all writing, fiction and non-fiction, because (to me) “world-building” is the art of getting your readers to accept the story’s mythos as more real than their daily mythos (meaning the story’s reality is more engaging and actualizing than their daily reality). I’ve read biographies and histories and been caught up in them, lost track of time, forgotten to eat, read until my eyes closed and then dreamt about what I read. Likewise I’ve read fiction that I’ve put down and forgotten to pick up again because I couldn’t care less about what was happening in the story.

I’m told I do lots of world-building in my work and ask, “Can you show me where?” Most can’t because I work to share a story’s reality through the development of the story itself, not in expository lumps (an “expository lump” occurs when the author tells the reader something rather than providing the reader with sufficient information to experience it. World-building case in point, the first paragraph of one of my works-in-progress, Gable Smiled, is:

Valen patted Gable’s muscular neck as they trotted into Lensterville. They’d been ten days out, mostly soldiering Sipio’s vast Northern Plain, and this time of year that meant heat with a capital “H”. Valen could feel his own sweat trickling through the hairs on his chest and back, and every time his Ranger-issue travel cords relaxed around him, his scent rose like steam washing his face.

Consider how much the reader learns in Gable Smiled‘s opening paragraph:


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Shaman Story Chapter X – The Immensity of Now

Read Shaman Story Chapter X – Borrowing.


Shaman Story Chapter X – The Immensity of Now

 
Buppa and I stand on the porch. He holds me, his strong, tanned arms making a seat for me to sit on. A man comes to us. He and Buppa talk quickly, quietly. Buppa shakes his head, no.

The man reaches out, pulls his hand back before touching Buppa. Holds his hands out, palms up. His voice strains.

Buppa tells him to go away, come back later. He shakes his head as the man goes down the steps, out the gate, to his car, drives away.

He takes me inside. “What did he want, Buppa?”

“To cause pain.”

“Will you do what he wants, Buppa?”

“I will do what he asked, not what he wants.”

“You going to hurt someone?”

“Someone will be hurt, yes.”

“You told me not to hurt people, Buppa.”


Greetings! I’m your friendly, neighborhood Threshold Guardian. This is a protected post. Protected posts in the My Work, Marketing, and StoryCrafting categories require a subscription (starting at 1$US/month) to access. Protected posts outside those categories require a General (free) membership.
Members and Subscribers can LogIn. Non members can join. Non-protected posts (there are several) are available to everyone.
Want to learn more about why I use a subscription model? Read More ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes Enjoy!

The Augmented Man Video Series Episode 4 – “To Feel”

 
Episode 1 – “Good Run, Trailer?”
Episode 2 – “Massively Scarred”
Episode 3 – “Learn Chess, Yes”

Sabine Rossbach
Joseph Carrabis
The Augmented Man