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Steve’s Book Roundup 3/1/2022

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I write a lot and have quite a few books.  So now and then I’m going to post a roundup of them for interested parties!

My sites

Fiction

I’ve been returning to fiction with a techno-fantasy setting of several planets orbiting a star called Avenoth.  Take a typical fantasy world of magic and gods, and let it evolve into the space age and internet age . . .

  • A Bridge To The Quiet Planet – Two future teachers of Techno-Magical safety find trying to earn their credentials hunting odd artifacts backfires when you’re hired to put some back . . . on a planet where gods go to die!

The Way With Worlds Series

This is what I do a lot of – writing on worldbuilding!.  You can find all of my books at www.WayWithWorlds.com! 

The core books of the series will help you get going:

  • Way With Worlds Book 1 – Discusses my philosophy of worldbuilding and world creation essentials.
  • Way With Worlds Book 2 – Looks at common subjects of worldbuilding like conflicts in your setting, skills for being a good worldbuilder, and more!

When you need to focus on specifics of worldbuilding, I have an ever-growing series of deep dive minibooks.  Each provides fifty questions with additional exercises and ideas to help you focus on one subject important to you!

The current subjects are:

Creativity

I’m the kind of person that studies how creativity works, and I’ve distilled my findings and advice into some helpful books!

  • The Power Of Creative Paths – Explores my theories of the Five Types of Creativity, how you can find yours, and how to expand your creative skills to use more Types of Creativity.
  • Agile Creativity – I take the Agile Manifesto, a guide to adaptable project development, and show how it can help creatives improve their work – and stay organized without being overwhelmed.
  • The Art of The Brainstorm Book – A quick guide to using a simple notebook to improve brainstorming, reduce the stress around having new ideas, and prioritize your latest inspirations.
  • Chance’s Muse – I take everything I learned at Seventh Sanctum and my love of random tables and charts and detail how randomness can produce inspiration!

Careers

Being a “Professional Geek” is what I do – I turned my interests into a career and have been doing my best to turn that into advice.  The following books are my ways of helping out!

  • Fan To Pro – My “flagship” book on using hobbies and interests in your career – and not always in ways you’d think!
  • Skill Portability – A quick guide to how to move skills from one job to another, or even from hobbies into your job.  Try out my “DARE” system and asses your abilities!
  • Resume Plus – A guide to jazzing up a resume, sometimes to extreme measures.
  • Epic Resume Go! – Make a resume a creative act so it’s both better and more enjoyable to make!
  • Quest For Employment – Where I distill down my job search experiences and ways to take the search further.
  • Cosplay, Costuming, and Careers – An interview-driven book about ways to leverage cosplay interests to help your career!
  • Fanart, Fanartists, and Careers – My second interview-driven book about ways to leverage fanart to help your career!
  • Convention Career Connection – A system for coming up with good career panels for conventions!

Heaven’s Design Team: God’s Blessing On This Wonderful Worldbuilding

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.  Then he outsourced the animal stuff.

That’s the Pratchett-esque premise of Heaven’s Design Team, an anime series based on a popular manga.   The story centers around Shimoda, a young angel assigned to relay God’s instructions to the titular Design Team.  Playing Metatron to a group of creative personalities ensnares our bean-bun loving protagonist in both office hijinks and hard-science explorations of how animals work.

It’s also a show that worldbuilders and writers should at least check out.

Creation Is A Double-Edged Comedy

The series episodes have a mostly familiar arc, but one that is varied enough to stay fresh.  Shimoda comes to the team with a vague request from God.  This request is relayed to a colorful group of beings named after the planets, each with their own specialties, obsessions, and neuroses.

The result is a fun, broad office comedy with some real-world teeth.  If you’ve ever worked on a complex creative project it will be more than familiar.  Prototypes fail, creative bickering ensure, and bright ideas burn out fast in the light of reality.  The likeable cast of characters is enjoyable, and the humor is refreshingly free from jokes about genders, sexual preferences, etc.

This office comedy part fuses seamlessly with hard biology.  The Design Team has to temper their enthusiasm as ideas run into real science issues and the advice of their engineering expert, Mars.  Brilliant ideas wither in the harsh light of reality, and when that reality is designing a surviving being, mistakes become painfully obvious.

This is where the show becomes something more than just a wacky comedy – and something for worldbuilders.

Weird Science, Weird People

Heaven’s Design Team’s first season is packed with many bits of great ideas falling apart due to biological truths, but the most illustrative is the team’s attempt to make a unicorn.  “Horse that fights with a horn” sounds good, but the various metabolic, psychological, and physical tradeoffs produce problems.  The final result is an aggressive idiotic beast with navigation problems – though it is salvaged to create the Narwhal, so cuddly-animal loving Neptune is thrilled.

The show is thus a spiritual cousin to Cells At Work, being both educational, funny, and using a given genre to explore science.  The continual theme of “how animals work” and “why some ideas are good and some not” takes it to another level – and it’s why any worldbuilder needs to give it a look.

Heaven’s Design Team covers many kinds of animals and animal traits, and manages to keep it fresh and interesting.  One episode explores reproductive habits, another is about dolphins, and a third sees goth queen of grossness Pluto creating a surprising animal from her requirements.  Though the show has a pattern it usually hews to, it’s an educational one that often surprises.

If you’re a worldbuilder, you’ll quickly get ideas of what to think about what to do, and what not to do.  Because the show is about trial, error, and prototypes, it’ll help you think about animal biology.  It’s not hard to imagine how the Design Team might respond to you playing God – and how your requests might go awry.

The Whole (Earth) Package

I can heap praise upon Heaven’s Design Team, but the end result is “if you like worldbuilding and office comedy, you’ll probably like this.”

Can I say it’s “good?”  To that, I would say “yes” for two reasons.

First, the show knows exactly what it wants to be – an office comedy about biology with a bit of supernatural humor.  The show reaches the goal it sets for itself.  One might say it’s “well designed.”

Secondly, the show has a sweet, genial nature, much like the angelic protagonist.  Characters may argue and snipe, characters have flaws and quirks, but there’s no bullying or cruelty.  Even when bird-loving Venus and snake-creating Mercury square off for obvious reasons, it’s rivalry not meanness.  It’s a pleasant watch.

If you like worldbuilding (or indeed just science, but I know my audience) check it out on Crunchyroll.  It might be a creation you appreciate.

Steven Savage

The Writer’s Game: Wytchwood

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

The Writer’s Game: Wytchwood

Wytchwood from Alientrap is a “gothic fairy tale game.” You’re an amnesiac witch with a cauldron on her head, stealing the souls of wrongdoers for a mysterious black goat. Steal enough souls, and you’ll awaken a mysterious sleeping maiden and maybe get your memory back. Of course, punishing evil is pretty rewarding . . .

The core of the game is crafting. As the Witch, you wander around collecting ingredients from the countryside and it’s creatures. You can craft traps, magical items, and more with the right components. Figuring out where to get resources, use them, and combine them is critical to progress.

You’ll use all your brews and creations to undermine assorted unpleasant figures and save people from evil. The characters all have a “fairy tale” feel, and more than a few will seem familiar. Completing your missions is semi-linear, making the game more of a visual novel/linear adventure unlocked my making things.

The game itself is really a playable story – it’s just you have to figure out crafting and resources to advance the tale. As you can guess, such an interactive tale yields quite a few lessons for writing fiction.

Look and Feel

Wytchwood is a fairy tale, and the game is excellently crafted to reflect the genre choices. The entire look feels illustrated much like Wildermyth. One wanders through various locations that look like a pop-up storybook. Characters have exaggerated looks in bright colors, and monsters and wildlife are amusingly expressive. It feels right.

Getting that feel is critical to your own writing. Perhaps your novel needs long paragraphs and colorful language, or it needs short breezy commentary. Wychwood’s aesthetic helps you embrace what it’s trying to be – a playable fairy tale.

(Of course, maybe you’re trying to break genre conventions, so keep that in mind as well.)

Know What You’re Doing

Wychwood is a story, but its mechanic is infamously familiar – wander around, collect things, make things. The game boils down to a shopping list and a to-do list that tells stories. The creators knew exactly what they wanted and stuck with it.

This focus means the game delivers on its two premises – crafting and stories – and can go deep in each area. Crafting requires thought in gathering and using items, which can set up satisfying “cascades” as you maximize your travels and tricks. Stories have all sorts of twists and turns as well as human bits, and are obviously carefully written. It’s amazing what you can do with focus.

When making a story, focus on what you want to deliver. It might not be all things to all people, but it will be the right thing you set out to do.

You Don’t Have to Say Much

For a game where you wake up in a world with no memory, the game tells a lot of story without saying a lot. Any exposition comes from conversation with other characters or flavor text – your character has nothing to add. As some storylines are mysteries, you start them at near-zero information.

It turns out that you don’t have to say a lot to tell a story. Wytchwood realizes its tales through conversations, reactions, clues, and flavor text. Everything revealed is relevant to the story and the game, but there’s no giant exposition dumps or walls of text. Wychwood sticks with what’s needed.

Amnesia is a remarkale way to make a story concise.

Keep It Human

Wytchwood tells tales of people, even if they’re very archetypical. A woman wishes to escape the attentions of an amorous wolf-man. Neighbors are fighting with each other because of a cunning manipulator. Workers groan under the burden of some taskmasters who earn a richly creepy comeuppance. It’s a visceral, human game because you relate to the characters.

This sheer humanity draws you into the game, because so much is relatable, albeit colorfully exaggerated.

If you write fiction, keep it human. Ensure characters can be understood and related to work with emotions, feelings, and sensations.

A Lovely Bit Of magic

Wytchwood takes the (in)famous game mechanic of “collect and craft” and uses it to tell a series of compelling fairy tales. Making excellent stylistic choices, making its tales human without information overload, it draws you in.

If you’re trying to craft a good story, Wytchwood is worth examining – and maybe playing.

Takeaways for Writers:

  • Chose stylistic elements appropriate to the story and genre (unless breaking convention is the point)
  • Focus on what you want to deliver depth. It’s better to do a few things well in writing than be all things to all people.
  • Tell your story with relevant elements that reveal enough – character reactions, discussions, appropriate descriptions. You can do a lot with surprisingly little.
  • Make your tales human, it ensures people relate and understand, and draws them in.

Steven Savage