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# Today In Phishstory - March 24th Brought to you by tiph-bot. Beep.
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Phish

Phish, Wednesday 03/24/1993 (30 years ago) Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, Santa Rosa, CA, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1993 WinteSpring Tour
Set 1 : Llama , Foam , Fee > Poor Heart , Maze , I Didn't Know ¹ , Sample in a Jar , All Things Reconsidered , Runaway Jim , Amazing Grace ² , Cavern
Set 2 : The Landlady > Split Open and Melt , Sparkle > Tweezer > Mound , Big Ball Jam > Fast Enough for You , You Enjoy Myself , The Horse ³ > Silent in the Morning , Hold Your Head Up > The Prison Joke ⁴ > Hold Your Head Up > Terrapin > Hold Your Head Up , Good Times Bad Times
Encore : Carolina ² , The Squirming Coil
1 Fish on trombone. 2 Without microphones. [3] Trey on acoustic guitar. [4] Was told by an audience member named "Sam" after Fish refused to tell it.
Jamchart Notes:
Split Open and Melt - Rhythmically oriented jam with awesome Fish and shredding Trey which gets increasingly experimental and dissonant.
Show Notes:
I Didn't Know featured Fish on trombone and The Horse featured Trey on acoustic guitar. Amazing Grace and Carolina were performed without microphones. You Enjoy Myself contained Amazing Grace and the theme from Speed Racer teases. The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Under Pressure were teased in the You Enjoy Myself vocal jam. The Prison Joke was told by an audience member named "Sam" after Fish refused to tell it. Fish teased Moby Dick before Good Times Bad Times. The soundcheck's Ready for Love also contained bits of No Quarter and Slave (The Rolling Stones).
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Tuesday 03/24/1992 (31 years ago) Flood Zone, Richmond, VA, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1992 Spring Tour
Set 1 : Stash , Poor Heart , Foam , Eliza > Rift , Golgi Apparatus , The Horse > Silent in the Morning , Llama , Colonel Forbin's Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbird ¹ > The Landlady , David Bowie
Set 2 : The Curtain > Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove ² , Guelah Papyrus , The Mango Song , Brother ³ , Uncle Pen , I Didn't Know ⁴ > The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony > Suzy Greenberg > Harry Hood , Cavern ³
Encore : Lawn Boy , Fire
1 Narration gave brief recap of Gamehendge saga. 2 Screams from band members. [3] Carl Gerhard on cornet. [4] Fish on Bag-Vac.
Show Notes:
The Mockingbird narration gave a brief recap of the Gamehendge saga and included Wilson teases. The Bowie intro included Take Five teases. Trey teased Moving in Stereo in Mike's Song. Weekapaug featured screaming band members and a Mainstreet tease. Brother and Cavern featured Carl Gerhard on cornet. Before I Didn't Know (which featured Fish on Bag-Vac), Trey introduced Fish as "Clifford O'Sullivan, a beacon of light in the world of flight."
Listen now at Phish.in!
Phish, Friday 03/24/1989 (34 years ago) The Paradise, Boston, MA, USA
Gap Chart, Tour: 1989 Tour
Set 1 : Possum , Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove , Golgi Apparatus > Divided Sky , AC/DC Bag , If I Only Had a Brain , Take the 'A' Train , David Bowie
Jamchart Notes:
Mike's Song - This fiery version marks the first instance of the 2nd jam, separated from the 1st jam by D, E, and F# chords at 5:22. While only 20 seconds in duration, over time, the 2nd jam would at times become significant. The 2nd jam concludes with a repeat of the D,E, and F# chords, followed by the closing chords.
Show Notes:
This setlist is incomplete and is out of order. The only recording in circulation is a mix of songs from the show, which features Hydrogen brutally cut out of the Mike's Groove. This setlist is in the order in which those songs appear on the mix. (The mix also includes several songs from the Paradise show on January 26, 1989.) Possum contained a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer tease, which raises the question - were these songs really performed in March 1989? David Bowie closed the first set. Before Brain, someone introduced Fish - or is it Phish - as being "from Bogota, Columbia." It is therefore possible that Brain opened this show, which would be the only (known) time that Brain opened a show.
Listen now at Phish.in!

Mike Gordon

Mike Gordon, 2019-03-24 The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/mike-gordon-march-24-2019-the-sinclair-cambridge-ma-usa.html
Tour: Not Part of a Tour
Show Notes: The Grid included additional lyrics referencing "Josh," who was a bartender during Thursday's show and a subject of banter from Mike for the rest of the Sinclair run.

John Fishman

Pork Tornado, 2000-03-24 Snow Barn, Mt. Snow, VT, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/jon-fishman-march-24-2000-snow-barn-mt-snow-vt-usa.html
Tour: Fish - Pork Tornado Spring 2000
Show Notes:

Other

Keller Williams, 2012-03-24 Higher Ground, South Burlington, VT, USA
Setlist: https://phish.net/setlists/guest-appearance-march-24-2012-higher-ground-south-burlington-vt-usa.html
Tour: Not Part of a Tour
Show Notes: Mike sat in for I'm Yours and Born to Be Wild.

I am originally from Lebanon but have been living in Canada since 2000 (23 years now); my wife and 2 daughters, 5 and 7, are not Lebanese , born and raised in Canada and have finally agreed to go visit this summer. we are only staying for 20 days and i was hoping for some suggestions of what to show them... here's what i have so far 1- Kefraya / Ksara ... (the wife likes her wine) 2- Baalbek / Anjar 3- Harisa / the fort of Junieh 4- a day at the beach (what's a good resort??) 5- Rowche/ Kornish and restaurants in the new marina 6- Centre ville 7- J3ita

wanna cuddle and watch one piece?

Over from the Patreon. If you haven't read Cass' Aven Cycle, it's really good stuff!
Today we're chatting with Cass Morris, author of the Aven Cycle, a historical fantasy set in an alternate Rome, and co-host of the podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists, an award-nominated podcast discussing the intricacies of worldbuilding in SFF. This means Cass is something of an expert on worldbuilding complexity in fantasy books, which is what I want to talk about today. SFF readers have a particular love of immersing ourselves in richly detailed worlds we can imagine ourselves in viscerally, but let's talk about how writers can actually bring that complexity of detail into focus without totally overwhelming readers.
So to start, I want to talk about political systems, because I love how you managed to make the deep sense of complexity on that front accessible. Ancient Rome: Not an uncomplicated governmental system! And that's before you introduce fantastical elements. People already have trouble understanding how our own governments work, so how do you teach the reader enough that you can play with that complexity for plot intrigue? How do you convey the sense of complexity so the reader understands it without totally bogging down the pacing with exposition?
CASS: Well, one big thing that helps is absolutely the editing process! I'm prone to going into far too much detail on the first try. Multiple pages of too much detail. An entire swamp's worth of getting bogged down. Laying out all the complexities helps me explain them to myself, but it's far more than a reader needs. After the first draft, I could carve out what was totally unnecessary, then simplify the rest enough to be comprehensible, just as, say, The West Wing simplifies the machinations of the White House and Congress without losing what's dramatically interesting about them.
Then, as with so many worldbuilding elements, I think you have to connect political worldbuilding to what a character needs and what's obstructing them. For example: Sempronius Tarren needs to win a certain election to get himself the right provincial posting to set up his longer-term goals. In seeing him make that plan, the reader learns a little about the hierarchy of offices and the powers endowed to each—not a full constitution's worth of details, but enough to understand why the office is desirable and valuable to this character in this moment. Then, the obstruction: His philosophical opponents don't want him gaining what they consider dangerous levels of power, so they throw legal challenges in his way, the same way the US Congress uses things like filibusters. Showing Sempronius' frustration at the block, followed by his own countermove to get around it, feeds the reader more information about how the system works, but through the more engaging lens of his thoughts and emotions.
CASEY: Ha, the existence of editing is a great point. I've done this the opposite way as well—drafted the bones of the story and then filled in later once I knew what kind of detail was called for. But I think the key that you bring up here is that you're focusing on what is relevant to the point-of-view character. They—and we, as the authors—might know and be familiar with all kinds of political nuances the reader isn't, but that doesn't mean you have to teach them all to the reader!
This can get tricky, because deep in the character POV they might notice all those signals, but the ones the reader needs are the ones that are directly relevant to the POV character's goal and its attending conflict. And moreover, it needs to be a specific goal, not something nebulous like, "I want to attain more power." You have a character who wants to accomplish something specific (e.g. win an election), and give them a limited number of people/obstructions who are the actual roadblocks—possibly not the person you'd expect to have the power to stop them, to indicate more nuance in a system, or you can mention in summary other contributing factors that are already in hand, things like that. But limiting the scope helps focus on a few areas to then flesh out in depth, which in turn creates the impression of more depth in general.
It's sort of counterintuitive, but in a way you have room to give more detail with fewer details. And I love how your approach bakes the exposition into the character's agency as they navigate their response to obstructions, because that is so helpful with pacing, too.
DJANGO: A good edit does indeed always help a lot!
For me the biggest barrier to depicting a complex government realistically is the sheer number of people involved. In any government of reasonable size there are hundreds, if not thousands, of potential decision-makers who might have impact on a plot. In a Roman context, beyond the actual elected officials (and there are plenty of those) you have all the other members of important families who didn'tget elected, or are planning to get elected next year, or who lend money to the candidates, or what have you. Thinking about the current US government, the number of characters I personally would recognize (as a more-or-less informed news reader) is both far less than the number who really matter and far morethen we can expect an average novel reader to keep track of.
There are a few techniques that have helped me in the past. The first is just an acceptable break from reality—power in novels tends to be way more centralized than it would "realistically" be. This is true even in very autocratic societies! To go back to my favorite example, in A Game of Thrones the number of major characters involved in the government is probably less than 20—the king, his family, the small council, and the seven Lords Paramount (Stark, Tully, Tyrell, and so on). This is enough that the book has a reputation for complexity and having a lot of characters, but compared to a real government of the type it depicts is probably an order of magnitude too low. GRRM wisely concentrates a lot of functions into personal rule because it works better dramatically for Mace Tyrell or Tywin Lannister to attend to stuff personally than having a hundred ministers and vassals all the time. (It's not a government, but in The Shadow Campaigns the army that the main characters are part of is under-officered in comparison to its historical counterparts—extremely so by British standards!—exactly because this means fewer named characters for everyone to keep track of.)
The other useful trick is to assign representatives—people who can stand in for a large bunch of similar people that we keep coming back to. If you need to write "someone convinces the members of Parliament to vote yes on something," and it doesn't work for there to be some single person who gets to make that choice, you can show the characters meeting with a small number of MPs, say three, and coming back to them several times. With the proper framing as a kind of montage, the reader understands that these are examples and extrapolates. This helps you depict the kind of thing that goes on in the government, which can be just as important as its formal structure. (For example, are you getting the MPs on-side by threats from the party whip, promises of future political favors, or payoffs and patronage?) Joe Abercrombie is particularly good at this, for example in his depiction of the Open Council in Before They Are Hanged.
CASS: Yeah, trimming down the number of people involved is definitely a big help. That's another place where I usually have far too many functionaries and side characters on the first go, then end up consolidating them in following drafts. You can also do a lot just depicting the literal halls of power—how full the building is, how many people are moving around, even the architecture itself can tell the reader a lot about the scale of the governing apparatus, in just a few words of description.
Trimming down the steps of a process also helps. If you look at something like how a bill becomes a law in the United States, it's a lot more complex than Schoolhouse Rock led us to believe! It's not just: 1. Propose Law; 2. Committee Debate; 3: Full Chamber Debate; 4: Vote; 5: Repeat in Other Chamber; 6: President Signs. There are many layers of hearings and markups and financial appropriations, and it's all recursive, because you might have to go through that several times! A little of that may prove interesting, if you can hang an exciting character moment on it or show a really neat procedural trick, but going through the full process will be torture for anyone but the wonkiest of policy wonks.
The Aven Cycle is a fantasy with a strong historical analogue, and I know you have a lot of experience with historical research, between your current dramaturgical work for Camp Halfblood and your formal academic training. So talk to me about how you use history to inform your worldbuilding without restricting your fictional playground with so much research the story becomes didactic. How do you choose what to focus on, and what to leave out? Since women are front and center in these books, I'd love to hear in particular how you focused their stories with a sense of historicity, and how much you could take or chose to invent based on your research.
CASS: I have always been hugely interested in social history: how people live their lives in a given place and time. Sometimes it's strikingly similar to how we experience life today, and sometimes it's so alien—and the same piece of history can be an example of both! I'm fascinated by all the pressure points a society faces and how we create both problems and solutions out of our dominant paradigms. Social history can be hard to uncover, though, because so many of our literary primary sources were composed by wealthy free men, which leaves out most of society. We generally see everyone else through the biased lens of those guys at the top of the heap—at least in what we think of as traditional source material. So, I like exploring less traditional sources.
In the early modern world of my academic training, we do have more surviving written work in the form of letters and journals, but we can also look to things like ecclesiastical records. I promise that's more fascinating than it sounds! Reading up on 17th century slander trials is wild, for example, because those record the exact words that people were using to insult each other—which in turn tells us a lot about what they considered virtuous and what was shameful. Or there's Henslowe's Diary, which gets into granular detail about the income and expenses of a theatre in the 1590s and 1600s.
In the ancient world, archaeology provides more information than words do. The layout of their houses, their furniture, their tools, their kitchen utensils, all of it shows us how people lived. Some of my favorite sources are funerary monuments. Thousands and thousands of these survive, and they document the lives of regular people. The majority, in fact, belong to soldiers or freedmen and their families. They used them to boast of what they'd made of themselves, proud that their children had been born free, proud of the businesses they built. The soldiers spoke about where they'd fought and what awards they won. Some of the most heartbreaking were set up by parents mourning for young children (putting paid to the myth that people didn't get attached to their kids because of high rates of child mortality). Each one is a declaration of the self in defiance of the oblivion of eternity, and I just find that so beautiful.
That's all a long way of saying: I look for the history that shows me people. Those are the details that I want to carry into the text: what they care about, what they value, and the material culture that attends those more abstract concepts. That's the history that ties to character, rather than just being an info-dump.
Even with all that archaeological information, though, we're still stuck with a dearth of information, particularly when it comes to the lives of women and other marginalized groups. So I've had to train myself to look at the absences, the gaps in the record, and try to fill them in, and to look at the sources written by men, then subtract out the biases those men held in order to get to something closer to truth.
It's like looking at the shadow of a tiger. It might give you an idea of the tiger's shape, but only from a particular angle. It may or may not tell you how big a tiger is. It won't tell you that a tiger has stripes, what a tiger sounds like, or what it eats. Examining the lives of marginalized groups in history is often trying to know them by their shadows.
What's clear, though, is that women exerted a lot of power "off-screen" in the ancient world. We have some gorgeous examples: Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, held up as a paragon of virtue; much-married Fulvia, who ran street gangs, had a feud with Cicero, and waged war against Octavius Caesar; Agrippina Major, popular heroine who gave an emperor so much grief that he had her assassinated; her daughter Agrippina Minor, mother of Nero, whose autobiography is the lost text I'd most like to see miraculously rediscovered. I could go on and on—but I borrowed a lot from all of them when crafting the women of Aven. They were smart and resourceful despite the confines of their society, and whether they played within the boundaries or dared to transgress, they made an impact.
DJANGO: For me this is all about using history to inform my worldbuilding, rather than define it.
I like to think of using history as a case study, an example, rather than a blueprint to be literally followed. If you have a fantasy situation—a type of warfare, an environment, a resource distribution—history provides you with examples of how real people adapted to it, made use of it, and generally applied their ingenuity. People, by and large, don't do obviously stupid things (at least not for very long) and so generally the fact that a society was set up in such-and-such a way and lasted for hundreds of years means that it worked pretty well! (In our modern times of plenty, this can be hard to comprehend; for most of human history, "everyone not dying of starvation" was a great accomplishment requiring constant, unrelenting work.)
This is not to say, of course, that it had to be that way, or that any other way is "unrealistic." The key is to use the historical analogy to understand the kinds of thingsthat were challenges for those people. If they live in, say, a desert, they will have adapted to it in every way: dress, food, shelter, etc. When you read about how they lived, the important thing isn't to copy it exactly, but to make sure that your fantasy people have answers to the same challenges—this is what gives the book verisimilitude!
What I generally find is that no amount of me sitting down and reasoning out the problems people face, a priori, goes even a fraction of the way toward actually understanding those problems; history inevitably throws up fixes that people invented for problems I would never have even considered. (In late medieval France, knife-sharpeners carried circular whetstones—we're talking big, 50 pound stones—on their backs as they went from village to village. The rest of their setup could be constructed from local wood, but big stones of sufficient hardness were very hard to find, and drilling a hole through the middle for the axle was a capital investment!) Lifting these little vignettes for my fantasy society gives it that feel of realism I crave, while still leaving sufficient room to change the aspects of the past that I'm not eager to replicate.
CASS: What gets really fun there is, if you are using a specific historical inspiration but want to make really significant changes, figuring out what happens when you flick the domino. I'm working on a new project now that's a secondworld fantasy instead of an alternate version of our world, but it's inspired by early modern London and the vibe of Shakespeare's theatres. I'm working from that base because I want that aesthetic—but I also want this society to have gender equity, I want them to be accepting of queer identities, I want them to be polytheistic, and the government is more like Venice than England. Those are some really big changes from London in 1600, even before adding magic to the equation!
So then I get to figure out what else in society those things touch: clothing, industry, family structure, bureaucratic structure, and so forth. How would these people, with their worldview, find similar or different answers to problems than the historical examples I'm inspired by? This is why I love worldbuilding, because I find that such a fun game. There are so many possible answers, and I tinker until I find the ones that best fit the story I want to tell.
CASEY: Oh, funerary monuments is a great tip. There's a newsletter called Ælfgif-who? on biographies of early medieval English women, and it's fascinating to see what the author can construct from a combination of records and artifacts and the biases involved, what's said and what's conspicuously not said, what she can guess versus what there's hard evidence for. As a fantasist, I love the possibility space those gaps create that I can fill in.
As Django points out, people have been problem-solving throughout history, and that's not limited to wealthy men. If the records don't talk about what women were doing, it doesn't mean they were sitting on their laurels all day or just accepting whatever men figured out, and you can often get a sense for the space they occupied in the gaps—and if you can't, those gaps can give you ideas for what space they couldoccupy—in history, or in a story.
I think it's also worth noting that historical research can give you a sense of what kinds of social systems go together. I remember reading a fantasy book with a setting inspired by Japan that had all these features that have existed in Japanese history but not at the same time. So it was this mess of things that didn't make any sense together, because the author hadn't paid attention to the historical context.
I don't write historical analogue settings, but even for secondary world fantasy I find it useful to pay attention to what features can work together, and that's especially important once you start changing aspects to suit your story. A society with cell phones is not going to work the same way as one with post. A society where most people can't read won't work the same either! And this matters because it determines what kind of plots you can write, but it's also not super efficient to consider every aspect of the worldbuilding. Like, in a given story I may not need to know how laundry works, or the sewers, or what toys children are playing with. (Sometimes, sure! But not every time.)
But I probably need to know what people are wearing so I can describe them, so it matters what kind of clothing their technology could make and what it costs. I need to know how they communicate with each other, because they're going to do that in pretty much any story.
So I start with a character and plot concept and work backward to build the world around what the story requires them to do, and I do it in this order because otherwise I am exactly the person who will get lost in a worldbuilding rabbit hole at the expense of actually writing the story. But once I start figuring out some of the tentpoles like, This person's unique education makes them critical to the plot (why do they have that education? what education is available to other people?), or more generally, Our heroes will not be able to call for help because the message won't arrive in time (how far does the message need to travel, and how long will it take, and how long to get a response?), that starts to tell you the kinds of things that will be important to put together to make a world that feels internally consistent and enablesyou to tell your story.
If your heroine is rebelling against an arranged marriage, it's worth asking how common arranged marriages are and why and for whom. Like, the whole culture of debutantes in regency England emerged out of economic changes! Social institutions are intertwined, you can't just treat them as piecemeal. But if you do it right, the research gives you more things to play with that inform your characters' histories and choices rather than restricting you based on what "really" happened. Then it's just a matter of focusing on the pieces that actually matter to the story you're actually telling or enhance it in some way.
Lastly, I would be remiss in talking to you specifically about focusing an audience without asking how you use rhetoric to do that very thing (you can find Cass' deep dive on rhetoric in Hamilton, backed by Lin Manuel Miranda himself, on her Patreon). A common piece of writing advice is to never actually write the impossibly dramatic speech in fiction, because it will never be as impressive to readers, and instead focus on the characters' reaction or experience. Do you agree? And are there particular rhetorical devices you like to use to help focus readers' attention on what you want them to notice, whether it's a part of an argument in dialogue or in conveying information in the narrative?
CASS: Oh, you've done a dangerous thing, opening the door of rhetoric for me!
I love rhetoric so much. It's gotten a bad reputation in modern parlance, since most people only ever hear the word in a negative context—political rhetoric, violent rhetoric, and so forth. But rhetoric is nothing more and nothing less than structuring your words to achieve a desired effect. It's deeply woven into everything writers do, whether or not you're the kind of ultra-nerd who memorizes the Greek names for a few hundred devices. I think some of the best writers (like Shakespeare and LMM) do it in part instinctively, because they have such a good ear for how people speak and for the cadence of language, but it's also a skill that you can hone and train.
Rhetoric serves many purposes, and a lot of it is about crafting a character's voice, both in dialogue and in their POV narration. It lends a lot of texture to the story, and it's something I find particularly useful in crafting multi-POV books. Subtle shifts in how characters use language can help center a reader within each individual POV.
In dialogue, I think about vocal quirks that are marks of character and tell you something about the speaker, then I use rhetoric to craft the effect. Who's prone to using more words than necessary, either because they like hearing themselves talk or because they're babbling (devices like pleonasm and accumulatio)? Who likes intricate descriptions (enargia), and who's a champion of deadpan understatement (litotes)? Who, in a state of excitement or eagerness, asks too many questions without waiting for an answer (pysma)? Who's so pompous or instructive that they answer their own questions (anythypophora)? Not that rhetoric is the only tool for playing with these things, of course, but it's the frame I personally like best.
It gets particularly fun when I get to write political arguments, because those speakers are conscious of their own devices to the point of weaponizing them. They'll ask lots of what we call rhetorical questions (erotema), where there's an obvious answer that they're looking for; they'll repeat their ideas in sets of three (tricolon), because that helps the audience to remember them; they'll seize on an important word their opponent used and twist it around some other way (asteismus). They're deliberately showing off, and following the minutiae of the argument often isn't as important for the reader as understanding that they're tweaking each other and trying to one-up each other. The rhetoric lets me communicate those character dynamics in fun ways—similar to the "Cabinet Battle" scenes in Hamilton!
Writers have rhetorical tics, too, which can sometimes become a vice, if you're not aware of them, but which are also part of each author's unique voice. I'm particularly prone to a certain combo of devices: zeugma plus anaphora/isocolon. Zeugma is when two or more words, phrases, or clauses are dependent upon the same other word (usually the main verb of a sentence), as in "I love you truly, madly, deeply." All three adverbs hang on the same main verb. Anaphora is repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, and isocolon is parallel structure. "I came, I saw, I conquered" is an example of both: the repeated "I" at the beginning and the structure of "I + [past tense verb]".
I then sometimes layer that combo with auxesis, a series of clauses or phrases that gradually ascend in importance. You make a list, and the most important thing is last. That's the traditional definition, at least, but I had a professor who argued that auxesis can also work in the opposite direction, where your series diminishes rather than growing, and I do think that can be equally impressive, especially when you want to narrow a reader's or listener's focus. So, the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo move gives me the opportunity to show a character becoming more intense or more pointed as they're working their way through a thought. If that ends up being shaped like self-correction, then it's also epanorthosis. I recognize that I'm nerding hard at this point! But this is what I find so fun about rhetoric: the devices don't operate in isolation, but layer and intertwine to craft specific moments and that desired effect on the reader.
As to writing the Impossibly Dramatic Speech—I don't think it is impossible, but I do think it's something to use cautiously. You have to pick your moment, for one thing, and it's not always the moment you might think. Not all magnificent speeches are Henry V bucking up his followers on the eve of Agincourt. Sometimes, the magnificent speech is a lover pleading to be heard, a con artist deceiving a mark, a sister quietly giving advice. (See? I told you I'm prone to the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo!)
It's easier to get away with the big speech on stage or film, because there, the actor is an essential component of the equation. On the page of a novel, the writing itself has a heavier load to carry. So I think you can get away with presenting a well-crafted Impossibly Dramatic Speech in a well-chosen moment, but not all in one block. Interposing the speaker's words with other elements helps to break it up and remind the reader why the speech matters. Maybe you cut away to show the audience's reactions; maybe you cut inside the speaker's head to show them nerving themselves up for it, or debating what to say next, or consciously choosing where they pause.
And here I'll throw another device at you: within a speech, choosing to pause is called aposiopesis. Mark Antony does it at the end of the first bit of his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech, when he says he's been overcome with emotion, "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me." Practically speaking, that gives the actor a break so they don't have to do 140 lines all at once, but it also gives the plebeians a chance to speak and the audience a chance to witness how Antony's words are having an effect. In a novel, a writer can effectively use aposiopesis in another way, breaking the speech up with descriptive elements, which helps to ground the lofty rhetoric back in the reality of the world and the immediacy of the moment.
CASEY: Rhetoric gives us so many tools to play with! Thank you for all those examples. I think it's worth highlighting your point that writers don't have to know what specific rhetorical devices are called to be able to employ them effectively. Adjusting sentence structure and word choice to match character or moment or the rhythm of the plot is doing exactly this work, paying close attention to howyour words are working.
Strategic repetition is a favorite of mine. I love repeating a structure multiple times in a row, particularly with paragraph breaks, because then the white space and alignment helps emphasize what I'm doing. That's something you can't do the same way in other mediums! I also love repeating a line a different character said and twisting its meaning in later dialogue—you have to in some way make sure the reader recognizes the reference, but there are lots of ways to do that.
With novels, we can't rely on visible reactions from the audience or an actor's delivery, but we can manage pacing with punctuation, with narration interspersed or removed. I also love doing the equivalent of an anime peanut gallery ("Did she do it?" "Yes, the attack landed!" "But look at her—now she's almost out of power; she only has one more shot. Will she last another round?") as a way to make sure the reader notices the undercurrents and how they're changing the stakes. And that works just as well in fraught conversations as fight scenes.
This can be especially important in scenes like political debates that are doing heavy interplay of character dynamics, but depending on the scene's goals, sometimes you can do this with telling, too, rather than showing—in The Hands of the Emperor,there's an anecdote about a character capping a joke perfectly; we never learn the joke or the reply, but the content of the words isn't what matters in this case as much as the context, that these characters having just met are able to match each other with no regard to the impropriety. That said, if we're instead in a romance where a plot beat hinges on one main character changing the other's mind, in almost all cases we're going to need that whole conversation to track the minute character shifts that drive romances at their core—and you can give those conversations extra impact by grounding them in the specific words they've said to and thought about each other before.
DJANGO: Rhetoric is an area where I don't have much training, I have to say, so I'll be the one who goes for "don't actually write the speech out." =) I do a fair bit of this in The Shadow Campaigns, in particular for Danton's magically-effective speeches in The Shadow Throne, which obviously aren't going to be replicated in text. In addition to the problems of being able to actually write a good speech—as Cass demonstrates, there's a lot more going on there then you might think!—it can also be hard to replicate the effect on an in-universe audience.
First of all, while the people in the book are hearing something delivered live, the readers are getting it written down, stripped of the power that a really good speaker can give it. Second, the diegetic audience are different people than the reader, with a different set of cultural assumptions and values. This can be as simple as feeling a stir of pride when language or music evokes national symbols, and goes all the way to complicated cultural markers and tropes. (What we'd today call memes!) The best rhetoric is often the most targeted at its specific audience, specifically because that can be so effective, but the result can leave modern readers cold. It's definitely one of those areas that depends on the author's strengths and the style of the narrative.
Cass, what have you been working on, and what's coming up for you next?
CASS: The Bloodstained Shade, Book 3 of the Aven Cycle, just released at the end of January. It's out in paperback and ebook now, and there's an audiobook coming in May. There will be a Book 4, someday, but at the moment I'm working on something entirely different—the secondworld fantasy inspired by early modern London that I mentioned earlier. That's still in drafting stage, and I'm so enjoying the ongoing application of everything I've learned about worldbuilding and writing craft in the past few years.
Event-wise, I'm doing a virtual workshop on developing magical systems for the Orange County Public Library on March 21st—open to anyone, whether you're an OCPL member or not! Then I'll be at RavenCon April 21-23 in Richmond, VA and at ConCarolinas June 2-4 in Charlotte, NC.
For more worldbuilding goodness, you can find me along with co-hosts Rowenna Miller and Marshall Ryan Maresca on Worldbuilding for Masochists, our two-time Hugo Finalist podcast! Available on all your favorite podcast platforms, with new episodes dropping every other Wednesday. We start our fifth year in June, and we'll be kicking off the season with a pretty exciting announcement!
I usually direct people to Twitter @CassRMorris as the best place to find me for general chatting, and while that's still the best place for now, with the increasing instability of the old bird, I'll also direct folks toward my LinkTree, which will always have the most up-to-date social media haunts, and my Substack, for major announcements and random acts of blogging.

Hi, I’m 5’10”, 150lbs, living in Richmond, VA and hoping to find a young woman aged 18-23 who’s interested in a long term relationship with a much older man. Really looking for someone local to central VA. I’m most attracted to petite women though being a little bigger isn’t necessarily a deal breaker. My ideal match would be submissive and have a naughty/kinky side, bonus if you’re into DDLG.

Poster: AJ Masthay
Official Stream: Free for Nugs Subscribers @ Nugs.net
Unofficial Stream: Mixlr: https://mixlr.com/hippy-hour-hero-radio--2
FANTASY GOOSE: Click Here
Tickets: Cash or Trade
Scheduled Start Time: 8:00pm ET (Likely start 8:30-8:45)
Set 1 (8:21PM - 9:25PM )
Flopener (11)
Turbulence and The Night Rays (9)
Elizabeth (12)
Travelers (10)
I'm writing a Novel * (7)
Earthing? or Alien? (25)
[END SET]
Set 2 (10:11PM - 11:34PM )
Creatures (18)
Hungersite (19)
Red Bird > Please Forgive Me^ ( 25)
Bob Don (6)
Pancakes ! (15)
[END SET]
Encore (11:36PM - 11:48PM)
Slow Ready (12)
Show Notes:
*Father John Misty
^ David Gray
! Dirty Arrangement
PETER-O-METER:
[ ] Backstage bananas
[ ] Rocking
[ ] Arpeggiating
[ ] Floating
[ 🕺] Hip swangin'
[ ] "Are you freaking kidding me right now?"
[ ] Straight Bird'n
[ ] Channeling evil Goose
[ ] Flipping switches
[ ] Razzle dazzle shoulders
[ ] Entering inter-dimensional travel
[ ] Loving you guys
[ ] Summoning deep space aliens with a mating call
[ ] Crowd Participating
[ ] Wondering whose first Goose show it is
SHOW INFO and SHENANIGANS
The band dedicated the tour to Chuck Morris (drummer of the jam band Lotus), and his son. Both tragically went missing during a kayak trip in Arkansas last weekend. Both are presumed to be perished as of this show.
You can donate to the family of Chuck Morris here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-jenny-thompson-family
Venue Info: Roadrunner
Weather: Mostly Cloudy, 54°F
Check-In: Albany, NY Alberta, Canada ATL ATL burbz w/ jacked tits Asheville, NC Ascutney Vt. Augusta, GA Austin, TX x3 Boone, NC Boonton, NJ Boston, MA x 2 Boulder, CO Buffalo, NY Center Rail w/ Jacked tits Class then omw to Roadrunner x2 Cleveland, OH Chicago under some blankies Colorado Springs, CO Covington, KY x2 Dayton, OH Denver, CO x2 Edwardsville, IL Finger Lakes Fort Myers, FL x2 Fort Wayne, IN GBH Parking Garage, Level 2 Glastonbury, CT Hackensack, NJ Hartford, CT Headed to the city! x2 Houston, TX Hudson Valley, NY Indianapolis, IN Lancaster, PA Landing, NJ KCMO Lodi, NJ Madison, WI Midlothian, Virginia Milwaukee, WI Montgomery, IL Morristown, NJ Nashville, TN North Plainfield, NJ NYC New York Oklahoma sticks Oshkosh B'Gosh Parts Unknown Pittsburgh, PA x2 Pittsfield, MA Portland Portchester, NY Raleigh, NC The Roadrunner Rochester, NY x3 Rocklin, CARichmond, VA San Antonio, TX x2 Seattle, WA Seneca, SC Springfield, MA SSI, GA Syracuse x2 Syracuse, NY Syragoooose Terlingua, TX Trenton, NJ Williamsburg, VA White Mountains, NH

So, I just received my W-2 from the restaurant I woke at as a waitress and noticed that hardly much was withheld for Federal income tax. I started in October 2022. So, i am not too worried if I owe this year since I started at the end of 2022 and it wouldn't be too much but I do want to be sure that enough is being withheld going forward so I won't owe a large amount for 2023. Okay so, for 2022 my W-2 states that I made $3,916.44 for wages, tips, and other compensation - box 1, $637.58 for Social Security Wages - box 3, and $3916.44 for Medicare wages and tips - box 5. Then, $3278.86 is listed for Social Security tips - box 7. Only $72.01 was withheld for Federal Income - box 2. $242.82 for Social Security - box 4. And $56.79 for Medicare tax - box 6. For state (I live in VA) $3916.44 was recorded for state wages, tips, etc. - box 16. But only $27.03 was withheld for State Income Tax - box 17. Are these numbers normal? I decided to look at some of my pay stubs from 2022 and it does NOT look like enough federal income tax was withheld. I checked my W-4 just to make sure I didn't claim exempt (I didn't). For example, on my 11/04/22 check date I made $58.64 in regular wages ($2.13 per hour) and reported $544.16 in tips. $7.89 was withheld for FED Med/EE/tip, $12.53 for Fed Withholding, $33.73 for Fed OASDItipEE, $0.85 for FED MED/EE, and $3.64 for Fed OASDI/EE. Do these numbers seem right for withholding? I've read that employees should submit a form 4070-A each month for tips but I claim my tips at the end of each shift on the POS system, so should I still be filling that form out and giving it to my employer? I have heard from coworkers about horror stories of owing thousands to the IRS come tax season and I really do not want to be one of them and want to make sure enough is being withheld from my paychecks. I also want to be sure my employer is withholding the correct amounts. I am paid out with cash from the restaurant at the end of each shift for any credit card tips. Are taxes supposed to be deducted from that amount BEFORE they give me the cash? Or is that something where I would need to fill out the form 4070-A and make sure to give my employer the money to send in? Or do I need to begin paying the amount to the IRS myself each paycheck? Any help/guidance is appreciated!!!

Company Name	Title	City
Potter League for Animals	Associate Veterinarian	Riverside
Tin Building	Seafood Associate	Coventry
Behr Paint	Territory Sales Representative	Providence
Olive Garden	Barman	Warwick
Riverhead Building Supply Corp.	Facility Attendant, Customer Service - Richmond	Wyoming
IntelyCare	Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) - Weekly Pay- Build Your Own Schedule!!	Coventry
IntelyCare	Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) - Weekly Pay- Build Your Own Schedule!!	Providence
Shake Shack	Restaurant Manager	Providence
Shake Shack	Diner Manager	Providence
Delta Airlines	CRC Specialist	Coventry
Delta Airlines	Customer Service Representative	Coventry
Delta Airlines	Customer Service Agent (PT or FT)	Coventry
Delta Airlines	CRC Specialist	Cumberland
Delta Airlines	Customer Service Representative	Cumberland
Delta Airlines	Flight Attendant (PT or FT)	Cumberland
Delta Airlines	Flight Attendant (PT or FT)	Johnston
Delta Airlines	Air Host	Johnston
Delta Airlines	Customer Service Agent (PT or FT)	Johnston
Delta Airlines	Flight Attendant (PT or FT)	Newport
Delta Airlines	Customer Service Agent (PT or FT)	Newport
Delta Airlines	Flight Attendant (PT or FT)	Pawtucket
Delta Airlines	Air Host	Pawtucket
Delta Airlines	Customer Service Agent (PT or FT)	Pawtucket
Delta Airlines	Flight Attendant (PT or FT)	Providence
Delta Airlines	Air Host	Warwick

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings , feel free to comment here if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

Yes, the Lebanese restaurant in Newtown does offer vegetarian and vegan options on its menu. Lebanese cuisine has a wide variety of plant-based dishes that are delicious and filling. Some popular vegetarian options at the restaurant include falafel, hummus, baba ghanoush, and tabbouleh salad. They may also have stuffed grape leaves, lentil soup, and grilled vegetable skewers for vegan options. With the growing popularity of plant-based diets, it's great that the Lebanese restaurant Newtown caters to all dietary preferences and offers flavorful options for everyone.

Posting this again now that I have a bit better information.
First I'm located in Richmond Va
Here's the situation. My mom and disabled brother were homeless living in a hotel for 2 years. Well she passed suddenly last month and now I'm responsible for my disabled brother. Our goal this year was to get them out and all of us into a home by the end of the year and that's still the goal.
The biggest thing is I don't know where to even start. People I know keep saying "just buy a home" "you make enough" alright buddy where's all the homes? Where do I start? Who do I go to?
Here are the numbers... Mom got some money from her father passing and put it into a mid yield savings account under my name and have about 90k of it right now... thats a good chunk of change but I don't plan on using it all for a down payment...
I'm 24 and make 2000 about a month after taxes with is pretty low... and my current Rent + Utilities + insurance + other bills fluctuates but its about 1400-1600 ! Month depending on the power and electric bills. Have been living alone in a rental unit of a duplex here in Richmond VA
My brother (18) is autistic and was at once point receiving disability benefits through my mom, trying to get them back onto it but because of their living situation of of his paperwork is gone and I'm still waiting for record request from the state.
I've got a good credit score of 760.
Yes I know I need a better paying job, just finally escaped food service and retail to get into an office job. Its also down the street from my home so I don't even have a commute.
So here's the question... I want to throw some of that money for a down payment on a house and make use of any first time buyers program and programs for parents of disabled children that I can.... I just have 0 idea where to start and I'm sick of living under crappy landlords and I want my own home, even if it expensive.
I'd like to stay in the Richmond area, preferably Bellevue, Lakeside, Northside. Hell if the home was renting didn't need a new (roof, siding, windows, AC system, everything) and still valued on zillow at 300k is make an offer to my landlord.

Context: I almost never remember my dreams, but this one was so vivid I needed to share
Despite the news and events from episode 2 (I'll avoid spoilers for this) Richmond finds themselves mid table with West Ham 2nd behind Man City as they get ready for their first match of the year against each other. Rebecca pulls Ted into the office and has a very serious conversation about how important winning this game is reminding the promise he made at the end of season 1. Ted tries to downplay it in natural Ted fashion, but Rebecca really hammers in that they need to win.
Two days before the match, Trent Crimm invites Ted to dinner to discuss the game for his writing (at the same Indian restaurant they went to in season 1) which Ted happily agrees to. Unbeknownst to Ted, Nate was also invited. Both are shocked to see them, but Trent does just enough to explain how important their relationship is to the narrative his book, that they reluctantly sit down.
During the meal, Ted is nothing but complementary, while Nate can barely say more than a few harsh words in the conversation. Eventually, Ted says again how proud he is of Nate's success, which triggers Nate into a rant on how his success is his own work and belittles Ted. He slams down a stack of bills and storms off, with Trent following. As Ted reflects on what to do next, he notices a piece of paper between the Bills, showing a design for a corner play. At first Ted thinks he should chase Nate down and give it back, but he is reminded of Rebecca's talk earlier and pockets the paper.
The next morning Ted shows the paper to Roy and Beard. Roy instantly remembers the play from his Chelsea days and explains how they shut it down. The team spends the entire practice working on a counter to it.
We cut to match day, and the squads are knotted at 1-1. Late in the game a closely contested ball leads to a West Ham corner. Richmond instantly starts aligning to counter it. After they are set,West Ham completely changes their alignment and confuses Richmond. Scrambling to cover, West Ham sends a perfect cross header in, and take the match 2-1.
Ted sits dejected in his office, now even more ashamed he took the paper. Roy and Beard try to console, but Ted took the uncompetitive road and lost, making him again question his role at Richmond. Nate, in the post game presser explains how he knew Ted would be predictable and goes off about his tactical genius, with Rupert just behind the curtain smiling.
We end the episode with Trent in his office staring at his computer. His furrowed brow is struggling to produce the words, but he eventually questions if a positive attitude and heart can truly win in a cutthroat Premier League.
Will this happen? Most likely not. But I wanted to get it down before I forgot.