Tag Archives: anthropomorphism

Archive Seasons 11-15, Guest, Live Audience, Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.b1: Bonus Episode — Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen

4 Comments

Your Hosts: Howard and Dan, with special guest Lawrence Schoen

Lawrence Schoen, clinical psychologist, cognitive hypnotist, small press publisher, Klingon language expert, and novelist, joined us at GenCon Indy for a bonus episode about elephants and death.

Howard and Lawrence both write uplifted elephants into their stories, and their stories also feature death as a theme, so this is a closer fit than it may seem to be at first blush.

Liner Notes: This episode was recorded in 2016, and after falling through the cracks (thanks in no small part to being below the fold on a spreadsheet), was rescheduled to coincide with the release of Moons of Barsk, Lawrence’s second novel in the uplifted-elephant setting.

Credits: This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson, and was made possible by our Patreon supporters

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:10 — 12.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Come up with a method for immortality, and then convince your protagonist not to use it.

Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence Schoen, narrated by J.G. Hertzler

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 08, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 8.3: Pets

17 Comments

We called it “Pets” because it’s pithy, but what we’re really talking about here is how to give your story’s animals — horses, dogs, cats — a personality. Why is this important? Why might it be useful? What are the tropes and the common pitfalls? What is the difference between tortoise-shell, calico, and piebald?

(We don’t actually answer that last one.)

Whether you’re using animals as a sounding board, for raising the stakes, or as an early-warning system (or as all three) you’ll want to give this a listen.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:43 — 12.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Write a human interacting with an alien, and the alien has a conspicuous companion animal who is critically important to the alien’s life.

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett narrated by Stephen Briggs