Here Be Tygers: Your Storytelling Guide

In the first half my conversation with Dave, we talked about the four elements of narrative pacing: the premise, your beats, what the audience ‘sees’ and where those should lead.

Today we’ll take a deeper look into the heart of things, or rather, ‘the heart of the scene’: that moment from which all of your beats will drive to or flow. This ‘heart’, as we’ll show, usually taps into what a character cherishes, wants or desires above all else (even in a slight way), reveals some truth of the world, or brings some nuance or insight on either to light.

It’s also why I like to say that in the stories we write, there’s no such thing as ‘a lunch of dry toast’; not when you can find so many wonderful things in even the smallest or quietest scene—you just need to ask yourself ‘what if...?’ and see where that goes.

- J

You can also follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Here Be Tygers supports #BlackLivesMatter and other organizations that would put an end to injustice, discrimination and police brutality. Here’s a list of things you can do to help.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: humorist, game maker and the host of Odder Worlds, David Herman

There’s a moment in every story’s life where it will go a different way than the one you had in mind. When that’s done well, it can lead to a great or even wondrous surprise. 

But sometimes the premise, the beats, and the end destination just don’t align: what you expect doesn’t lead anywhere, the moments that should have been are not there, or you don’t know how—at this place—you’ve arrived.

What do you do when the tale that you’re trying to write, when the pacing you’d need (or perhaps like) doesn’t fit within the inevitabilities that you find? 

Join us today for the first half of our conversation on a few tales that we’ve engaged with or made and how they create, sustain (and sometimes break) narrative flow.

- J

Show Notes

Infamous, the game: a five minute summary for those who haven’t played

Prototype, cutscenes and gameplay 

An earlier piece I wrote on Character Development

Hogfather review by Lunarian Press

The Little Matchstick Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

You can also follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Here Be Tygers supports #BlackLivesMatter and other organizations that would put an end to injustice, discrimination and police brutality. Here’s a list of things you can do to help.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: filmmaker, documentarian, and Executive producer of Alive Inside, Michael Rosatto-Bennett

I’ve held on to this interview for awhile. I had plenty of reasons: it was old, it was too noisy, it was live; I wasn’t sure of where it would go—none of them ‘right’. 

But that’s the funny thing about grace. It doesn’t come when you’d like, just in the moments between; when you listen, you wait, you hold something too small on its own to survive. 

Our guest today has a few stories about forgiveness and change, transformation and sacrifice. And those moments between when you find, as the celebrated mystic and poet, Khalil Gibran, of the wisest (and blind) man should write:

"I am an astronomer.”

His hand to his breast.

"I watch all these suns and moons and stars.”

- J

To learn more about Alive Inside, the documentary and foundation, you can visit their site or connect with them on Facebook.

You can also follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Here Be Tygers supports #BlackLivesMatter and other organizations that would put an end to injustice, discrimination and police brutality. Here’s a list of things you can do to help.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: William Howell, Senior Creative and Multimedia Producer for the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, and Mark Daniel, a research associate at IHMC and their exoskeleton pilot

Earlier this year, I had a chance to meet with two remarkable people: IHMC’s Mark Daniel and Billy Howell. They’d just finished speaking at the Podfest Expo in Orlando, where they presented a machine—a part of the team’s collaborative research—that could help a man to his feet, that could give to his legs, to his knees that ability to, again, work.

Having watched my own father struggle with such things after a brutal car accident, with where the one step should lead or how the body should turn, it was incredible to see and to hear how much we’ve learned in just a few short years. But the science here is only one half of the story: the other is a tale of friendship, compassion, and indomitable spirit. One that I don’t want to spoil too much of before you listen to it as I did, for the first time.

Oh, and this episode was recorded live, so it might have the occasional quirk or surprise. 

-J

To learn more about IHMC, you can visit their site, subscribe to their video channel, or listen to their award-winning podcast, STEM Talk. You can also support their exoskeleton project or contact the team directly at: https://helpquix.org.

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: practicing evangelical, Masters of Divinity in spiritual formation, and the host of Halfway There, Eric Nevins

The words around ‘faith’—that belief in numinous, the eternal, the ethereal, the strange—are often fraught with our own experience of how others would frame it. There are dogmas and proofs, liturgies, claims; but the journey we take is a personal one—sometimes with great struggle or of uncertain length.

For Eric Nevins, a practicing evangelical, Masters of Divinity in spiritual formation, and the host of Halfway There—a show about ordinary Christians who sometimes feel lost or ‘on their way’—that journey began with learning to listen; to tell the difference between knowledge and wisdom, between love and intractable certitude—between the questions intended to guide and those meant to dissuade. 

So join us today as we talk about magic and miracles, art, science and faith, and the many, many ways that a truth reveals its shape.

- J

Show Notes

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury 

Guardian article on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the fatwa issued against him

Film critic Alissa Wilkinson on the evangelical movement & Harry Potter

Journalist Rozina Ali on the challenges of translating Rumi without mentioning Islam by name

Rami Shapiro’s modern take on Ecclesiastes, The Way of Solomon

Can I Say This At Church, Seth Price’s podcast on faith, religion and soul

Eric’s show, Halfway There, is available on his site, Twitter (@EricDNevinsJr) and Instagram (@eric_nevins). 

For more information on the Christian podcasting membership services and site he just launched, go to https://www.rocketpodcast.co/.

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: former Air Force colonel, Health Coach and stage-four ovarian cancer survivor, Deanna Won

How do you choose—do you define—who you are and what to do when you have only a month left to ‘your time’? When the doctors describe to you symptoms, procedures and what your few weeks in hospice will be like?

For Deanna Won, a former military colonel, scientist and trained fighter, that decision to want, to survive, to take back her autonomy, chase her dreams, regain her life started with one simple moment: 

“This cancer is not me, but it is mine.”

Oh, and this wasn’t planned, but the Hebrew word for 18 is chai, as in “l’chaim” the cheer or phrase for ‘to life!’.

- J

Show Notes

Rami Shapiro’s take on Ecclesiastes, The Way of Solomon

Gam Zeh Ya’avor or “This Too Shall Pass”, on Breaking Matzo

Works by or about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on the Internet Archive

The Institute for Integrative Nutrition

Remembering Oliver Sacks, RadioLab episode 

Rabbi Elliot R. Kukla on ‘choosing life’

To learn more about Deanna, her work as a health coach, and how she partners with your support team to provide you with care, you can visit her site or follow her on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram @deannawon.

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: Julia Perch, a Russian-American psychiatrist, illustrator and writer of the upcoming novel, Umbra

Julia and I first met in an online writing group, where she confessed that she was struggling with some friends and family who felt that her story was either a work of witchcraft or inspired by the devil.

As a tremendous believer in the power of dreams, imagination, and what lives on in the emptiest places of our minds, this hurt her deeply. But still, she was inspired to write; to share the new and weird spaces that her characters occupied.

So join us tonight for a conversation on surreal fiction, Otherness, character ‘arks’ and archetypes, and how the languages we speak can affect the tales that we write.

- J

Show Notes

Paris in the Twentieth Century, by Jules Verne

Butler-Bowdon’s summary on the Collective Unconscious and Jungian Archetypes

Ebert’s review of The Twelve Chairs, with Dom Deluise, Ron Moody, and Frank Langella

The State of Weird, by Helen Marshall, a brief historical review and essay on the genre

A History of God, by Karen Armstrong; N. Katherine Hayles is the author of How We Became Posthuman and related texts, which you might find fascinating as well

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

Or contact us directly at Herebetygers.com, where we can help you find your tale and make it come to life.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to Reckless Media for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As promised, we return this month with the second half (and finale!) to our adventures in Microscope: a storytelling game about all the ‘big things’ that happen and the smaller scenes between. 

So join us tonight as our mad flight resumes with multiple clones, flavors of ice cream, androids, and the consumption of our would-be saviors.

- J

Show Notes

• “The Girl from Ipanema”, orig. by Antônio Carlos Jobim & Vinicius de Moraes; performed by NOVA

• Rules for playing Microscope with your crew, family or team 

• How to make your own Neapolitan Ice Cream Cake 

• “Memo to Human Resources”, by They Might Be Giants

• How to know if you’re an android: on Rossum's Universal Robots 

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman and @jcertherealist.

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice, share the show with a friend, or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to @BrothersHerman for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Occasionally, Dave, Pablo, sometimes Stephen, and I get up to shenanigans. 

This is one of those times.

Microscope is a game of what’s true and not right about the world. And what follows from that, as a tale—as a narrative—that we define.

Or at least it should be, in practice, in theory. Until we tried. With apologies to candy, teeth, Star Wars/Trek, Battlestar Galactica, androids and anything else that I forgot tonight.

Here’s the first half of what happens when we make a soon-to-be-real tale of migration come to life. 

We hope you enjoy, 

(...and stay subscribed ;p)

Oh and just a heads up: this episode is mostly raw and unfiltered, hence the R rating this time.

- J

Show Notes

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman, @MyopiaPodcast, and @jcertherealist

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice, share the show with a friend, or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers.

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to @BrothersHerman for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining today: entertainer, co-host of The Geekly Oddcast, and host of Odder Worlds, David Herman

What if an advent was something left behind by the gods, as proof that your gift had been recognized? Or currencies an acknowledgement of the relationship between those of great need and those with great power or verve? If what you were worth was measured not by success but the work? 

We’ve spoken before about what makes an ‘earth’. But the things that make that work—currencies, faith, presence, the ‘rules’ of the world—deserve their own light. So join us tonight as we talk about building roads, the internet, pamphleteering and the printing press. And then maybe, in what little time is left, on that rarest of elusive pigments: 

Kobold blue.

We hope you enjoy.

- J

Show Notes

• “The Revolutionary Power of the Black Panther”, by Jamil Smith

• Themes, values and motifs related to the weregild

• “Maitreya and the Wheel-turning King”, a translation 

• A short history in Blue: cobalt, indigo, and the porcelain trade

• Fordite or “Detroit Agate”, featured in a collection of watches

• The rules to Steve Wallace’s “No Country for Old Kobolds” 

You can follow our shows on Twitter @BrothersHerman, @MyopiaPodcast, and @jcertherealist

Like what you hear and want to show your support? Leave a review on your app of choice or subscribe for more on Patreon.com/herebetygers

The Magician, written & performed by Immersive Music

Kudos to @BrothersHerman for the final edits. 

Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/herebetygers)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices