The question I hear most from beginners about building a fantasy storyworld is, "Where do I start?" Oz, Wonderland, Narnia, the 100 Acre Wood, Neverland, Hogwarts, the United Federation of Planets, Westeros, Middle Earth, Alagaesia, Terabithia, Gotham City, Jurassic Park, Fablehaven, and a galaxy far, far away. These fictional places have become real in the minds and hearts or readers. These storyworlds that someone invented-someone who was once like you, learning to tell stories, learning to write, and dreaming about publishing a novel. Whether you're starting from scratch or are looking to add depth to a finished story, Storyworld First will get you thinking. Includes tips for worldbuilding: Astronomy • Magic • Government Map making • History • Religion Technology • Languages • Culture And how it all works together.

Just what exactly is social studies, you may ask? Well, it includes the study of all kinds of people and places, some far away and some next door. In this book we talk about families, like your family in your house, and also lots of people close by, which we call a town or city, and finally about even more people in cities or outside of cities, all living in big places called countries. My Story and the World Around Me is a course for lower elementary students. It includes basic introductions to history, politics, sociology, economics, and geography, and provides a fuller understanding of God’s world and the cultures of the countries. This is a daily adventure-based curriculum series that encourages families to explore the world together through four nine-week quests and to understand it better from God’s perspective. It is designed with elements that make weekly learning fun and interactive, including: Activity timeWord find timeReview timeMy story journal Learn all about the world while you discover more about your own. And make sure you pull out your Quest Collector Cards at the beginning of each quest. Your world map on the other side shows where you are in each lesson!

Storytelling isn’t complicated. We’ll prove it to you. Do you have an amazing idea for a novel but you struggle to get words on the page? Maybe the problem isn’t writer’s block. Maybe you need a writing process. Publishing veterans and bestselling authors Zach Bohannon and J. Thorn share their proven system for developing a plan that will bridge the gap between a collection of random notes and a cohesive first draft. This comprehensive book will teach you the foundations of fiction: Plot, Structure, Genre, Theme, Character, and World. Discover: Why you need a system to finish a first draft whether you plot or pants What Aristotle said about storytelling thousands of years ago that still applies today How studying Star Wars can make you a better writer What some of the most prolific authors believe about the craft How all stories can be reduced to three components Which archetypes create a more engaging reader experience How the Hero’s Journey is alike and different than the Virgin’s Promise Why you should cast your characters like a movie producer Developed over 10 years and applied on millions of words of fiction, Thorn and Bohannon will show you how to layer your approach and build a fantastic story from the ground up. No more staring at a blinking cursor when you sit down to write! Become a master storyteller today. Three Story Method will transform you from a struggling writer into a career author. Downloadable worksheet and full list of resources included! Get it now!

What can contemporary media fandoms, like Anne Rice, Star Wars, Batman, or Sherlock Holmes, tell us about ancient Christianity? Tom de Bruin demonstrates how fandom and fan fiction are both analogous and incongruous with Christian derivative works. The often-disparaging terms applied to Christian apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, such as fakes, forgeries or corruptions, are not sufficient to capture the production, consumption, and value of these writings. De Bruin reimagines a range of early Christian works as fan practices. Exploring these ancient texts in new ways, he takes the reader on a journey from the 'fix-it fic' endings of the Gospel of Mark to the subversive fan fictions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and from the densely populated storyworld of early Christian art to the gatekeeping of Christian orthodoxy. Using theory developed in fan studies, De Bruin revisits fundamental questions about ancient derivative texts: Why where they written? How do they interact with more established texts? In what ways does the consumption of derivative works influence the reception of existing traditions? And how does the community react to these works? This book sheds exciting and new light on ancient Christian literary production, consumption and transmission.

This volume presents a multidisciplinary approach to narrative engagement within the paradigms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, and social-psychology. In their basic form, storyworld possible selves, or SPSs, are blends resulting from the conceptual integration of an intra- and an extra-diegetic perspectivizer. In written narratives, SPS blends function as hybrid referents for a variety of inclusive and ambiguous linguistic expressions, which are here explored from the standpoint of interactional cognitive linguistics, as instances of SPS objectification and subjectification. The model also draws on character construction and on the social-psychology notions of self-schemas and possible selves. This allows an exploration of emotional responses to narratives not just in terms of empathy or sympathy towards fictional entities, but also in terms of narrative ethics and of culturally determined and simultaneously idiosyncratic feelings of personal relevance and self-transformation.

Sherlock Holmes remains more popular than ever some 130 years after the detective first appeared in print. These days, the iconic character’s staying power is due in large part to the success of the recent BBC series Sherlock, which brings the famous sleuth into the twenty-first century. One of the most-watched television series in BBC history, Sherlock is set in contemporary London, where thirtysomething Sherlock and John (no longer fussy old Holmes and Watson), alongside New Scotland Yard, solve crimes with the help of smartphones, texting, online forums, and the internet. In their modernization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s nineteenth-century world, Sherlock creators Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss make London as much a character of their show as the actors themselves. The highly stylized series has inspired an impassioned fan community in Britain, the U.S., and beyond. Fans create and share their writings, which reimagine the characters in even more dramatic ways than the series can. Interweaving fan fiction studies, world-building, and genre studies, Ann McClellan examines the hit series and the fan fiction it inspires. Using Sherlock to trace the changing face of fan fiction studies, McClellan’s book explores how far fans are willing to go to change the Sherlockian canon while still reinforcing its power and status as the source text. What makes Sherlock fanfic Sherlockian? How does it stay within the canon even while engaging in the wildest reimaginings? Sherlock’s World explores the boundaries between canon, genre, character, and reality through the lenses of fan fiction and world-building. This book promises to be a valuable resource for fan studies scholars, those who write fan fiction, and Sherlock fans alike.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

From Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead, imaginary worlds in fantastic genres offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. This book examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer valuable tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire as a way of understanding globalization, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics shows how popular fantastic fiction has the potential of offering more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media convergence and participatory culture. The book approaches fantastic world-building as an ideologically ambiguous way of imagining alternatives to global capitalism. By approaching transmedia world-building both as a narrative form and as a growing industry derived from fan culture, it shows on the one hand the limitations inherent in the political economy of popular genre fiction. But at the same time, it also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics, popular culture, and anticapitalism.

Traditionally, the fault lines in biblical theology run between the understanding of whether the field is a purely descriptive endeavor, produces a normative theology, or tries to achieve both. However, is this the only grid we should use to approach biblical theology? Should practicing it not rather foremost result in a transformative experience that encompasses and integrates both Testaments? Two Testaments, One Story explores the foundation for a transformative panbiblical theology that empowers believers to live a consistent and compelling life as Christ-followers and global Christians in a pluralistic world. Join the author in this journey, from the preparation work at the drawing board through the extensive study of scripture to constructing the biblical story world’s literary and theological framework. Central to this quest are the concepts of cultural memory and remembrance culture and identifying the Bible’s critical root stories. Their workup establishes the road to unlocking scripture’s story world. Discover the path to a transformative panbiblical theology in Two Testaments, One Story.

Pie Corbett’s ground-breaking Talk for Writing approach has been successfully used by thousands of schools to teach writing creatively in an engaging way that motivates children. Now Pie and Julia take this multi-sensory approach to Early Years settings introducing a simple way to inspire young children’s language development through storytelling. Children learn language through memorable, meaningful repetition. The Talk for Writing approach enables children to internalise the language of story so that they can imitate it, innovate on it and create their own effective stories independently. Talk for Writing in the Early Years will show you how to put rhyme and story at the heart of your work with children and parents so that young learners language development and creativity flourishes. This multimedia resource shows you how to: • Select a story or rhyme the children will enjoy and tell it engagingly, encouraging the children to join in •Use a story map so they can picture what happens •Use actions to reinforce meaning and emphasise key language patterns •Help children build a bank of tales, developing their linguistic repertoire The 2 OLCs contain: 1 Footage of Pie Corbett conferences with EY teachers showing Talk for Writing in action 2 Clips of nursery children engaged in the Talk for Writing approach 3 Advice on how to use the OLC and handouts to train all staff in the approach 4 Interviews with parents and nursery school teachers on the impact of Talk for Writing 5 21 stories with story maps