jonnywaistcoat - Tumblr blog

[jonnywaistcoat]

Centuripe, province in Enna, Sicily, Italy

[jonnywaistcoat]

Hi there Jonny! I'm curious as to what your thoughts on The Wicker Man is

I'd assume you at least enjoy the movie considering you and the rest of the mechs adapted one of the songs

I mean, what's not to love? Absolutely classic bit of British folk horror with Christopher Lee at the top of his game. Also, from a Catholic perspective, it even has a happy ending - my man dies in faith and gets his martyrs crown.

[jonnywaistcoat]

Spock is the fakest hoe in Star Trek. That guy has cried in every single movie. Get out of here with that vulcans don’t have emotions bullshit. You aint fooling nobody, you sensitive fuck

[jonnywaistcoat]

Pitcrawler digital is here!

Behold! The digital edition of Pitcrawler is here!

...if you backed it on IndieGoGo, at least. The rest of you will have to wait another month or two to Behold! it, I'm afraid.

It's been a real labour of love this last year to get it all ready for folks, and we're so happy to be sharing it. If you backed the campaign, you should have it in a Backerkit email that came through to you inbox (or your spam if your computer's suspicious) last week. If you haven't had it, let us know.

And for everybody else, here's a little tast of what's to come after we've sorted printing and it goes public.

[jonnywaistcoat]

Me if I were a dog

[jonnywaistcoat]

Have you heard of the “dark academia aesthetic”? If so, do you like it and have you employed it into the ~vibes~ and ~themes~ of some of your work? Asking because I’ve seen many people interpret Magnus as belonging to that kind of vibe and wondering if that was your intended vision

It's hard to articulate why exactly this ask a amuses me so much. Essentially "dark academia" tends to be a slightly cartoonish fashioned-up vision of old British scholarly institutions, as interpreted by American kids who are just picking up on the vibe. As a Brit who's spent most of their life in London, Oxford, Manchester and the various libraries and museums therein, it's not an aesthetic or a vibe - it's just what I know. Also, from what I can tell one of the other main inspirations for "dark academia" is adaptations of Victorian and Edwardian spooky fiction (James, Blackwood, Dickens, etc.) which are exactly the sort of ghost stories I was reading as a kid and which inspires a lot of my work.

So, I guess my feeling is Magus wasnt aiming for a dark academia vibe - dark academia is aiming for a *Magnus* vibe. And it's not nailing it.

[jonnywaistcoat]

Fuck

Number FIVE babes

[jonnywaistcoat]

Currently relistening to tma so i can get into tmp properly and I was just wondering if you got any inspiration for the spiral from Junji Ito's Uzumaki. I read it a few days ago and couldn't help but see a few similarities. It could just be because it's got a lot of spirals and all but the mind bending way the spiral would effect the town Kurouzu-cho seemed similar, especially when I listened to the episode about the Gabriel the clay worker and the man on the stair. I love your work btw it's great :3 currently reading through the thirteen storeys and I'm getting the family business soon too yay

Junji who? Never heard of him mate.

[jonnywaistcoat]

Do you know about Tarrare? He sounds like an actual Magnus archives flesh avatar or something.

Yeah, I had a passing familiarity with him and seriously considered doing something in the flesh vein with him, but then I did a bunch of research on him and his whole situation, and the more I read the sadder it made me. Like, the dude was ill in some really intense ways and his life was mega tragic, so it felt like it would have been kind of a cheap shot to make him a fictional monster.

[jonnywaistcoat]

Mr. Waistcoat, there's a rather heated discussion about this question on hellsites such as Twitter & Tiktok, and I thought your opinion might be a valuable contribution.

Would you rather stumble across a bear or a man when alone in the woods?

Wish you a lovely day (preferably not alone in the woods),

drumla

This is a very bizarre question that I can only put down to the likelihood that the majority of Twitter/Tiktok users don't regularly go walking alone in the woods, 'cause, uh, you do meet people (including men), pretty regularly. And it's fine. Maybe you say hi or give each other a nod as you pass, but basically no-one is actually lurking in the woods with sinister intent. When you meet someone, chances are they are also just taking a walk. It's not impossible the encounter might be unpleasant, I suppose, but it's a pretty tiny possibility.

A bear, on the other hand... Depending on the type of bear, that's an encounter that has a comparatively high chance of going sideways.

I suppose my view might be slightly skewed by being a British man - passing other people in the woods generally only requires a nod of acknowledgement, whereas in a lot of other cultures (especially much of the US) I suspect the expectation of being drawn into small talk is much higher, which might be awkward or irritating. But still, y'know, better than a bear.

But yeah, 99% of the time neither the woods, nor people walking within them, are dangerous or scary, and I think the folks debating this question should get off social media and take a woodland walk, cause walking alone in the woods rules actually!

[jonnywaistcoat]

Vampires vs Werewolves, ft. Joe Hill, @victoriocity, Aliette de Bodard, Ben Aaronovitch, Oraine Johnson, Garth Nix, @sarah-hawley and @jonnywaistcoat prevaricating like he knows any answer will be used against him in the future.

[jonnywaistcoat]

[jonnywaistcoat]

When writing, did you ever suffer from a fear or underdelivering or misrepresenting a topic? If you did, how did you overcome it? I enjoy writing but rarely bring it to the public out of fear that I am either not doing good enough or badly portraying the themes or aspects of what I write.

Absolutely, and on the one hand it's a very healthy fear - it prompts you to do your research and be thoughtful in how you write. On the other hand you've just got to accept that occasionally it will happen. Inculturation is a hell of a thing, and leaves us all with a thousand kneejerk preconceptions and perceptions of the world, some benign and some downright awful. And sometimes they crop up no matter how thoughtful you try to be. And you gotta understand that when it happens and people call you on it, you just have to take your lumps and learn what you can from it.

It doesn't help, of course, that the words you write are only ever half of what your audience reads: five people reading the same book are reading five different books, each filtering the text through a lifetime of psychology and experience. And they will find themes and problems in there you never even considered, and they will also find resonances and beauty in your work that you could never have foreseen.

At the end of the day, writing stuff thats meaningful to you (hell, writing anything at all) is a messy, bruising business, and anybody who tells you there are simple solutions or clear rules to follow is either lying to you or to themselves.

But you can't let it paralyse you. Its like if you're playing football and you're worried about falling over. It's a reasonable fear and you should do your best to avoid it, but occasionally it's gonna happen, and unless you want to spend the whole game just standing still in a field, you've kinda just got to get on with it. Just try not to be one of those writers who's always taking dives and... screaming for the ref to get a free kick? Hm. That analogy may have gotten away from me. I don't actually know much about football.

Point is, I'm aware that this isn't the most reassuring writing advice I've ever given, but yeah, its a messy, scary business. Just do your best. Be thoughtful. Be kind. And always do your research.

[jonnywaistcoat]

Do you ever catch yourself humming Mechs songs without realizing?

Yes and no. Most of the Mechs songs are riffing on existing folk tunes, sea shanties, trench songs, etc, because we all shared a deep love of that sort of music. Most of them were based on songs I already knew very well, and those songs still rattle around in my head pretty frequently, so while it's rare I find myself humming Mechanisms songs specifically, I will often be singing to myself the songs they come from. It's rare, for instance, that I find myself humming 'Cinders Song', but 'Haul Away Joe' is deep in my soul. It's unlikely I'll be singing 'Underworld Blues' to myself, but Geeshie Wiley's 'Last Kind Words' is a perennial favourite.

[jonnywaistcoat]

I think it's really nice you thought you could create an unfuckable and untwinkifiable monster, and I always think people should dream big, but I think it might be time to put this one away.

I am endlessly fascinated by this version of me that exists in the head of some fans, of this naive yet stern-faced Writer(tm) desperately trying to make them take my work seriously; frantically trying to stop them being horny for my creations. Like, mate, cmon. Ive been doing this for a long time now, and I made my peace with the monsterfuckers years ago. Am I trying to make an unfuckable monster? No. Cause I'm not an idiot.

I just make my messed-up grotesqueries for my little horror stories and assume someone out there probably wants to fuck them and that's fine. Me trying to stop them would be just be a waste of everybody's time, so I just wish them godspeed and go add some more pus to Mr Bonzo's stitches.

It does make me laugh that none of you know what a twink is, though.

[jonnywaistcoat]

[jonnywaistcoat]

i just want you to know that i have to do some analysis of "for sale: baby shoes, never worn" for an english assignment and that joke you made one time on a stream about the shoes never being worn because it was an unexpectedly massive baby has been in the back of my mind the entire time. thank you

I remember! "For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Massive baby."

Always astounds me Hemingway is held up as such a great writer when the man didn't even realise adding these two simple words would make his story cool and happy and kinda funny (cause of the inclusion of a huge baby) instead of it being, like, super sad. Absolute rookie move imo.