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[nicosraf]

Fuck. I can't do anything right. *pulls my shirt up slightly and you can see a little bit of my abs*

[nicosraf]

What was ur thought process into making or developing Samyaza?? Or all of the watchers..I’m like 50% into the book and he’s hypocritical to me like he makes these back handed remarks abt azazel having a man but like does it matter cause you all are sinners in the eyes of god and it seems he wants to get rid of everybody on earth so far

It seems like most of the watchers still hold some type of bias towards the “sinners” of Heaven for being a “whore” but you guys aren’t even in heaven (and won’t be treated the same when u return) and you guys are doing the same thing :/ even having tons of babies like did you guys even think abt this being a possibility???

I feel like this is an unpopular opinion but I kinda dislike Samyaza it seem like after everything that’s happened he still doesn’t try to see different view points on life on earth apart from his. He chalks up Armoni not particularly liking his wife (that he was practically forced to marry) as just Armoni being his usual distasteful self. :(

I may just have to reread a couple of pages to try and understand Samyaza or any of the the watchers. But I LOVE your works and I think they’re amazing and I didn’t want this to come off as passive aggressive I guess I’m just confused abt some of these characters since I don’t think like they do

I realized this just seems like a rant but still you’re writing is AMAZING💕💕💕 you’re really inspiring as a writer 😋

a&m spoilers

Hello! I'm curious if your thoughts have changed since you sent this ask, but disliking Samyaza definitely isn't a minority opinion!

I think almost all my betas disliked Samyaza at the start, but they all liked him by the end. I think, for most readers, Samyaza is hypocritical, selfish, and etc., but the amount he suffers by end makes it so that.... well, yes, Samyaza might be a bit aggravating at times, he definitely didn't deserve any of what happens. And he does change as a person, at least I think so.

The story of Enoch sort of lends itself to the interpretation of a husky, tortured fallen angel who sweeps a beautiful woman off her feet and has to choose between her or God, his Father. I like to say this is the version of Samyaza that I would have been able to write if I wasn't as gay as I am, but my reasoning for not making him that is a little more complicated.

I like writing hypocrites, and I liked the idea of an angel that saw his struggle similar to a woman's, feeling a solidarity with her instead of just sexual attraction. One part of Enoch that always struck me is the passages about the Watchers crying and begging Enoch to talk to God for them. I thought the angels being unsure or not really knowing that this would make God as mad as it did was interesting. I liked the idea of him being an angel associated with water because of his role in the flood, so I made him a lesser angel of healing. I can go on and on.

In my original concepts of A&M (YEARS ago), I intended for Samyaza to be much more of a bad person, almost an antagonist to Azazel. But as I outlined, I started falling in love with this version of him.

Btw, it's okay if you dislike Samyaza and even dislike him after finishing the book. Not all characters have to be loved, and Samyaza would agree with you that he doesn't really deserve anyone's love or forgiveness after what he's done.

I can talk more about the Watchers if you like! I really like all of them :') Thank you for the ask! I'm happy you like my writing. I hope you enjoy the rest of a&m

[nicosraf]

Jennifer’s Body (2009) Hannibal (2013-2015)

[nicosraf]

all of your angels have magically been turned into Polly Pockets. who are you chewing on first 🎤

Rosier. Then Michael...... I think I'd chew on Michael and Lucifer together actually.

[nicosraf]

This may or may not be a distraction from the shitty parts of life. But are the angels bottoms or tops or verse? I feel like Baal would be a top but for Lucifer he would be a sub bottom if Lucifer asked. Michael gives Top but not strict top and Lucifer gives power bottom but I think he would get bored eventually and he would want to switch it up.

#thismightnotbeanask #angelshavetakeovermylife

I don't want to answer this concretely but I do want to confirm that Baal would do absolutely anything if Lucifer asked

[nicosraf]

what kind of dilfs are you into rafa? are we talking hugh grant or more like pedro pascal?

I mustn't say

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I just wanted to say the cain chapters were my favourite chapters of the entire book, finding out the Cain & Abel lore had me messaging my partner (my christian bible gamefaqs guide) feverishly late at night to tell them abt it. But also the line "who remembers cain?" And the response... i GASPED in the bus!!!!!!!! IT MADE ME SO EMOTIONAL. the writing and repeated lines between the paras of that chapter was so insane i was shaken by The Prose!!!!!! Another moment i was so taken aback by was ohya and hahya sheltering the human children bc oh FUCK THEYRE STILL LIVING BEINGS... THEY HAVE FAMILIES N LIVES TOO...THEIR ONLY SIN WAS BEING BORN TMT i started doodling that scene (i cant draw good but sometimes ur compelled by Emotion to) bc it struck me so much how even the giants are innocents... its been two weeks n thinkin abt the fate of azazel n samyaza's family unit has destroyed me irreparably

Spoilers for A&M!

Ahh I'm really glad you liked the Cain chapters! My ideas for Cain were one of my biggest motivators for turning the idea of ABM into the idea of a trilogy. I remember hearing once that Cain is really Lucifer's child, and I have a gay brain, so I imagined Lucifer taking in a little Cain. And here we are! Cain may be a fav character of the series for me. Agh I just love him

And Ohya and Hahya.... Aghh ive said this before but I originally planned to have them talk, and it made it halfway into the finished draft. I decided the ambiguity about their humanness was better, but yeah! You hit the nail on the head. They're also living things with families. It's not their fault they're hungry :(

Thank you for reading A&M! I'm really happy you enjoyed it!!

[nicosraf]

rafa you absolutely cooked with all the comparisons of michael to a dog in a&m. and lucifer calling him a dog. i’m losing my mind it’s too good

i'm glad you think so.. i'm really insane about michael and dog parallels. i think about it Obsessively i fear

[nicosraf]

on that note, are YOU a cat or a dog person? (and if you’re a dog person, big or little dogs?)

I'm a dog person! I took care of some kittens briefly as a kid, and i think i'd fall in love with cats if I ever owned one, but I've grown up around dogs! I have two dogs, a big one and a little one. I love them both equally :)

[nicosraf]

Weird ask again (im sobbing by how many times I come into your inbox i should stop)

What are each angels' favorite historical time period or place? (I.e the Roman empire for michael or hellenic greece for raphael, the inca empire for rosier, the han dynasty for jophiel. im making stuff up here.)

You can include as many as you wish I dont mind even if its just one! Im just curious.

I wont do all of the angels mostly to not spend 54783 hours on this ask, but yes I think Rosier would love the Inca Empire ahdks, but generally the Pre-Colombian Andes.

Michael would like the Roman Empire very much. Uriel would like the Islamic Golden Age.

Asmodeus loves Prohibition Era America (I can also see him really loving Edo Era Japan). Baal loves revolutions.

Lucifer would say he doesn't have a favorite time, (and I don't think he does), but I think he'd miss a lot of really ancient societies, like Old Kingdom Egypt, the Babylonian Empire, and the Indus Valley.

[nicosraf]

re: supposed modern era angels 3... I think Rosier becoming a Pinterest girlie will well and truly fix me

(also side question; who of the angels/demons would use Tumblr?)

Rosier has so many recipe and gardening pins saved.... not sure why but i really see him with a sanrio icon. pochacco maybe?

anyway, i think Lucifer would like tumblr but not the fandom side of it, more like the aesthetic and poetry blogs. he would leave after the porn ban though.

[nicosraf]

Hello I've gotten a few asks w Angels & Man spoilers, and now that it's been about a month since release, I'm going to start answering them. I'm going to tag them as "a&m spoilers" so you can mute if you don't want to see :) Hope that's okay!

[nicosraf]

AHHHHH

Let’s say God allowed the angels to do whatever they wanted on earth for a day. What do you think the archangels would do? 🤔

it is 2 am and I cannot sleep and I'm deciding you mean modern-day earth because I think that's a little more fun. So:

Michael: he would like a burger, a hot dog, maybe anything from a halal truck. He would like to play beach volleyball also.

Uriel: he wouldn't want to go to earth but if he was forced to, I think he'd spend the day visiting museums.

Raphael: he would like to go to somewhere with a plaza or urban park where he can sit and feed the birds. He likes the peace

Gabriel: he would want to go to Universal Studios but Disney World is a close second

[nicosraf]

moocifer short for patreon this week i think.... and maybe the next couple weeks at this rate because jesus i have so much moocifer spilling out of my pockets rn

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[nicosraf]

Advice/hard truths for writers?

The best piece of practical advice I know is a classic from Hemingway (qtd. here):

The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.

Also, especially if you're young, you should read more than you write. If you're serious about writing, you'll want to write more than you read when you get old; you need, then, to lay the important books as your foundation early. I like this passage from Samuel R. Delany's "Some Advice for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student" (collected in both Shorter Views and About Writing):

You need to read Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; you need to read Austen, Thackeray, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy; you need to read Hawthorne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner; you need to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncherov, Gogol, Bely, Khlebnikov, and Flaubert; you need to read Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Dahlberg, John Steinbeck, Jean Rhys, Glenway Wescott, John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens, Angus Wilson, Patrick White, Alexander Trocchi, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Vladimir Nabokov; you need to read Nella Larsen, Knut Hamsun, Edwin Demby, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, John Barth, Philip Roth, Coleman Dowell, William Gaddis, William Gass, Marguerite Young, Thomas Pynchon, Paul West, Bertha Harris, Melvin Dixon, Daryll Pinckney, Darryl Ponicsan, and John Keene, Jr.; you need to read Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Richard Powers, Carroll Maso, Edmund White, Jayne Ann Phillips, Robert Gluck, and Julian Barnes—you need to read them and a whole lot more; you need to read them not so that you will know what they have written about, but so that you can begin to absorb some of the more ambitious models for what the novel can be.

Note: I haven't read every single writer on that list; there are even three I've literally never heard of; I can think of others I'd recommend in place of some he's cited; but still, his general point—that you need to read the major and minor classics—is correct.

The best piece of general advice I know, and not only about writing, comes from Dr. Johnson, The Rambler #63:

The traveller that resolutely follows a rough and winding path, will sooner reach the end of his journey, than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hours of day-light in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages.

I've known too many young writers over the years who sabotaged themselves by overthinking and therefore never finishing or sharing their projects; this stems, I assume, from a lack of self-trust or, more grandly, trust in the universe (the Muses, God, etc.). But what professors always tell Ph.D. students about dissertations is also true of novels, stories, poems, plays, comic books, screenplays, etc: There are only two kinds of dissertations—finished and unfinished. Relatedly, this is the age of online—an age when 20th-century institutions are collapsing, and 21st-century ones have not yet been invented. Unless you have serious connections in New York or Iowa, publish your work yourself and don't bother with the gatekeepers.

Other than the above, I find most writing advice useless because over-generalized or else stemming from arbitrary culture-specific or field-specific biases, e.g., Orwell's extremely English and extremely journalistic strictures, not necessarily germane to the non-English or non-journalistic writer. "Don't use adverbs," they always say. Why the hell shouldn't I? It's absurd. "Show, don't tell," they insist. Fine for the aforementioned Orwell and Hemingway, but irrelevant to Edith Wharton and Thomas Mann. Freytag's Pyramid? Spare me. Every new book is a leap in the dark. Your project may be singular; you may need to make your own map as your traverse the unexplored territory.

Hard truths? There's one. I know it's a hard truth because I hesitate even to type it. It will insult our faith in egalitarianism and the rewards of earnest labor. And yet, I suspect the hard truth is this: ineffables like inspiration and genius count for a lot. If they didn't, if application were all it took, then everybody would write works of genius all day long. But even the greatest geniuses usually only got the gift of one or two all-time great work. This doesn't have to be a counsel of despair, though: you can always try to place yourself wherever you think lightning is likeliest to strike. That's what I do, anyway. Good luck!

[nicosraf]

Hi Rafa! I'm interested, what time period will the setting of Angels 3 be? From what I've been getting from these recent asks, will it take place in the modern era?

I'm making a final decision now, but there's a high chance it'll take place in the present! Inshallah Baal will be on grindr