robinswrites

[robinswrites]

This has met its goal but let's see if it can meet the stretch goal!

Pride Dragons Merchandise Kickstarter: Back NOW!

Our Kickstarter campaign to make stickers, magnets, key chains, earrings, washi tape, and lanyards out of ten adorable Pride-flag-themed dragons by Florilège has launched!

These precious, playful, cat-like dragons are in the colors of the polyamorous pride flag, the genderfluid pride flag, the bisexual pride flag, the Gilbert Baker pride flag, the intersex-inclusive progress pride flag, the pansexual pride flag, the demigender pride flag, the genderqueer pride flag, the aroace pride flag, and the non-binary pride flag! You can get one of them or get them all, mix-and-match our merchandise options, and customize your order – or, if you love them all, you can get full sets of merch, flag sets featuring different merch with the same flag, or even get one of everything we’re offering (and get a discount when you do, of course)!

We’re aiming to raise $2,900 between now and July 2nd. I hope you’ll give us a hand by helping spread the word or by becoming backer!

HAPPY PRIDE!

(artist: @echo-bleu )

[robinswrites]

we all know and love dog coded characters but what about their cousin, falcon coded characters. characters whose loyalty is fierce, but more distant, less physically affectionate, an unspoken but mutually understood bond. whose devotion to you is a language that only the two of you understand. whose fearsome appearance never lets you forget the privilege you hold in having earned that devotion. who require careful handling and patience to bond with, so you don't slip and cut yourself on their sharp edges. whose trust is given after you place yours in them, not before. whose dependence on you is less apparent but no less real. whose power is only equal to their fragility. who can easily leave your side, but will always return when you hold out your hand and call them home.

[robinswrites]

I'm in this anthology, along with a lot of other cool people! It's going to be great!

Meet the Contributors to Our Next Anthology: Scholarly Pursuits!

We've completed Kickstarter fulfillment for our last anthology, and so of course we’re gearing up for the publication phase of our next anthology! Writing on Scholarly Pursuits: A Queer Anthology of Cozy Academia Stories is done, and we’re well into the editing stage; we’ve got sketches for the cover art, and we’ve got artists contracted for the merchandise. And so, it’s time: meet the 22 (!!) authors contributing to Scholarly Pursuits: A Queer Anthology of Cozy Academia Stories!

Robin S. Blackwood (Personal Website)

E. V. Dean (Instagram | Tumblr)

Eliza J. Fitzwilliam (Archive of Our Own)

Rhosyn Goodfellow (Linktree)

Mare Griffen

Zel Howland (Archive of Our Own | Tumblr)

Robin Huntington (Archive of Our Own | Bluesky | Twitter)

Indigo J. H.

Bettina Juszak

Lucy K. R. (Archive of Our Own | Personal Website | Twitter)

Nicola Kapron (Personal Website)

Cassia King (Bluesky | Instagram)

Mina Kramek (Archive of Our Own)

Shannon Lippert (Archive of Our Own | New Play Exchange | WordPress | Youtube)

Lyonel Loy

Jessica Mason (Archive of Our Own | Discord: alocalband | Tumblr)

Maggie Page (Facebook | Goodreads | Tumblr)

Lee Pini (Archive of Our Own | Instagram | Personal Website | Tumblr)

Vee Sloane (Archive of Our Own | Tumblr)

Swev (Linktree)

D. E. Towry

Dei Walker (Discord: .dei. | BlueSky | Tumblr | Twitter)

This awesome mixture of new-to-Duck-Prints-Press authors and authors returning to write with us again have done an a.may.zing job on these stories. I know y’all are gonna love them.

Read the authors’ full biographies!

Also, we’re thrilled to share that Liz Lee Illustrations (Bluesky | Instagram | Tumblr) will be doing the cover art for this book! She also did the gorgeous dragon-y cover for our first anthology, Add Magic to Taste.

Follow the Scholarly Pursuits pre-launch page on Kickstarter!

[robinswrites]

(copied from @dxckiii on Twitter) this could literally change everything.

They have begun a recount process. WAKE UP YOUR NEVADA FRIENDS AND MAKE SURE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM CHECK iwillvote.com to make sure their ballot was counted. if it says it was denied, they need to call immediately.

Don't scroll past this. If there's any chance someone from Nevada is following you, they need to see it. Get this as far as possible. Be loud. I know it's easy to feel hopeless right now; god knows I was crying my eyes out for a good chunk of last night, but if there's even a shred of action we can take, we can't let it slip by.

If you know anyone in Nevada, please share this with them. Reblog it. Spread it far and wide, ASAP.

[robinswrites]

On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.

On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.

Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.

[robinswrites]

IF YOU LIVE IN THE US, PLEASE READ THIS

Posting this from the bird app since I hope it can help people.

People have been contacting the White House directly to demand a recount, especially since there has been evidence that not every ballot has been counted and will be thrown away if it hasn't been cured.

The link to contact the White House is here!

The following screenshot comes from here!

If you need help writing something, check under the cut! I've provided a prewritten response from one of the replies!

"I am a concerned citizen, and I need you to hear me. I urge you to recount the ballots from this election and investigate election interference. Bomb threats have been called into multiple polling locations, causing some to close early. Domestic terrorists have burned ballot boxes. An unprecedented number of ballots have been rejected and require curing. There have been reports of polling officers allowing voter intimidation in and outside of polling places across the country and an estimated 20 million mail in ballots are unaccounted for. In addition, many people have reported that ballots were not counted for suspicious reasons such as signature invalidation which is information that vote counters do not have access to. These events have occurred in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia, for instance."

Feel free to add and change what you want, this is just a base for you to work off of.

[robinswrites]

idc if it's not a person. if your icon is a sunrise, you're a sunrise now.

poll about swapping with prev's icon here

[robinswrites]

Thoughts on adaptations: good, bad, accurate and inaccurate

I've been thinking for a while about adaptations, and especially adaptations that are drastically different from the source material--sometimes to the point of making you wonder if it should be considered an adaptation at all.

While sometimes I do watch these adaptations and think "wow, these people clearly did not care about, and possibly knew nothing about, the source material", I think Tumblr is too quick to assume that any 'unfaithful' adaptation is unfaithful because the director disliked or hadn't read the source material. The reality of it is...well, that does happen? but it's also quite a bit more complex than that.

There's a post about directors of adaptations of gothic literature never having read the book going around at the moment that got me thinking about this again. I think that applies to at least some of the Dracula and Frankenstein films out there, and people who straightwash and whitewash etc imo clearly don't CARE about the themes of the original whether they've read it or not, but a lot of people in the tags were also talking about Mike Flanagan and...

Look, I love The Fall Of The House Of Usher, and while his TV show of the same name was in my opinion a good TV show, it was certainly not a faithful adaptation. But I do not think you can watch that show and seriously come away from it thinking "Flanagan has never read a Poe story" as people were saying in the tags.

Some stories, like The Black Cat, were adapted quite closely. Others, like The Masque of the Red Death, had a modernised twist to them but still kept the same themes and ideas. The story the show was named after was unfortunately one of the less closely followed ones, though the ending still plays out...

But I think it's very very clear from character names and details (a character named William Wilson appearing in a story that deals with doppelgangers--even though it's not closely adapting the plot of William Wilson at all, the CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals being bricked up in a wall, the Roderick Usher Experimental Morgue, Arthur Pym mentioning "having Richard Parker for dinner") referencing many of Poe's characters and stories including some that are less well-known, the extensive quoting, and allusions to Poe's own life and to previous adaptations (like the characters watching the black and white film of The Black Cat) that a lack of familiarity with Poe is NOT the reason for the changes. He even gave the audience a Poe reading list before the show came out! He's talked extensively about liking Poe and having read a lot of Poe and wanting more people to read Poe! I love Poe, have read a lot of Poe, and still sometimes found myself looking something in that show up and realising there was a Poe reference I missed.

I also know enough people who have actually never read a Poe story that I can confirm: people who have never read a Poe story do not know all the details referenced in the show. It's not as if William Wilson being a story about a doppelganger or Arthur Pym having Richard Parker for dinner is as well-known as Darth Vader being Luke's father.

He just also clearly has very different priorities in adaptations to many people on here, where e.g. "the characters having the same personality and behaving in the same way as the original" is not a priority. He seems to view stories, even ones he likes, as being made of LEGO and an adaptation as taking the LEGO apart to build something else out of, and that's not compatible with people whose idea of a good adaptation is first and foremost "my blorbo walked off the page and onto the screen!".

His House Of Usher show actually ended up feeling more like "Theatre Of Blood, but Poe instead of Shakespeare" to me (and I enjoyed it once I started thinking of it like that and stopped thinking "Roderick would never! why have you made him a corrupt CEO?? Roderick Usher canonically gave most of his inherited money away leaving himself with not even enough to keep his house from falling apart and is reading books about proto-communist ideas!")--but I think it's very obvious that the writer of Theatre of Blood was VERY familiar with Shakespeare, even though, you know, it's not a faithful adaptation of any one Shakespeare play, there are no poodles in Titus Andronicus, Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech was not followed by him jumping off a balcony, etc. and I think it's similarly clear that Flanagan knows a lot about Poe and just chose to make a lot of changes to tell his own story. You can like or dislike that decision, or have mixed feelings on it as I do, but you can't always claim it came from ignorance.

While we're on the subject, and even though it's not gothlit exactly, even adaptations that don't succeed even as stories in their own right can't always be blamed on unfamiliarity with the source material. I know it's tempting, but it's simply not accurate to claim that "Moffat and Gatiss have clearly never read a Sherlock Holmes story". They started BBC Sherlock because they had been talking to each other about their shared love for the Sherlock Holmes books. Unfortunately, sometimes people will read a thing, and genuinely consider themselves to be a big fan of it, and also have bad takes about it, or simply not be good writers. Sometimes people are bad at analysis and could list off every single fact and bit of trivia about their favourite bit of media and still totally fail to understand the intended themes. Sometimes, people's interpretation of what they read is skewed by prejudices or projecting. And sometimes people have memorised every single line of their villain blorbo's villainous dialogue and still won't admit he's a villain because they find him hot.

(If you want proof, I bet for any popular TV series in the world you can find at least one person on here who has seen every episode 5+ times and still writes the most OOC fanfic imaginable. Yes, some people you encounter in fandom with bizarre OOC takes have actually not read/watched the source material and are getting their info from other fics, or dislike the source material and want it to be different, but the person who yelled at me on my other account with a bizarre and incoherent take on Rocky Horror had been going to see it on a regular basis for decades. It happens. And people who do adaptations are ultimately just fanfic writers with a budget, capable of just as much love for the original [though adaptations made by people who don't love the original certainly exist], and also capable of making all the same mistakes. They can be brilliant and true to canon, brilliant and wildly AU, technically accurate to all the facts of canon but still mediocre, or incoherent and OOC to the point of unrecognisability, and what you think might fit clearly into one of those categories, someone else might think is another.)

For that matter, sometimes an adaptation that makes drastic changes from the original is made with the direct involvement of the original author who made those changes to their work on purpose! Either because they consider them improvements (and you might agree or disagree--but I do actually think it's possible for an adaptation to change things in a way that's an improvement, in some cases) or just because they want to try a different take for the fun of it. Clearly it's not that the author has no familiarity with their own work and is making themself roll over in their own grave with their disrespect for themself!

I'm not saying "oh this director clearly didn't give a fuck about the work they were adapting" is always incorrect, but it's easy to jump to any time any adaptation makes a change that you don't like, and often isn't actually the case. There can be such a huge range of reasons for changes in adaptations ranging from "everyone knows the plot twist of the original now, so framing it as a mystery won't work out [unless we change all the names and don't let people know it's an adaptation, as at least one film based on Jekyll and Hyde has done]" to "this worked in text but simply will not work on screen" to "this has aged very poorly and now comes across as seriously bigoted" to "but wouldn't it be cool to transplant them into a different time period / genderswap someone / make it gay / set it in space / whatever". The reasons can be good or bad, and so can the results. And more than anything else, it's all highly subjective.

[robinswrites]

[robinswrites]

None of what I'm writing is intended as YA, though I'm sure plenty of it could be enjoyed by teenagers just as I enjoyed plenty of books for adults at that age. The WIP of mine with the youngest protagonists has them university-aged but my others are about people 25+.

is there a writeblr community for people who are interested in writing things other than fanfic or YA?

specifically i'm looking to see if anyone out there is interested in writing/publishing (self or traditionally) books and stories for the 25+ crowd, because i'd love to get involved in that.

[robinswrites]

Ink Sketch Commissions by Mx. Wellman open for a limited time!

Each season we usually open up for a small batch of ink sketches to help cover expenses between seasons of the show! When you're making podcasts and art online, keeping all the bills paid can be a challenge, so this is an excellent way to support the show during the break.

Until October 17th, you can order $25USD personal ink sketch commissions, with free postage to anywhere in the world. Sketches will ship out by October 31st to be there in time for the holiday season!

More details and order link here.

[robinswrites]

This was, in fact, the moment I knew I loved Hello From The Hallowoods.

I started this podcast today and I think the fact you named a dead person Diggory Graves actively hilarious and peak comedy ty for that Ive been laughing since I heard it 13 hrs ago

For Graves being in their name they sure don't stay in theirs much

[robinswrites]

North Continent Ribbon, by Ursula Whitcher

I have some very exciting news today, which is that someone I know published a book! I have not yet read it, because it only just came out, but she has good taste in books, which is generally a good sign, so I've bought her book under the assumption that it's going to be pretty cool.

You can order a print book here, though it's apparently only available in the US at the moment:

So I bought the ebook, which you can get here:

Reviews are comparing it to Borges and Le Guin, which is seriously impressive, and I can't wait to read it.

Also, when I do read it, I'll post a review! That's a new thing I'm going to start doing on this blog, though there's some other books that I'm going to read and review before this one because they're library books so I should get to them first (do not ask about the size of my TBR pile, it will horrify you.)

Anyway! Buy this book if you like queer SF/F!

[robinswrites]

Magnolia: Talk about one of your favorite side-characters.

Well, guess it's time for a rant about Rakal, to go with the moodboard.

Rakal is the naturally-born child of lab-grown, genetically modified people who prior to the ascent of the current Empress were used as cannon fodder troops (part of a larger scale enslavement of lab-grown people, though these ones were genetically modified for combat). After this practice was ended, the genetically modified people were essentially abandoned on the planet that had once housed the facilities where they were made. Between the limited resources on this planet and the prejudice they faced, their society suffered from poverty and crime.

Growing up in this environment, it wasn't long before Rakal became a criminal themself: first petty theft, then more major theft and dealing in stolen goods. Eventually, they were caught--and while the Empress supposedly freed the enslaved lab-grown people, that doesn't apply to convicts, and they were forced into working for the Imperial military.

Rakal is a cynical, snarky when he thinks he can get away with it, sullenly silent the rest of the time, sneaky little rat man masc-adjacent nonbinary person (not that I think he'd actually have a problem with being called a man). He hates his boss and is deliberately bad at his job. He also spends a significant chunk of the plot assuming Si'tak is loyal to the Empire (and also resenting him for a whole host of other reasons) when they could have solved all their problems by teaming up much sooner, because he defaulted to everyone else being the enemy who he should scowl and snark at if they dared try to talk to him, instead of having a normal fucking conversation for a change. He is deeply offputting and extremely difficult to get along with at the best of times (unless you're a podcat--despite being nicknamed "Rat" he seems to be a cat person) but I love him.

They do undergo some actual positive character development over the course of the story but they stubbornly resist it the whole time. Still, I have plans for them to appear in a follow-up mini story where they get less misery and more Be Gay Do Crime. Because really (in any universe where they can't just be a mall goth) heists are what they're best suited to. They'll also get to team up with Karo and experience the shocking revelation of "someone is treating me like a person?", so let's see how that might affect them.

LIKES

Rayguns

Alcohol

Punk rock

Cats, including podcats (he can befriend vaguely cat-shaped carnivorous plants but not people?)

Crime

DISLIKES

People

Authority

Being condescended to/assumed to be stupid (happens all too often)

Space fascists

[robinswrites]

Everyone should indeed learn about Ed Wood.

This week I learned about Ed Wood, and I think everyone should learn about him, too

[robinswrites]

Oh Rakal "Rat" Vild, you were not meant to be important, but I love you.

Featuring lyrics from: I Think I'm Wonderful by The Damned; Vicious by Halestorm; Red Flag by Billy Talent.

Let’s make a moodboard! Specifically, let’s make moodboards your favorite side character in your story!

[robinswrites]

This inspired me to make a moodboard for the story Alexandra appears in: she really is the one bright colourful character standing out from infinite spooky gothness. And since her moodboard is so bright, here's the moodboard for...everyone else.

I've tentatively titled this story "The Fear of the Dark and the Luck of the Devil".

Static Video has lost its color. Your story has lost its color too! Create a monochrome moodboard for your story!